The building seems smaller, but more spacious than the V&A, and I would say the curation is a little more sparse - I guess this suited Hannah and I because it meant we could see all the rooms and exhibitions without much rushing. As well as two galleries organised in the classical chronological order, picking out specific Dutch designs in particular movements in the 20th century, several rooms were dedicated to big Dutch designers, as well as fantastic curation of contemporary art albeit with a clear design edge. While some objects were very familiar to us - Paintings by Mondrian, furniture by Rietveld, etc. etc. - it was a real discovery process for us to figure out the timeline of Western design movements, their overlapping and responses to each other (embarrassingly we had forgotten our dates for de Stijl and Bauhaus, Art Nouveau and Art Deco...it turns out its a fun game to guess what is from which movement), as well as finding some fantastic designers that we hadn't known before.
Mostly the individual rooms were small and self-contained, with a theme within the room and the objects very curiously close and easily-touchable...The Dutch clearly trust their visitors! But it was great to be able to get so close to the work and see all the details that you wouldn't normally be able to access over barriers. We also enjoyed the way they had designed some of their plinths to effortlessly float in the space, not disturbing the link between the paintings and sculpture. We were impressed with what they had chosen to collect - we liked how they had chosen to collect and display parts of the process of making 'art', such as plan drawings of Picasso's Guernica. It was nice to go around and pick out objects that seemed interesting in the context, and to pull out why they were in a design collection.
One of my favourites was Willem Sandberg, who had an almighty role of director and designer for the Stedelijk Museum from 1937 - 1962, but had been involved as a graphic designer for the museum since 1928. Dream jobs much, I imagine that doesn't happen much anymore. A typographer, printer and curator, he designed many of the museum exhibition posters and programmes, before and during his time as director of the museum. He at first resented the museum as a house of 'the past' but changed his feelings after becoming director. What's fascinating is that part of the deal of becoming director was that he would still be able to design the catalogues. He believed that the catalogue was just as important to the exhibition as the exhibition itself, designing 320 catalogues for the museum, even after he became director when he would design in the evenings after the day's work in the museum. Here's a fab article about him on the Eye Magazine website if you want to know more.
It's a shame we hadn't really learned much about him, and after seeing his work and hearing his achievements, I feel a bit embarrassed not to have known about him before... I loved looking at his catalogues, and it makes me even more excited to do a type course at some point. His use of colour and shape is playful and (to me) very illustrative, and graphically eye-catching. I would certainly have subscribed to his catalogues.
Another artists that caught our attention was Karel Appel, a Dutch painter, writer and poet who was a member of the group CoBrA, an avant-garde group of artists. Sandberg commissioned him to paint the walls of the refreshment room, and enjoyed it so much that Appel was brought back to paint a mural on the former restaurant, what is now the opening room of the museum. It's such a happy, vibrant and dynamic image, and when at this scale is just breath-taking. The central oval 'flower' is actually a window, which means the light made that particular area really sparkle. I also loved the way that he played with the space, overlapping and moving from wall to wall to ceiling, making for an energetic bunch of characters.
Our last favourite was actually from a temporary exhibition of Jan Dibbets, a Dutch conceptual photographer. The exhibition was a re-exhibiting of Dibbets Colour Studies from the 1970s, several close up colour photographs of the shiny hoods of cars. The studies had been newly printed to be several metres high, exhibited alongside Dibbets original prints from 1976, (no bigger than an A4 if I remember rightly) which he had printed as large as possible by the technology of the time. From afar, they looked like meticulous paintings, and the photographs were displayed beautifully in these vast galleries with lots of natural light. They looked amazing framed in doorways at this large scale. I really appreciated that these works were displayed in a 'design' museum, because I think it's important that contemporary art is put in the context of design, and how something like scale in the process, made possible through new technologies over time, of making art can make such a dramatic different to the way it captures its audience. In a way, the work was totally new, just because it was that much bigger.
Just as a last note, in light of Brexit, I'm really glad Hannah and I got to visit before the trip would be tainted by the fact that we won't be part of Europe anymore. After taking this course, its even clearer to me that our industry as well as others relies on togetherness, collaboration and consistent criticality of ourselves and each other. It's without doubt that we will miss the diversity that for me, makes Britain what it is. I really think that even though I and so many of my friends voted Remain, we have to continue to believe that we can change things, change people's minds and feelings, otherwise Leave then really will have won. In spite of it, I still feel very much a European, as well as a citizen of the World. I hope that in our industry we can continue to open up, engage and develop the ways we share design with each other.
