There was a moment last year when the three principal museums of Amsterdam – the Stedelijk, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum – were all more or less closed, the culmi­nation of a pitiful, long-running soap opera. While rebuilding and restoration are inevitable, to have all three institutions in the hands of contractors was a scandalous miscalculation. A major problem was the interminable closure of the Stedelijk Museum – nine years – and the attendant political manoeuvrings and delays that marked the building of an extension to the Museum. Among the most striking storylines have been the resignation of the Stedelijk’s director Rudi Fuchs in 2003, followed by no less than three further appointments to the post, the latest being Ann Goldstein who arrived in 2010 from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. There were power struggles on the Museum’s board, escalating costs and the rejection of at least two proposals for the extension. As far back as 1989, a feasibility study for expansion was carried out and as a result, four years later, Venturi & Scott Brown won a competition for the new building only for it to be rejected as too expensive. An agreement was then reached with the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza which led swiftly to disagreement, his three modified proposals all turned down. Estimated costs were spiralling and there were heavy spats between Fuchs and the city council over sponsorship. After Fuchs’s departure, the Museum closed. The Sanders Commission of 2003 reported on demoralised staff, an antiquated inventory system, poor storage and a backlog of conservation.1 The building’s fabric was in bad shape and the city’s fire brigade would not grant a licence for the admittance of the public. A competition was relaunched and a local Amsterdam firm, Benthem Crouwel, was appointed. To fund the project the city council were to provide just under €58 million of the desired €90 million; the eventual cost has been €127 million.

Since its foundation in 1895, the Stedelijk Museum, on the strength of the vision of a number of formidable directors, has become noted for three main achievements. First, its permanent collection, developed on high modernist principles; secondly, its peerless collection of mostly Dutch applied design and the decorative arts from c.1900 onwards; and thirdly, it has had, since after the Second World War, a reputation for exhibitions of contemporary art at its most forward looking, coupled with innovative and energetic artist-led events.

By the standards of the great temples of modern art, the Stedelijk is not a collection of the highest quality. It is not studded with masterpieces nor does it attempt a survey of the whole twentieth century. But it is of considerable importance and contains informative groupings and individual works that illuminate, for example, the evolving trajectory of abstraction, German Expressionism, post-War figuration in Europe, Min­imalism and Conceptualism. There are particular strengths – the holdings of Malevich and Mondrian, early Pollock, de Kooning and Newman, the CoBrA movement; on the other hand Cubism and Surrealism float into the narrative on unexceptional works.

The first two of these three strengths are much in evidence in the building following its reopening in September last year. The old entrance to the Museum, on the street, is now closed and a visitor approaches ‘round the back’ and in through the new extension. This has rather aptly been nicknamed ‘the bathtub’ (see Fig.86 on p.137 below). On top of the glass-walled ground floor – the generic open space for ticketing, shop, escalators etc. – is a curious off-white structure, looking, indeed, like a streamlined bath seen from below. At first sight it is shockingly at odds with the original building, next to which it seems to have been dumped rather than seamlessly attached; its swollen bulk and sharp edges are ugly; it is jokey without being amusing. Viewed from a slight distance, a tall steel sculpture by Richard Serra seems to be holding up the tub’s right corner (though in fact they do not touch). Seen from the grass of the Mus­eumplein, the Stedelijk and its neighbours – the entrance to an underground supermarket and a towering black rectilinear structure for the Museum’s services to the left and, to the right, the unfortunate late 1990s addition to the Van Gogh Museum – present a truly dreadful built conglomeration.

Inside, matters improve. From the entrance hall a visitor gains the ‘old museum’ and plunges into the long sequence of white rooms, more or less following chronology from the late nineteenth century onwards. Windows are screened in white blinds and there is a satisfactory blend of natural and artificial light. Throughout, the fondly remembered herringbone floors have been replaced with mundane honey-coloured floorboards. The walls reach down to within a few centimetres of the floor, provid­ing a dark skirting reminiscent, as one reviewer has noted, of the moveable divisions of art-fair stands.2 Most rooms are sparsely provisioned with paintings and sculpture which, for the most part, work well. Occasional larger spaces give much-needed relief. It is a dutiful hang with its grace notes and occasional visual muggings. It is also a very Western display and decisions will have to be taken very soon on whether to broaden the contemporary holdings beyond Europe and North America.

A large section of the Museum contains the absorbing design and decorative arts collection, packing in over 2,000 exhibits, from earrings and cutlery to Mrs Harrenstein’s complete bedroom designed by Rietveld in 1926. In the later rooms a visitor might well glaze over at the shelves of gadgets from recent years – if still able to walk after going down on hands and knees to read labels flat on the floor inside the earlier glass cases.

The Museum has chosen to inaugurate its new temporary exhibition galleries – airless, characterless but large spaces below ground and rooms on the first floor – with a sprawling retrospective of the work of the late Mike Kelley (1954–2012). It is an astonishing sampling of the multifaceted and multimedia works of this menacingly humorous artist who could jump from undergraduate dirty jokes to some of the most unsettling and sophisticated art of the last decades.

The third of the Museum’s achievements mentioned above is the one most difficult to regain for a new audience. Paradoxically, impromptu and experimental events take careful programming to develop into something substantial that can be fully perceived by the public. This aspect will depend on the lead given by the director and the curatorial staff, most of whom are relatively unfamiliar with the collection in the flesh, so to speak. To judge from recent interviews, the director seems undecided, even cagey, about the Museum’s vision for the art it is to project. Keeping cards too close to one’s chest might mean one does not see them oneself.

1    See the Editorial in this Magazine ‘The Stedelijk: stopping the rot’, 145 (2003), p.623.
2    See C. Blotkamp: ‘Het nieuwe Stedelijk’, De Witte Raaf 160 (November–December 2012), pp.10–11.