Amsterdam has a LOT of museums. The most popular is probably the Van Gogh Museum, which we did not visit because it required advance booking and/or booking a ticket to stand in line for a pre-scheduled time. We don’t like to plan that kind of stuff ahead, so we skipped it. We’d also just seen a Van Gogh exhibit in Toronto, so we didn’t feel we were missing out too much.
Just down the street from the Van Gogh is the Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s primary contemporary art museum. Here’s the ‘official’ Wikipedia description:
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈsteːdələk myˈzeːjɵm ˌɑmstərˈdɑm]; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.[8][9]
The 19th century building was designed by Adriaan Willem Weissman and the 21st century wing with the current entrance was designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects. It is located at the Museum Square in the borough Amsterdam South.
The collection comprises modern and contemporary art and design from the early 20th century up to the 21st century. It features artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Karel Appel, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Lucio Fontana, and Gilbert & George.[9]
When approaching the museum, the first thing that you notice is the new wing, added onto the original historic building. It’s shaped like a gigantic bathtub, so it’s pretty tough to miss. Once you go inside, you work your work through all of the rooms, which are all white square or rectangular spaces. This museum, like many of the others we visited, offer complimentary audio guides… simply find a kiosk in the museum, grab a little “phone”, choose your language, and start walking!
The collection is great, and ranges from audio visual modern art to more classical modernist or constructivist painting, to contemporary photography, to exhibits about new technologies being used to accommodate refugees. Some of the stuff that we saw here we saw again in Toronto at EDIT (Expo for Design, Innovation, & Technology).
We took quite a few photos, so you can check it out for yourself!
the stories that I'm telling. 