October 29, 2013

Dutch museums own some 139 contentious artworks

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 1:57 pm

According to years of research carried out by the Netherlands Museums Association on the origins of artworks, some 139 pieces of art acquired by Dutch museums between 1933 and 1945 (during the Nazi regime) are suspected of being stolen, confiscated or were sold to them by force. Some 41 museums have such artworks in their collections, many of which were owned by Jews.

The research, started in 2009, had as a goal of establishing what the extent was of the possession of contentious paintings after the end of WWII. Some 162 Dutch museums collaborated with researchers in order to help return artworks to their rightful owners and/or their heirs. A special website will go live at 4 pm has now gone live on Tuesday, 29 October (CET) for everyone to peruse and maybe even help.

The museum with the most ‘stolen’ artworks is the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague Municipal Museum), followed by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Museum and Stedelijk Museum.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl, www.museumvereniging.nl, (Illustration: Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet. Source: politie.nl)

Tags: , , , , ,

July 16, 2011

Summer Expo 2011, bringing the Pepsi Challenge to art

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:06 pm

The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is hosting Zomer Expo 2011, an exhibition of 250 paintings—portraits, landscapes and still lifes—that were picked anonymously by a jury of art connoisseurs.

Artists, both professionals and amateurs, got to enter their works in three rounds. The works were then anonymised and the jurors subsequently had less than a minute to decide whether a work would be admitted.

Trendbeheer visited the show and was pleasantly surprised—even though Jeroen Bosch’s own works weren’t on display (it doesn’t say whether he had entered). The exhibition will continue until August 21.

If you cannot make it to The Hague in time, there is also an online exhibition (the yellow dots signify a work that’s on display in The Hague). The Summer Expo 2011 was inspired by the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London and the Canvas Collection in Belgium.

(Image: Be-spiegelingen by Annemieke Alberts, one of the paintings on display at the Gemeentemuseum, source Summer Expo 2011 website)

Tags: ,