AS PRESSURE MOUNTS on museums to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’ it is noticeable that there is no proposal to curb the practice of trucking works of art around the country or flying them around the globe. Rather, the reverse. It is indeed clear that over the last decade or so the standard model of what a museum should be has changed. In place of the museum that regards itself primarily as a ‘permanent collection’, occasionally lending a work of art for a worthy exhibition, slowly modifying its displays and modernising its facilities, and feeling somewhat embarrassed by the quantity of work in store, we have the museum that frequently changes its displays, gives increasing emphasis to temporary exhibitions and is striving to be more of a global brand than a place. Our national institutions are now frequently lending to regional satellites or partners, and also to the shining new mus­eums of the East, enterprises which are driven by ‘political profile’, cultural diplomacy, and an ingenious combination of outreach and fund-raising. The ‘permanent collection’ is not always neglected and can even attract critical attention when a new wing is built or a gallery is radically refurbished – something that, in a really large museum, can be contrived almost as frequently as the mounting of a popular exhibition.

The institutions that once contrasted with, and compensated for, the restless commercial world now mimic the operations of multinational capitalism, upon the favours of which they increasingly depend, and whose ‘vision’ they increasingly adopt. Museums that were intended to foster permanent values (as well as national identity and imperial destiny) are now more likely to promote fashion than design. There is much that is alarming as well as exciting about these developments. Above all, a museum which sees its mission as akin to a ‘lending library’ must presumably expect its exhibits to wear out, and may soon favour deaccessioning. The museum which was more like a cathedral treasury gave priority to the highest standards of care – standards which we are now being urged to relax.

Outside London two other factors militate against the old model of the permanent collection: the increasing prestige of contemporary art (much of it very large in size) and the simultaneous shrinking of available space, owing to reductions in spending by both local and central government. Space once allocated to the display of watercolours in the typical British municipal gallery has often been taken over by videos and installations, and now cuts have led to the dismantling of the (admittedly rather tired) typical display of Chippendale furniture, portraits by Hudson and local ceramics. The display of ‘stories’ created a decade ago (in which historical, mythological and religious pictures are combined in an anti-chronological and ‘thematic’ way for the benefit of ethnically diverse school visits) survives but may be swept away when there is opportunity, or even perhaps political pressure, to accept more contemporary art, offloaded by a prominent collector/investor or a speculative gallerist as part of a ‘philanthropy’ initiative.

Those of us who wish to defend the idea of the museum or gallery with a permanent collection – a fixed place where we can visit and, more importantly, revisit great works of art, a repository where that which we most value will be preserved for the future, a matter of national or local pride, where the arrangement of the art is itself a work of art and the whole more than the sum of its parts – need to make changes and concessions if many of the institutions we most love are to avoid extinction. Some solutions may be found on continental Europe, and perhaps the most interesting ideas are to be found in Rotterdam at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

The history of this institution is available in an admirable official (but lively and candid) handbook by Erik Beenker, published in English as The Collection.1 It began with F.J.O. Boijmans, a collector who wished to preserve his gallery of paintings and sold it to the city of Rotterdam at a bargain price. By 1900, after sales and a fire, little more than ten per cent of the paintings in the foundation collection remained. The Museum that we see today is really the creation of one man, Dirk Hannema. He was made director in 1921 at the age of twenty-six and seems to have had the confidence that came from a wealthy upbringing and easy relations with leading experts (one is reminded of Kenneth Clark). After the Second World War he was dismissed for collaboration with the Nazis (a topic which Beenker handles very fairly) and it cannot now be easy to admit that his acquisitions were judicious in almost every field (including contemporary art) and his decisions shrewd (for example, forming foundations for donors who were fearful of the whims of local government). Together with the architect Ad van der Steur he created a new museum building which opened in 1935, eight years after it was first conceived – a modern building, but not notably modernist, the quality of which has only gradually elicited critical admiration and which still probably seems somewhat austere to the general public.

The structure is fairly inflexible because of the old idea that art is best appreciated in proper rooms rather than in different portions of a labyrinth or in a partitioned section of a huge glass box. The rooms are varied in size but they tend to be fairly small because of a preference for considering the relationships between works of art, which is best encouraged by small groups of pictures (sometimes of only half a dozen). The rooms are connected by a dado of pale wood which is extended on to the floor as a border to brass-edged vinyl. Benches built into the dado participate in a double curve which sweeps us elegantly from room to room (a feature inspired by the ground floor of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin), establishing continuity without the daunting vista of an enfilade (Fig.I). The manner in which daylight is filtered and complemented by artificial light soon became standard and, like the air conditioning system with its elegant brass outlets, still functions today.

The director of the Museum has made the excellent decision that the time is right to celebrate this building, which far surpasses in architectural merits the extensions that have mercifully left it largely intact. The designer he has called in, Maarten Spruyt, has been careful to respect the architecture as well as the paintings. For the present installation the wall colours were specially designed by the artist Peter Struycken, whose pale grey paint tending to green or violet or, more rarely, brown – colours that suit the architect’s vinyl and the pale wood – are varied to avoid monotony and to suit different types of art, and thus are browner (slightly too much so) for Rembrandt and for Christoph Paudiss’s Still life with beer, herring and pipe. The slightly violet-grey wall in one room picks up a minor note – a few brush-strokes of nearly identical colour within the beiges, pinks and greys – in the courtyard view by Morandi (a painting bequeathed by Vitale Bloch in 1976). Such subtle changes sharpen our awareness of an artist’s palette, and it is not an accidental felicity that something similar happens quite often in Rotterdam, as the colours were chosen in close collaboration with the designers.

The selection and hanging of the paintings and the labels and wall texts are the work of a single guest curator, Peter Hecht. The fact that Hecht is the most eminent academic art historian in the Netherlands may have made him an obvious choice, but it is rare for anyone, whether academic or curator, to have Hecht’s feeling for the telling juxtaposition and grouping, the right balance of connection and contrasts, across half a dozen centuries. And having one voice with a distinctive style gives unity and a sense of purpose to the whole display. Hecht’s use of language – to judge from the very readable translations – is vivid, terse, occasionally colloquial, but neither condescending nor obscure and, above all, free of both pedantry and subjectivity, never giving his own knowledge or feelings inappropriate prominence.

The display is broadly chronological in order and the themes are ones to which the visitor is not always obliged to give careful attention, and which are in fact of varying importance. Hecht tries gently to inculcate some awareness of the history of the collection and indeed of collecting in the Netherlands generally. For example, he groups the sixteenth- and sev­en­teenth-century paintings (by Coorte, Sweerts, Beccafumi, Cavallino and Mola) in Vitale Bloch’s bequest, observing that these were by artists who have been subject to enthusiastic reappraisal since Bloch acquired them, and commenting on their artistic restraint, their ‘silent music’. Elsewhere he asks why it is that ‘so little foreign art ended up in the Netherlands, which traded with the rest of the world for centuries’, commends the acquisition in 1991 of Mattia Preti’s Belisarius receiving alms (‘a bull’s eye’ – ‘een schot in de roos’; Fig.II), draws attention to a rare survival from the great collection of King Willem II, auctioned in 1850, and gives deserved prominence to Batoni’s fine portrait of a Rotterdam merchant.

The most significant challenge to received ideas is the emphasis Hecht places on the acquisitions of contemporary art made in the first half of the last century. His hang gives Pyke Koch, Dick Ket and Carel Willink a prominence equal to that of Mondrian. Willink’s Self-portrait of 1936 is the work of an artist ‘who has declared war on modernism’ (the attitude is not far from that of Meredith Frampton). Ket’s Self-portrait (Fig.III), given by Hannema himself in 1934, is something of an uncouth return to Cranach and Dürer (which, on account of its mysterious attribute, and its air of defiance and exposure, looks forward to the early paintings of Lucian Freud). Loans of a Stanley Spencer (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and of Valerius de Saedeleer’s Snow in Flanders (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp) hint at the international context, which is indeed something that Hecht does throughout.

Although very few of the acknowledged masterpieces in the collection (to judge at least from the guidebook) are not included in this display, Hecht has given prominence to a number of very important old masters which have long languished in the gallery’s reserve collection. One of these is the unusually large Frederik van Valckenborch, dated 1603, in which the white water is dashed in between the roots of the trees, as it is by Tintoretto in the landscapes in the Scuola di S. Rocco, and the figures have limbs which are as agitated as those which would be painted much later by Magnasco (or etched by Piranesi). No less surprising is Hendrik van Limborch’s Achilles discovered among the daughters of Lycomedes, a painting of 1710 which comes remarkably close to the sleek Grecian paintings by the disciples of J.-L. David a century later.2 Altogether an astonishing proportion (between a quarter and a third) of the works of art in this display were not visible in the previous installation.

At the edge of the main sequence of rooms Hecht found space for two miniature exhibitions (so-called ‘interventions’, which change on a regular basis). One such was a display (closed 4th September 2011) uniting Van Gogh’s portrait of the postmaster Roulin (borrowed from the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) with his painting of Roulin’s son (one of the most popular works in the Boijmans Museum). It encouraged us to consider the impact on Van Gogh, when he visited Rotterdam, of the great self-portrait by Fabritius. With a tact which is unusual in exercises of this kind, the Fabritius was not hung on the same wall as the Van Goghs. The neighbouring room was less likely to appeal to most visitors but was certainly engrossing – it evoked (but did not seek to reproduce) the way the collection was displayed when Van Gogh and, before him, Théophile Thoré, visited it.

The publicity for Hecht’s work – ‘The Collection Enriched’ – emphasises the loans (more than twenty of them) ‘from Dutch public institutions and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp’. These range from the Giovanni di Paolo that the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht has placed on deposit in the Rijksmuseum and Crivelli’s Mary Magdalene (also from the Rijksmuseum; Fig.IV; formerly in Hitler’s collection) to a Lovis Corinth from Antwerp, a Redon from Gouda (which arrived early in 2012), and Stanley Spencer’s Self-portrait from Amsterdam (returned at the end of August 2011). They have been well selected (taking advantage of many museums which are closed for reconstruction) but do not make a decisive difference in every case and, when all is considered, make less impact than Hecht’s discoveries within the collection itself.

It is so rare for Hecht to miss a trick that it is worth mentioning the occasions when he does. Han van Meegeren’s forgery of Vermeer, the Supper at Emmaus, is on show, commendably, but, given that Hecht tries to extend our sympathies generally, it is disappointing that the label merely ridicules the painting and by implication the experts (including Hannema) who were fooled by it. It would be better to point to the parts of the painting which do show an understanding of the way Vermeer described light at the expense of form, as in the spots on the bread crust and the projections of the glass. In a display that from time to time reminds us of how the hanging of a painting is an act of interpretation, it is noteworthy that the great pair of portraits by Maarten van Heemskerck must (since they are lit from different sides) have been intended to hang opposite each other or in separate rooms. Thus they did not originally reverse (as Hecht’s label suggests they did) the convention whereby the wife sits on the man’s left.

The Boijmans Museum plans to rearrange its permanent collection every two years. The inspiration for this may be the success of Tate Britain’s policy of altering its displays at regular intervals, but that pace of change seems better suited to a col­lection of modern and contemporary art than to a museum devoted also to old masters. Given the success of Hecht’s work, might not his display be extended to five years, with changes to perhaps only a third of the rooms? Ideally, of course, the museum’s own curatorial staff should be able to play a part in this process. What is most successful is the incorporation of novel displays within the reassuring stability of the permanent collection. This is also found nearby in the delightful municipal museum in Dordrecht, which opened after a major redesign in 2008. What may be more significant than giving the right prominence to Ary Scheffer, or inserting a local historical display or a small monographic one so tactfully within a chronological structure, is the way that the Dordrecht Museum is arranged so that the contemporary mingles judiciously with the old in some parts and is separate in others. Elsewhere, in museums all over the western world, the contemporary is like a tsunami, gathering strength to swamp both old and modern art.

The directors in Rotterdam have been remarkably varied in their outlook and activities since Hannema was dismissed: one of them recklessly lending to suburban libraries, another closing the crèche and stopping the guided tours; one buying only modern, another – a manager with no curatorial pretensions – putting on forty temporary exhibitions a year; another, having tried to sell a Rothko, being obliged to work alongside a co-director for business affairs. Its way of displaying things has not always been admired, and the insensitive mingling of old and new (Rubens beside a vacuum cleaner) and brash emphasis on interactive digital information was forcefully condemned in this Magazine by James Beechey in November 2003.3

But this new initiative is not merely exemplary in its introduction of novelty into the permanent. It provides a model for intelligent debate. The question of how appropriate it is for a museum to include reminders that the curator is an individual with a distinctive personality – even, at times, an artist – is an important one. Perhaps it is not such a straightforward idea in a larger institution. And then how easy is it to find a curator with the requisite range and authority? How prominently the visitor should be reminded that the institution has embodied different values in the past and has been shaped by accidents and ideals which are now hard to understand is also something to consider. Right now, the best place to do this is in Rotterdam.

1    E. Beenker: The Collection: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Rotterdam 2005.
2    The painting was included, at Hecht’s suggestion, in the exhibition Vom Adel der Malerei: Holland um 1700 in Cologne and Dordrecht in 2006–07, and was illustrated in the review of that show in this Magazine, 149 (2007), p.352, but it then went back into storage.
3    The Burlington Magazine 145 (2003), pp.814–17.