The Most Modern Van Abbemuseum In Eindhoven, The Netherlands Is Toured By AKN Editor

Written by Lund Conover Monday, 17 January 2011 23:08

The Van Abbemuseum, established in 1936, is now one of the most spectacularly designed museums in the Netherlands. The museum, founded by cigar manufacturer Henri van Abbe in 1936, has a long-established reputation for presenting a surprising, progressive programme which raises issues of art and society in an experimental fashion. In 2003 the existing listed monument designed by architect A.J. Kropholler was thoroughly renovated and integrated within architect Abel Cahen’s design for an architecturally progressive, large-scale complex. This provided the museum with the necessary expansion in terms of floor space and facilities. The Van Abbemuseum is one of a growing number of museums for the visual arts, in the Netherlands and abroad, where collection and presentation as well as architectural design are a token of their distinctive, contemporary character. Cahen’s design has made a prominent contribution to international museum architecture. The Van Abbemuseum lies on the River Dommel and enjoys a surprisingly natural setting. Landscape architects envisioned a substantial widening of the river, adding fish ladders and a nature-friendly river bank. This has established an ‘inner lake’ in the embrace of the new building that is overlooked by the museum café and its open-air terrace. The museum café is not only accessible via the main entrance, but can also be reached via the footbridge constructed to the rear of the museum. This work of art, a small, vivid-pink house with the illuminated words ‘Echt iets voor u’ – ‘Just your kind of thing’ – on the roof is a design by the Eindhoven-based artist and architect John Körmeling. The museum has several of his works in its collection. The shortest covered bridge in the world is an eye-catcher by day or by night. The façade of the new building is clad with natural stone, namely grey Flammet slate from Lapland. This grey shell, which changes in hue from silver-grey to dark anthracite depending on the weather conditions, accentuates the angular, sleek design of the new building, forming an expressive contrast with the light and surprisingly transparent spaces within. The heart of the Van Abbemuseum is a 27-metre-high tower with inward-sloping walls, onto which every floor opens out. Sweeping flights of stairs and a musical lift form striking vertical traverses. Each floor has its own internal structure, sometimes high and monumental, sometimes modest or surprising in form. Though the museum initially strikes one as labyrinthine, it thereby provides space for intimate presentations as well as large-scale exhibitions and monumental installations. The tower, just like the basement, is treated both as an exhibition space and as a workspace where artists can create work in situ. The Belgian designer Maarten van Severen created the interiors for a range of public facilities, turning the Van Abbemuseum into a user-friendly hub of expertise furnished with state-of-the-art digital equipment. Employing his restrained style and refined palette of colours to great effect, he realized the educational spaces, the museum shop and the auditorium. His highly original design for the library, which extends over three floors around an open well, can rightfully be called a masterpiece of applied art in Eindhoven. The Van Abbemuseum celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2011. A theme common to our activities in 2011 will be our endeavour to escape the confines of the familiar museum walls and to enter into increasingly collaborative relations with with events and traveling exhibitions worldwide. The Van Abbemuseum has become internationally known as a place where a cross-fertilisation of ideas takes place through new forms of extra-disciplinary research. Visit the website at : www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en/

The Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, an internationally renowned collection of modern and contemporary art, with great courage and taste built by museum directors as Edy de Wilde, Jean Leering and Rudi Fuchs. The collection includes Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Richard Long, Robert Morris: they are masters of 20th century modern art work. Their work can be found in Eindhoven, at the Van Abbe Museum. Not the most obvious place. In international circles the collection of the Van Abbe Museum is considered as one of the most remarkable in Europe, if not the world. There is also focus on the current situation of the museum, the Van Abbe still able to expand its collection at a time when the value of art is primarily determined by institutional and private collectors. The current and fourth and last part of "Play Van Abbe" is called The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker). The title describes the possible roles that a museum visitor could play when looking at an artwork or exhibition. By doing so, the programme focuses directly on criteria that visitors use to make judgements about art. These criteria have become more complex and uncertain over the last years and are no longer limited to beauty or truth. By offering three classical roles to visitors, the museum curators want to encourage a greater playfulness in making personal judgements and understanding the judgements of others. The pilgrim is likely to be more concentrated on the object of art; the tourist on the relation between objects and stories; the flaneur on time and people passing by. In this way, experiences with artworks at the museum become the basis to make new judgements about what art is and how it effects each one of us. The exhibition includes key works by Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Sarah Charlesworth, Erwin van Doorn, Barry Flanagan, Surasi Kusolwong, Richard Long, Marko Peljhan, Oliver Ressler, Katerina Sieverding, Ulay/Abramovic, Yang Zhenzhong, and others. Also on view is "Lissitzky+ Victory over the Sun" until 3 March, 2011.In 2009 the Van Abbemuseum started the large-scale project Lissitzky+. The museum holds the largest collection of Lissitzky’s work outside Russia. The exhibition takes the futurist opera, Victory over the Sun, as its starting point. For this show, the Van Abbemuseum is the first institution ever to have rendered important designs by Lissitzky as large-scale, three-dimensional figures, wholly in keeping with Lissitzky’s ideological legacy. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design. The museum’s collection of around 3700 works of art. The museum has an experimental approach towards art’s role in society. Openness, hospitality and knowledge exchange are important. We challenge ourselves and our visitors to think about art and its place in the world, covering a range of subjects, including the role of the collection as a cultural 'memory' and the museum as a public site. International collaboration and exchange have made the Van Abbemuseum a place for creative cross-fertilisation and a source of surprise, inspiration and imagination for its visitors and participants.