Stedelijk Museum: The Bathtub and the Avant-Garde
Why is it significant?
Face the building and you will see two museums glued together. On one side, a dignified brick palace with towers and sculpted niches. On the other, a smooth, gleaming white volume with a cantilevered roof that seems to float over the entrance.
Key Facts
| Place | Stedelijk Museum: The Bathtub and the Avant-Garde |
|---|---|
| Address | Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35790, 4.87990 |
| Part of Walk | Amsterdam's Green Heart: Vondelpark, Oud-Zuid and the Concertgebouw |
| Generated | Generated |
Face the building and you will see two museums glued together. On one side, a dignified brick palace with towers and sculpted niches. On the other, a smooth, gleaming white volume with a cantilevered roof that seems to float over the entrance. Amsterdammers took one look at it and gave it a nickname: the bathtub.
The brick half opened in 1895, designed by Adriaan Willem Weissman, and it exists thanks to a woman. Sophia Augusta de Bruyn-Lopez Suasso, a wealthy collector, left the city her collection of art, jewellery and curiosities, on condition that a museum be built to house it. So the Stedelijk, the city's own museum, began as a home for one woman's cabinets of treasures.
It became world famous thanks to a man with a typographer's eye. Willem Sandberg, director from 1945 to 1962, had spent the war in the resistance, forging identity papers, and in 1943 he took part in the attack on the city's population registry. After the liberation he threw the museum's windows open to the new: abstract painting, Cobra, design, posters, film. Under him the Stedelijk became one of the boldest modern art museums in Europe, and it built up one of the largest collections of Kazimir Malevich outside Russia.
The white extension, by the architects Benthem Crouwel, opened in 2012. It is not painted plaster. The outer skin is a seamless composite reinforced with high-strength fibres, smooth as the hull of a yacht, so the nickname is not so far off. The new entrance turned the whole museum round, so that it now looks out over the great lawn of Museumplein.
And there is a quiet link to the park behind you. For the generation who rebuilt Amsterdam after the war, modern art, open parks and public concerts were part of the same idea: beauty belongs to everyone, not just to those who can afford it. Now walk along the side of the museum and cross the street to the long, dignified building with a golden lyre on its roof.