Wim Pijbes, director general of the Rijksmuseum, will leave the museum to head the private Museum Voorlinden, the Art Newspaper reports. Pijbes took over at the museum in 2008, guiding the ongoing renovations and improvements to the institution to a highly lauded reopening in 2013. (more…)
Anish Kapoor, Internal Object in Three Parts (detail) (2013-2015) © Anish Kapoor; Courtesy the artist & Lisson Gallery
Anish Kapoor & 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn are placed into a neighborly conversation at the Rijksmuseum this month, as dualisms of flesh and meat, figuration and abstraction underscore the more nuanced connections between the pair, and illustrate the ever-changing focal points, yet unified interests in the shapes and forms of the human body and its depiction. (more…)
With its 10-year, $500 million renovation now drawn to a close, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is set to reopen on April 13th. The new design, which undid years of renovations to restore the original design and layout by Pierre Cuypers, was well over both budget and timeframe, but has already received praise for its new design and attention to historical detail. “This was built as a national museum, not just an art museum, and we want the public to get a sense of history, seeing the paintings, furniture and applied arts that were all conceived around the same time.” Said Director of Collections, Taco Dibbits. (more…)
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Joan Miró, Dutch Interior I, 1928. Image via The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “Miró: The Dutch Interiors,” an exhibition featuring three surrealist works and the two seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings that inspired them. Joan Miró first encountered the domestic scenes of Jan Steen and Hendrick Sorgh when he visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam. The impact of these works on the Catalan artist resulted in The Dutch Interiors: a series of three paintings in which Miró re-envisions the Old Master works as abstract compositions, nearly four-hundred years after their original production. The exhibition, which debuted at the Rijksmuseum earlier this year, is the first occasion on which Miró’s reinterpretations of these scenes have been displayed with the works upon which they are based.
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Hendrick Sorgh, The Lute Player, 1660. Image via the Rijksmuseum.
