Director's foreword
This is an exciting period for the Van Gogh Museum. At the time of publication, the museum is building a new wing for temporary exhibitions and is engaged in a project to renovate its existing building. After eight months, during which the museum will be completely closed to the public (from 1 September 1998), the new wing and the renovation are to be completed and ready for opening in May 1999. The original museum building, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and his partners, requires extensive refurbishment. Numerous improvements will be made to the fabric of the building and the worn-out installations for climate control will be replaced. A whole range of facilities will be up-graded so that the museum can offer a better service to its growing numbers of visitors.
Plans have been laid for housing the collection during the period of closure, and thanks to the co-operation of our neighbours in the Rijksmuseum, visitors to Amsterdam will not be deprived of seeing a great display of works by Van Gogh. A representative selection from the collection will be on show in the South Wing of the Rijksmuseum from mid-September 1998 until early April 1999. In addition, a group of works will be lent to the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede. We have also taken this opportunity to lend an important exhibition to the United States. Some 70 works will be on show in Van Gogh's Van Goghs, shown first at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
While a huge amount of time and energy has been invested in the plans for the closure and reopening in 1999, the day to day work of the museum has continued apace. The museum enjoyed an exceptionally good year in 1997, with an attendance of over a million visitors - a tally only exceeded during the year of the Van Gogh retrospective in 1990. The exhibition programmes and their surrounding events were highly successful, and in particular the exhibitions Alma-Tadema and Vienna 1900 attracted wide interest.
The work of the museum's curatorial and academic staff has also continued, amidst the distraction of the building works and the recent publicity surrounding debates over Van Gogh fakes. Some of the fruits of their labours are reflected in this, the third issue of the Van Gogh Museum Journal. Exceptionally, this volume covers two years. The basic aim of this Journal is to provide an interim catalogue of our acquisitions and to offer a forum for scholarship about Van Gogh and other aspects of our holdings. However, while our own collection provides the starting point, we are keen to stimulate research and scholarship across a wide range of issues in 19th-century art history. We are delighted that several distinguished colleagues from outside the museum have contributed to this Journal and we hope that this will continue in subsequent issues.
The Van Gogh Museum Journal was established by former director Ronald de Leeuw and it is one of many concrete signs that scholarship flourished during his tenure at the museum. We would like to record our deepest gratitude for his leadership and vision at the Van Gogh Museum and we wish him every success in his new post as Director of the Rijksmuseum. This volume of the Journal is dedicated to Ronald de Leeuw in appreciation of his inspired directorship.
John Leighton
Director
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