As Queen Beatrix handed the title of monarch of the Netherlands to her son, Willem-Alexander, the country’s first king in 123 years on Tuesday, art lovers in Amsterdam had another reason to celebrate. For the first time in a decade, the city’s great museums are all open.
The longest wait was for that great treasure house of the Dutch Golden Age, the Rijksmuseum, which reopened on April 13 after a 10-year renovation.
Today, May 1, the Van Gogh Museum reopened after seven months. Nina Siegal writes about the opening exhibition, which highlights findings of research into the artist’s palette. Those blues you see in Van Gogh’s painting “The Bedroom� They may have been more purple when the canvas was new. Fresh insight into the troubled artist’s psyche? Perhaps.
The show features the most famous works of the Van Gogh Museum’s permanent collection as well as loans from institutions around the world. Among them are van Gogh’s only known extant palette and his three surviving tubes of paint, borrowed from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It also brings together two of van Gogh’s five “Sunflower†paintings - one from its own collection and the other from London’s National Gallery â€" to hang, as the artist intended, on either side of a portrait of his “Portrait of Augustine Roulin, ‘La Berceuse’†(1889).
The museum’s van Goghs remained on view during the renovation, but in borrowed space: at the Hermitage Amsterdam, the branch of the St. Petersburg museum. The renovation of the Hermitage’s building, a 17th-century nursing home, was finished in 2009.
And for those seeking modern art, there’s another stop on the Museumplein, the grand plaza where you’ll find the other two. The Stedelijk Museum reopened late last year after an expansion into a new structure that not everyone applauded.
Have you visited any of the refurbished museums? What did you think?
