Director's foreword
The Van Gogh Museum is flourishing. The permanent collection is drawing a growing number of Dutch and foreign visitors, the exhibitions programme is simultaneously receiving a good press and reaching a public that is both large and involved. There have been a significant number of important acquisitions, not least two wonderful early landscapes by Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet, and the output of our academic staff has been considerable.
At last the start of work on our new exhibition wing is also in sight, and the adjoining premises at Museumplein 4 have become available for the accommodation of the library and documentation centre. In a number of senses, the Van Gogh Museum now occupies a central position on Amsterdam's Museumplein. Meanwhile we have been hard at work on the renovation of the Museum Mesdag in The Hague, which reopened its doors to the public on 12 October 1996.
While there is space in this volume of the Van Gogh Museum Journal for only the merest reflection of all these activities, the high points will be summarised in a Review covering the period up to the end of 1996. In this issue we have chosen once more to give centre stage to two facets of our work, the Museum Mesdag and our sculpture acquisitions. You will therefore find articles on the history, renovation and collections in The Hague; and also a concise catalogue of the young but fast-growing collection of sculpture in Amsterdam. In the second half of 1996, the startling exhibition The colour of sculpture 1840-1910 was a triumphant demonstration of the élan with which sculpture has made its debut in the museum.
Beside these, in addition to a number of fascinating Van Gogh Studies, the regular sections feature articles in which items from the collection are placed in their respective contexts. As intended, this publication (whose first volume, we are happy to say, was received enthusiastically by our colleagues) remains firmly object-oriented. And with regard to this second volume, we are also delighted that the number of contributions by authors from outside the museum has already increased.
It is certainly not without a certain sadness that, on 1 December, I will be exchanging the directorship of the Van Gogh Museum for that of the Rijksmuseum. However, I congratulate the Supervisory Board of the Van Gogh Museum Foundation for finding such an excellent successor in John Leighton, who for over a decade has been the outstanding curator of 19th-century painting at the National Gallery in London. The museum could hardly be in better hands as it approaches the fin de siècle and crosses the threshold of the new millennium.
Ronald de Leeuw
Director
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