I see a lot, but an exhibition that gives access to that contemporary art for outsiders is rarely among them. You have the Rijksmuseum with a nice overview of culture through the ages, but from 1900 onwards, the space for it becomes very small. So you don't know what's going on now. For that, you can go to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, which shows the world's best. However, if you want a handy overview of what Dutch artists have created, it's best to go to Schiedam.
The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam recently opened the exhibition Ik hou van Holland. With it, the museum tries to give an overview of what has been going on in the Dutch art world since World War II. No easy task, because even with half a museum available, hard choices still have to be made.
Despite, or perhaps because of those choices, it is an accessible exhibition where there is actually a work by all the image-defining artists. Sometimes it is one of the better-known works, but sometimes there is a little surprise in between. This makes it an interesting exhibition even for the initiated. Of course, you can talk at length about who is missing and who does not belong, but as a kind of starting point for contemporary art, this is a very good and insightful exhibition. It could easily be adopted in its entirety by the Rijksmuseum.
But now, then, first a little chronology, starting with 1945. The moment World War II ended, the world must be radically different. Humanity is no better after the horrors of concentration camps and mass destruction. Artists are breaking with tradition and going back to the source of innocence; children and indigenous peoples. According to them, art should go back to the beginning, where there were no threats. It helps to quickly forget the trauma of war. The artists (and poets) of the CoBrA group, whose best-known figures are Karel Appel, Constant and Lucebert, is the epitome of art just after the war in the Netherlands.
But soon Karel Appel's "messing around" gets boring for many artists. Many reject the romantic idea of a man just sitting in his studio slapping paint. Art as an activity, or even useful art, slowly becomes the leading form. Constant (so first still with CoBrA) designs a new utopia for which he makes models for years. Hoping that the world will still become a better place for humanity.
Against this utopia of Constant, there is also nihilism in art, such as a beer crate wall. In other words, it is no longer about art, but about sociable beer-drinking with friends. Banal pursuits like emptying a bottle of lemonade into the sea become elevated acts. Meanwhile, Marinus Boezem signs the sky so that it becomes his. As the TV has taken the central place in the living room, at the expense of the fireplace, Jan Dibbets brings back cosiness by placing the fireplace in the TV.
Other artists, on the contrary, concentrate on the beauty of the minimal. Jan Schoonhoven has been making relief sculptures for years, which, despite all starting from the same idea, produce an enormous wealth of images. Many of these artists look for laws and ways to vary on them.
From the 1980s onwards, art starts to become broader and broader: more and more is allowed. It is also the period of Punk. DIY becomes the fashion and visual culture flourishes. In the 1990s and early years of this century, computer and image-editing programmes like Photoshop rule.
From roughly the fall of the Berlin Wall onwards, anything is really possible, as long as it is innovative and free. One of the trendy keywords of the last few years has been borderlines. The more boundaries an artist crosses, the better. In the meantime, the fun has waned a little. Due to an overwhelming visual culture and the oversupply of artists, you increasingly have to take radical positions to stand out. There is currently no dominant movement in the Netherlands. The arts have broken down into different niches, each with its own discourse and conditions. Yet it is all contemporary visual art.
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