If you haven’t understood yet what Conceptual Fine Arts is about, visit the The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rottherdan and buy its “Collection book”

 

The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen first opened its doors in 1849 and currently comprises an estimated total of some 140.000 objects, thanks to the generosity of its many benefactors – more than 1600 individuals, that is a huge numbers of donors considering that Rotterdam now has approximately 610.000 citizens.

 

The museum’s collection has two main characteristics. The first one is the high quality of the artworks: from the iconic Pieter Breugel’s Tower of Babel and Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Armand Roulin, to a variable number of “genuine Rembrandt”, or to the Madonna and Child by Beato Angelico. And then Bosch, Degas, Cezanne, and an extraordinary body of works by Salvador Dalí. The second characteristic, as you may presume, is the diversity of artworks, both in terms of style and epoch.

 

The Boijmans is different from the Louvre or the Met in New York. It was not conceived with the aim of having a comprehensive collection in order to reflect the history of arts. This museum is more like a sophisticated gathering of various collections, thus embodying specific personalities of collectors, such as the Utrecht lawyer Frans Jacob Boijmans himself, or the Rotterdam shipping magnate Daniël George Beuningen, to whom the museum is also dedicated. Such a considerable corpus of artworks ends up representing a specific idea of beauty, rather than a great wealth, or the power of a certain social system as, for example, in the case of the British Museum.

 

This aesthetic perspective becomes evident once flicking through the Boijmans’ catalogue, the so called “collection book”, where the sequence of the artworks is alphabetically ordered (while in the museum works are displayed chronologically). It means, for example, that Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4 poster is behind the Portrait of the the Lütiens Family by Max Beckmann, or the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen by Edgar Degas faces a room installation by Walter De Maria, titled A Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World/ 3-12 Polygon.

 

This parallel between images and information is the same endless game which we invite you to play every day, that is developing links between artworks throughout the time in order to broaden their possible meanings and expressivity.

July 18, 2015