Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed to be shut for three years — the taste for colourless voids has come and, please God, is going.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the designer behind the museum’s new interior decoration, is obsessively anti-white. It kills anything on show, he says — that’s why he’s gone for a series of hangings of blue-grey shades as the background for objects and paintings. Occasionally, the fine gauze over the windows gives the place a touch of sepulchral gloom, but that’s a minor gripe. The sombre colours work, lingering backstage, not swamping the pictures. And so does a massive new rehang, which has two main elements to it.
First, there has been a cull: now only 8,000 objects, out of a total of nearly a million in the collection, can be seen. Second, the floors have been reconfigured as an easy-to-understand, chronological route: medieval on the ground floor, 18th and 19th centuries on the first, 20th on the third, and the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age on the second floor.
Only the most energetic aesthete could claim that 8,000 works of art aren’t enough to keep them going. And no one could claim the new arrangement is worse than the old cluttered dingy Rijksmuseum. The redesign is a palate-cleaner, an invigorating renaissance, rather than a revolution. The one unabashed modernist addition is the free-standing pale-stone-and-glass Asian Pavilion in the gardens — its small scale means it takes little away from the exterior of the original French Gothic Revival museum, built by Pierre Cuypers in 1885.
A vast new light-flooded atrium has been excavated by the Spanish architects Cruz y Ortiz under the most expensive bicycle path on earth. The whole restoration has cost £320 million and a lot of that has been spent on appeasing the Fiestsersbond, the Dutch Cyclists’ Union, who insisted they should continue whizzing along the road that bisects the museum. That meant digging down to the waterlogged piles on which much of Amsterdam rests — the lowest point of the museum is nearly 30 feet below sea level. The new concrete floors had to be cast at lightning speed, because the piles can only be exposed for two days before they start to rot.
In all the chopping and changing, only one picture has remained in the same spot as before: Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’, pleasingly drenched in natural light, in pride of place at the end of the Eregalerij, the Gallery of Honour. The room was purpose-built for ‘The Night Watch’ in 1906 — here there was no need to improve on its setting.
If you had only half an hour to see some of the best pictures in the world, you could do worse than walk the Eregalerij, with its Rembrandts, Vermeers, Steens and Halses. Among the Rembrandts is his 1654 portrait of Jan Six, still owned by the Six family of Amsterdam, and only occasionally on public view. The familiar thickly layered complexion of a Rembrandt face gives way to some astonishingly free light detail on Six’s cloak, dashed off, even, but dashed off with genius. The blockish grey of his tunic is altogether different, an extremely avant-garde Manetesque chunk of colour.
A few steps away are three Vermeers that have lost none of their power, either in their diminutive size, or their familiarity. In his ‘Milkmaid’, ‘Woman Reading a Letter’ and ‘Het Straatje’ (The Little Street, in Delft), Vermeer captured the everyday pinprick detail of the mid-17th-century Netherlands: the dots of grain on the milkmaid’s loaf of bread, the miniature scuffs in the paint on the wall behind her; every brick, every splodge of patchy pointing on the Delft houses, all veiled in that fuzzy, filmy, calming Vermeer veneer.
To see Amsterdam when its canals were split new, head for Gerrit Berckheyde’s pair of late-17th-century pictures of the Golden Bend, the bend in the canal in the Herengracht; then, as now, one of the city’s richest terraces. I’ve often thought British terraced houses are our greatest contribution to world architecture, but I’m not sure Amsterdam’s aren’t better, particularly as painted by Berckheyde, with their ultra-restrained classicism, the subtle variations in height and width, and the shifting skyline of gables, pediments and parapet statues; much of it cast into gentle shadow by the soft northern European sunlight.
There are a few oddities. The 20th-century collection on the top floor looks as if it’s been squeezed together into the eaves of the building, with a first world war Bantam biplane nestling next to a Mondrian.
Still, the chronological approach — with fine arts thrown next to decorative arts from the same era, a unique arrangement among national museums — doesn’t just fix historical periods in your mind in the right order. It also provides shocking surprises that suddenly jump out at you.
Just before the Mondrian-biplane room, there’s a display case — in new, super-transparent, non-reflective glass — with the blue and grey striped jacket of a Dutch Jewish inmate of a Nazi concentration camp; a stark reminder that only half an hour’s walk from the civilised high-mindedness of the Rijksmuseum stands Anne Frank’s house, one of those dignified terraced houses, where unfathomable horrors took place.
The Dutch 17th century is the star of the show here, although there are several Van Goghs, including a haunting 1887 self-portrait of the painter with a blank, 1,000-yard stare. Van Gogh addicts may feed their habit across the road at the Van Gogh Museum, which reopens its doors at the beginning of May, after seven months’ closure, with a new exhibition, Van Gogh at Work.
There are some foreign rarities, too, including a cheerfully informal Goya of Don Ramón Satué, a shabbily dressed Spanish Supreme Court judge, and a good Fra Angelico of a Madonna and Child.
Still, the Rijksmuseum has never tried to present itself as a global gallery: its supreme strength is its Dutch collection. Those 17th-century artistic advances — combined with and related to the country’s economic and political success — seem near-miraculous in such a small place. This year also happens to be the 400th anniversary of an architectural miracle, the beginning of the construction of Amsterdam’s Canal Ring. A walk round those canals and a day in the new Rijksmuseum, and you began to understand how it all happened.
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