I visited the new Migratie Museum (Migration Museum) to write a review for Villa La Repubblica about its present exhibition (which was made in co-operation with Nest) The Bricks that Build a Home. Click here to read the review (in Dutch).
Amber Toorop
As i spent quite some words on it in the VLR review, i leave you here with some impressions of the show without comments.
The Russian-born French sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1888/90-1967) has a special relationship with the Netherlands, in particular with Rotterdam, where his monument The Destroyed City, placed in 1953, became the ultimate modernist war monument (click here to see some pictures of the monument in situ).
Zadkine is clearly the proverbial artist of the second quarter of the 20th century with a lot of expressionism and cubism and a touch of Modigliani in his portraits.
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As such he was an inventive craftsman and a prolific artist, and there is a lot to be admired in the show.
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However, his prolific output also makes his work a bit predictable which becomes clear in this exhibition of one hundred works (!), crammed into this otherwise very spacious museum.
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The presentation is more or less chronological in a kind of makeshift galleries and more loosely arranged in the left over open space, an approach that tries to bring some order in this forest of sculptures.
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As such the presentation lacks good sightlines which might have expressed the special qualities of certain works in dialogue with each other.
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What lyrical power the individual works may have, is destroyed by this massive, wholesale approach.
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However, for the aficionados who just want to see a lot of Zadkine this is probably their best chance.
The façade of Museum Beelden aan Zee (Sculptures by the Sea museum) is one of the most remarkable in The Hague for such a significant building, in that it hardly exists.
Built in a dune and under a 19th century neo-classicist pavilion it only has a modernist but unassuming entrance (in Harteveltstraat) and a concrete perimeter.
It was built in 1992-94 and designed by Wim Quist (1930) for the Scholten sculpture collection.
Its real architectural value is very much in the inside and it is one the best museum buildings for sculpture imaginable.
Also for its interesting exhibitions it deserves far more prestige than it presently has.
Nevertheless its outside is also interesting in that it doesn’t want to be obtrusive.
It has about the same colour as the sand and it also looks like a kind of protection of the small dune area with the old pavilion on top.
In the southwest corner of the museum area sits a sculpture by Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014)
