Imane Rachidi |
The Hague (EFE) the Pompidou Center and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).
The director, Annabelle Bernie, announced today the new partnerships, which will bring world-famous art collections to Amsterdam, where they will be exhibited in this art gallery that will be called the H’ART Museum from September 1, which shows “ the unifying force of art and opens its windows to the world”.
“It is an exciting new step for us, a contemporary and future-ready model. We are building our experience in the international field and now we are spreading our wings. Our programming will have multiple voices and will reflect the times in which we live. We will be showing major art exhibits as well as intimate exhibits,” Bernie explained.
In March the Hermitage in Amsterdam broke ties with Russia
In March 2022, the Dutch museum severed its historic ties with the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, its sister art gallery in Russia, which had been giving it access to one of the world’s most famous art collections.
“For a long time, the Hermitage in Amsterdam remained aloof from political events in (Vladimir) Putin’s Russia, as politics focuses on everyday reality and our orientation lies in art treasures and movements spanning centuries. (…). Russia’s attack on Ukraine makes this distancing no longer tenable,” the museum said in March last year, announcing its break with Moscow.
Since its opening on June 20, 2009, when it was inaugurated by then-Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev, the Hermitage has functioned as an annex to the Saint Petersburg Museum and has curated exhibitions from its renowned collection.
The new partnerships, however, will allow the museum to continue its work with art from partner museums, “taking advantage of their rich and extensive collections to mount exhibitions” in Amsterdam, and presenting itself as a museum that “brings art and narratives from around the world, exposing them in a new and unexpected way.”
The museum explains that the Pompidou Center has one of the most outstanding collections of modern and contemporary art in Europe: the British Museum is among the oldest in the world with a collection that spans continents and oceans; and SAAM is America’s premier museum of fine and decorative arts.
The schedule will be made public at the end of 2023
The complete program for the next few years will be made public at the end of this year, but the first major exhibition of the H’ART Museum will be by Kandinsky, which will be held in collaboration with the Pompidou Center in mid-2024, and already in 2026, the H’ART plans to host the British Museum’s “Girl Power” exhibition.
In addition, the 750th anniversary of Amsterdam in 2025 will also be celebrated at H’ART in collaboration with the Leiden Collection, one of the most important private collections of 17th-century Dutch art, and it will be the first time that 17 paintings by Rembrandt in a single exhibition.
A work from the SAAM collection is already on display at the museum as of today: Clubbing (2012), a video installation by Martine Gutiérrez.
The Amsterdam museum will continue to operate under the Hermitage name until September.
After the invasion of Ukraine, the museum hosted an exhibition of over a hundred portraits, many from the National Portrait Gallery in London, ranging from paintings painted in the 16th century to poses captured by contemporary photographers, reflecting love, passion and tragedy in real life stories.
“This exhibition is a prelude to what people can expect from us in the future (…). It is the beginning of a new beginning,” Birnie told Efe at the time, announcing that the Dutch museum will work with other galleries in other countries in its new stage, to continue “building great designs, telling fantastic stories, connecting people through the art, and collaborating with international museums”.