The Rijksmuseum’s new masters

The Rijksmuseum is the national gallery of the Netherlands but, rather like our own National Gallery, photographs are not what visitors expect to see. Its collections include Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch”, Vermeer, Franz Hals and even – after Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist became a bestseller this summer – Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house, among the wonders of the 17th-century world. But photographs by Man Ray, Robert Frank, Ed van der Elsken or Rineke Dijkstra (two of the best-known Dutch names in international photography) are not the obvious attractions. Like our own museums, the Rijksmuseum came late to photography (the V&A set up its photography department in 1977; the Tate appointed its first photography curator in 2009). At the Rijksmuseum, it was 1994 when the national photo collections were brought together under its roof, and two new curators, Hans Rooseboom and Mattie Boom, were assigned to their care. In 1996, they staged the first major photography show, A New Art: Photography in the 19th Century. After that, they turned to the 20th century to see what they could find.

As Rooseboom writes in the catalogue to their new landmark photography show Modern Times: Photography in the 20th Century, which opens at the Rijksmuseum next month: “Twentieth-century photography is expensive, and good-quality prints are rare.” When it came to adding to their holdings, it wasn’t going to be easy to catch up. Along with the scarcity of good prints, rationalising the existing collections and extracting the photography-related books and catalogues from the research library (which had more than 12,000 of them), Rooseboom and Boom faced another problem, this one unique to the Rijksmuseum. In December 2003, the building closed for renovations (as Simon Schama wrote last year in the FT, it turned out to be “less a restoration . . . [more] the inauguration of a curatorial revolution”). What was scheduled for five years took 10 and during that time only the Philips Wing remained open to the public, with a tiny fraction of the collection on show.

After the reopening last year, it was the Philips Wing’s turn for a rethink, and the same Spanish architects, Cruz y Ortiz, who worked on the main building, have turned it into a cool, spare series of galleries for temporary exhibitions. As if to underline its new look, the Philips Wing reopens with an exhibition of 20th-century photography. The curators used the closure to review their collections, acquire additional works, and fill as many gaps as possible, keeping a balance between Dutch photographers and work from abroad. They travelled, visited fairs, auction houses and private collectors, searched photographers’ archives and dug around in their own, sifting through albums, negatives and slides. Eventually they came up with an exhibition of about 400 works supported by 12 catalogue essays, which they hope will present a coherent record of the century in which photography documented and dominated our lives.

Unlike paintings, which are unique single objects, photographic prints come in many versions. One of the main skills of a collector, or a curator, is being able to identify which is the best print to buy. The Rijksmuseum, unlike many other institutions, does not have an acquisitions committee of outside experts to suggest and vet works, but rather relies on the judgment of its curators.

Hans van der Meer

The Rijksmuseum annual photography commission, “Document Netherlands”, this year went to Hans Van der Meer, who has photographed along the Belgian–Dutch border. An exhibition of his pictures is part of the celebrations to mark the opening of the newly renovated Philips Wing of the Rijksmuseum, November 1 2014 – January 11 2015. www.rijksmuseum.nl.

Click here to view the slideshow

“Mattie and I make proposals to the directors of the museum,” Rooseboom explains, “and if they say ‘yes’ the item(s) will be bought. Like any museum there is a limit to our spending. But if there is an important item that is outside our normal budgets, we would seek to raise the additional money from sponsors or foundations.”

The curators make no claim to a comprehensive collection but are very selective about what they buy. In 2005, the collection acquired some 500 prints and about 2,700 photo books from the Dutch photographer and collector Willem Diepraam and his wife, Shamanee Kempadoo, including works by Kertesz, Weston, Weegee and Capa that filled in some of the gaps. Since 2007, sponsorship by the Chicago-based international law firm Baker & McKenzie has enabled them to purchase other, particularly American pictures, including works by Lewis Hine, William Eggleston and Helen Levitt.

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When I met Boom and Rooseboom earlier this year to look through some of the work they’d selected for the show, they took me to the spectacular Cuypers Library, named after the Rijksmuseum’s architect, and famous for its metal spiral staircases and high-galleried walkways that look down on the central reading room (one of whose occupants asked, quite correctly, if we could please be quiet).

They stressed that quality – a fine vintage print, made by or under the supervision of the photographer soon after it was taken, and signed – is what they’re after. They’re not interested in later prints or, except in singular circumstances, prints made by others after a photographer’s death. The scarcity of vintage material reflects how little photographs were once valued. “Before the 1970s,” Rooseboom said, “there was no ‘art market’ photographers could cater to, so why would they make more prints than needed for the newspapers, magazines and books they were contributing to? That is an important reason why older photographs are so rare. Colour photographs (which we are very much interested in) are rare as well, as there was not always a need for making prints on paper: often the transparencies were sent directly to the lithographer.” And, he added, “As photographs have only been considered collectable since the 1970s, for a long time they have been neglected, overlooked, maltreated and lost.”

If we treasure Dutch 17th-century painting for its depictions of everyday life, then we have the Dutch impressionist painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923) to thank for his photographs of street life in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, taken with an early hand-held camera at the turn of the 20th century. Breitner never classed himself as a photographer but used his photos as studies for his paintings, some of which, in a north European palette of greys and browns, reproduce their scenes almost exactly. But after a large collection of prints and negatives was given to the Netherlands Institute for Art History in the early 1960s, Breitner’s importance as a photographer was quickly recognised. It is the style of his pictures, snatched as if carelessly on the hoof, that make them distinctive, plunging the viewer so directly into a bustling city street that it’s almost possible to feel people pushing past on either side.

By the 1960s, one of Amsterdam’s most famous street photographers had already made the work that would be his legacy. Ed van der Elsken, born in 1925, spent the years 1950-1954 in Paris. His book about those years, Love on the Left Bank, has become a classic, its grainy black-and-white images perfectly expressing the fictional narrative set in the streets, bars and jazz clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The artist and dancer Vali Myers plays the kind of role that Anna Karina played in early Godard films – beautiful, bohemian, streetwise but vulnerable. In its subjective, cinematic style, it anticipated the mood of the 1960s a decade early, and has evoked a nostalgia for it ever since. The curators’ choice of van der Elsken’s “Juliette, Sevres” (c 1954), a domestic picture, has the same casually intimate grace.

Rooseboom mentioned an emphasis on colour, and the exhibition runs the gamut, from early autochromes such as George Seeley’s “Still Life with Peaches” (1907-1912) to Helen Levitt’s “Squatting Girl/Spider Girl” (1980) and Bruce Wrighton’s “Diner, Binghampton, NY” (1986-1988). (The autochromes, which require backlighting, are too fragile to be exhibited; they can be viewed online or in the catalogue.) And, to prove the curators’ point about 20th-century pictures not fitting neatly into 100 years, the most recent pictures in the show are Viviane Sassen’s 2013 colour portraits from Suriname, which reference Holland’s colonial past while making an unequivocal focal point of the contrast of hot pinks and yellows against dark brown skin.

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Documentary photography, Rooseboom says, “is still very dear to us: how the world looks.” This is where they have benefited from their various source collections: the museum’s department of Dutch History; the Royal Dutch Society of Engineers; the collection of the Amsterdam lawyer LJ Hartkamp, who began collecting in the 1950s, and which was bought by the state in 1985, and more specific gifts, such as a group of photographs taken by German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the second world war.

The museum can also draw from its own contemporary resources. In 1975, the department of Dutch History established an annual photography commission, “Documenting the Netherlands”, which invited a photographer to cover some aspect of Dutch life. Over 40 years, these pictures also reflect the shifts in photographic styles and approach. Corine van Balen’s “Portraits of Seven-Year-Olds” (1997-1999) or Dana Lixenberg’s “Experimental Ecological Housing Estate in Lanxmeer” (2011) are worlds away from Ed van der Elsken’s subjective reportage. This year the commission went to Hans van der Meer, best known for his series “European Fields”, a record of amateur football games on dodgy pitches from Bradford to Budapest. His pictures for the commission, of the Belgian-Dutch border, are also on show in the Philips Wing, in what will be a new gallery dedicated to showing photographs from the permanent collection.

Despite the drawbacks of entering the market so late, Rooseboom is inclined to make a virtue of it. “Starting collecting 20th century only after 2000 gave us the opportunity to maybe make better choices than when we would have been in the middle of the ‘production process’. I think you can still build a good collection of photographs. The amount of photographs ‘available’ is enormous. So a good eye and a profound knowledge of what has been done in the 20th century is extremely important – maybe more than an unlimited budget. The only thing you can do is be on the lookout constantly. But we don’t have to rush. That’s the main advantage of a museum over a private collection: you have much more time on your side.”

When I asked, half-seriously, if he could choose a favourite picture in the show, he said it would probably be the small autochrome “Eight Children by a Sloop, North Sea Coast” (c 1922-1930), a perfect Dutch family snapshot.

‘Modern Times, Photography in the 20th Century’, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, November 1-January 11 2015.

A catalogue in English, with essays by Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, published by the Rijksmuseum, is available via the website and in bookshops (€40); rijksmuseum.nl.

Slideshow photographs: Collection Rijksmuseum