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Never a dull moment in Flanders and The Netherlands. Art, history, language or literature, you name it, there is a museum for everyone's taste in the Low Countries. Let Museum Explorer be your guide.
The Antwerp museum is the first ever to be established solely around the existing collection of one person.
This beautiful city palace in Mechelen has re-opened its doors to the public after a year of renovations.
After five years of renovation and decolonisation, the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren opened again. Dutch writer of Congolese descent, Kiza Magendane visited the museum with mixed feelings.
With the opening of its new wing in 1996, visitors to the Teyler Museum in Haarlem are now better able than ever before to enjoy the treasures of this oldest (1784) public museum in the Netherlands. For more than two centuries art and science have been exhibited side by side in this unique museum with its exclusively natural lighting and its outstanding exhibits in many fields. For more than two centuries the combination of art and science, natural light and a magnificent interior has made the Teyler Museum unique. Those who have no interest in art, but come for the minerals, are nevertheless confronted with Art. Those who are only interested in art and do not care for physics are nevertheless fascinated by the large electrostatic generator and other treasures from the worlds of nature and technology to be discovered in the museum. The view of the testator Pieter Teyler that art, knowledge and science enrich mankind, still holds good today.
Three Flemish cities, Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven all have a new museum. They show three different ways of tackling a project. In each case, existing old collections are given a new, engaging presentation.
While Flanders prepares to devote the years 2014-2018 to large-scale commemoration of the First World War, the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres shows a completely new scenography and a total area 50 % larger than when it opened in 1998. It was a good idea to incorporate the Cloth Hall's bell-tower, destroyed in the war and rebuilt, into the museum circuit.
Light and balance are the two cornerstones of Museum Voorlinden, which opened its doors in Wassenaar, just outside The Hague, in September 2016. The art collector Joop van Caldenborgh (1940), a former chemical industry magnate, commissioned a building to house his extensive collection of contemporary art in a setting characterised by clarity and clean lines. ‘Artists have taught me to look at the world differently, to think more freely’.
The Antwerp musem of photography has recently taken on a new lease of life after many decades of dormancy. The FotoMuseum, as it is now called, is owned by the province of Antwerp and has a very extensive international collection of photographs, an impressive collection of photographic equipment and a library of more than 35,000 volumes and documents, and will now finally take its rightful place in the landscape of national and international museums.
About this museum in Amsterdam, aiming to show the place of Jewish religion, history and culture within Dutch cultural history.
The 'In Flanders Fields' museum is not a traditional museum. It's a 'layered' museum, a museum you can put together yourself, and so it's eclectic and postmodern in the sense that the big stories are replaced by the countless small ones.
In April 2013, after a renovation lasting more than ten years, the doors of the famous and iconic Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, opened again. The article presents the renovation of the building and the new museum concept.
Rubens' House in Antwerp first opened its doors to the public as a museum on 21 July 1946, fifty years ago in 1996.
The normally rather reserved world of Dutch art critics was frankly enthusiastic and full of praise on the occasion of the opening of the new Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in January 2003. It even received the accolade of being called ‘the finest museum in the Netherlands'. Van Abbe ranks as one of the most important museums in the Netherlands for 20th-century art, and now also for that of the 21st century. Yet it also faces the diabolical dilemma which museum directors find themselves in: how to attract more visitors without watering down the artistic content.
In June 2000, the Museum of Musical Instruments (Muziekinstrumentenmuseum, or the MIM), moved into the former building of to the Old England department store chain near Koningsplein in Brussels. After twenty-two years of plan-hatching, fund-raising and hard work, it was time for the opening – of rather the re-opening – of a museum that actually had been in existence for quite some time but was not widely known. A brief sketch of the difficult road from creating a collection to finding a fitting way to exhibit it.
In its 100 years of history this museum has developed from a typical colonial institute into a museum and study centre where people from all over the world carry out research.
In September 2012 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, was reopened. Striking was the spectacular museum extension, called ‘The bathtub'. The article describes the renovation and scenography of the modern art collection, famous throughout the world.
'Vlaamsekunstcollectie', written as one word and meaning literally ‘Flemish art collection', is a new name for a collaborative project involving the three most important art history museums in Flanders: those of Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. The project, which was set up in 2001 by the museum managements, covers all areas of the museums' activity: collection logging and cataloguing, restoration, exhibitions, academic research, merchandising, security, publicity, communication, etc.
A short history of one of the most important museums in the Netherlands: the Mauritshuis in The Hague, home of the Royal Picture Collection.
