The Furniture Collection. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 1950- 2000/From Michael Thonet to Marcel Wanders, Luca Dosi Delfini, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2004 (pp. 456, English text, € 89,50)
Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum goes well beyond the designation of “public museum”. But to what does it owe its fame? In nearby Germany the charismatic figure of Willem Sandberg (1897-1984) has been associated with it for decades. In his thirty-year stay (1932-1962), first as artist then as curator and finally as director, he was the thinking mind in the committee of the design review Form, the only one in the post-war period.
Sandberg worked with Gerrit Thomas Rietveld for a long time and exhibited the Ulm school in Amsterdam before it closed rather than celebrate the Bauhaus in a retrospective exhibition. His non-academic way of “doing museum” was based on a sort of sixth sense for discovering what was happening in the figurative cultural world and displaying it before it became fashionable. He seized the kairòs, the suitable moment, inspiring contemporary art museums in Romania such as the re-established Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, which inaugurated its activity after 1945 by exhibiting Joseph Beuys’s first installation.
This condition has in part prepared the ground for an ambitious reconstruction, with a reasoned catalogue, of the history of the “Stedelijk”, established in 1895 as an offshoot of the Rijksmuseum. In fact, during Sandberg’s directorship the collection of furnishings was his exclusive domain. Another factor has been the museum’s temporary closure, entailing inaccessibility to the permanent collection for the last three years. Even though the furniture collection is actually a relatively recent part, it represents the most complete and uninterrupted account of the Stedelijk’s history.
The contemporary art section, for example, merged its Van Gogh paintings with the nearby museum dedicated to the artist a long time ago. The collection of twentieth century objects began in 1934. This was also the triumphal year overseas of MoMA’s inauguration, a museum established under very different auspices, but which has also recently published its design section catalogue. The introductory essay by Luca Dosi Delfini, ex-curator of the deposit, goes back over the directors of museum activities: exhibitions and purchases. The detailed commentary on each exhibition (of which even in the best cases there otherwise remains only a faded catalogue) and the purchases and donations go hand in hand in chronological order. Not only an exploration into new territories, it is also an immediately popularised work, the role of catalyst.
This is the Stedelijk’s undisputable merit. The few retrospective exhibitions, such as “De stoel in de laatste 40 jaaren” (“The chairs over the last 40 years”, 1935), gave an incentive to mythicising a key object in that period’s design culture. But also the many contributions to diffusing a new way of living, such as “Zo wonen wir in Zweden” (“This is how we live on Sweden”, in 1947, well before the invasion of Swedish furniture in the rest of Europe) and “Kunstenaar en meubel” (“Artist and Furniture”, 1957) recognised and propagated the importance of the role of companies like Knoll in forestalling the diffusion of highly calculated and coordinated company images. It is sufficient to recall “Kunst und Handwerk in Holland 1850-1950” (“Industry and Design in the Netherlands 1850-1950”) and “Holland in vorm” (“Holland on Form” 1987) to recognise that single objects or particular people are not the keystone of Stedelijk research.
Instead it is industrial products in modern period room contexts, invented or recreated on the exhibition stand. This aspect in turn reflects a peculiar character of how design is perceived in the Netherlands, which still today encompasses all aspects of daily life (one thinks of Bruno Ninaber van Eyben, designer of guilders and euros). Sandberg is present in this story like a point in a path that proceeds with less avant-garde and more historical reflection with Wil Bertheux (1964-1981). Thus comes the consolidation of a collection with its strong point in the furniture of the Amsterdam school (and in Rietveld, of course), in the years when the architectural legacy of the school was rediscovered abroad. It is from this account that the reader deduces the Stedelijk’s pragmatic and persevering strategy.
If it was not known to what extent the exhibitions that circulated new ways of living affected the tastes of normal dwellings, the greatest profit surely went to the museum, which after every exhibition took the opportunity to enrich its collection. The long-term result of shrewd expository activity was a coherent collection. The image of a sturdy, self-confident museum emerges, which, emancipated from its dusty initial forty years thanks to its collection’s new direction, despite many “modern classics” in deposit, stands out from all other examples. Only the feared competition in the ‘80s and ‘90s of the Centre Pompidou and the Vitra Design Museum of Weil am Rhein is mentioned (p. 77). The catalogue is composed of 717 entries and is proposed as a logical continuation of the museum’s history, illustrating the purchasing policy previously described in a complete manner piece by piece. Here again, by means of alphabetical order, the object, the designer or the part is not privileged over the whole.
The collection’s inevitably heterogeneous character is self evident, but it is harmonised above all by the sober graphic layout characterised by rigorous geometry and muted chromatic tones. It is not explicitly stated, but the book reveals the desire to retrospectively paraphrase the museum’s activity. It reconstructs historical contexts and environments, recreating the entire twentieth century in Amsterdam with a marked educational intention. However, from the educational to the didactic, the five brightly coloured thematic and anthological interludes that intersperse the catalogue of entries are disappointing. “Dutch Icons” and “Icons” (in general) would not have been missed, given the extent to which the subject is dealt with: the reader also has a right to explore. On the other hand, worthy of note is the appendix describing the cataloguing process for each piece of furniture starting from the acquisition, the first step in the museum’s collection, as well as a restoration survey on the example of a sitting in metallic tubular by Willem H. Gipsen: an added reflection on the restoration methodology of “new” materials.
It is a shame for the entries illustrated in duotone, for the lack of care in specifying the dates of some objects (if we are talking about a re-edition it is better stated clearly), and for the disappearance of Antti Nurmesniemi, possibly forgotten due to the seven years required for the book’s preparation.
With the re-opening of the new building in 2008, this catalogue, a museum to browse in the real sense of the word, arouses our interest after having initiated us into the secrets of the Stedelijk, and furthermore makes us think about how many other museum-structures work.
Donatella Cacciola Museum aide