On the last day of last year, I left my hotel in the centre of Den Haag and walked a short distance to Mauritshuis. Built in the mid-seventeenth century, initially as a splendid family home in the city centre, it has for the past two-hundred years housed first the Dutch royal and now the Dutch state art collection, which includes very impressive paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer, Fabritius’s beautiful small painting, The Goldfinch, along with a large collection of other works. It is a wonderful museum, where I spent two enjoyable hours looking closely at these great artworks. It is also a rather traditional space, with paintings displayed in rather traditional ways.
On leaving Mauritshuis, I walked north-east through the Haagse Bos for around an hour, before turning north into parkland at the outer edge of the city, until I reached the Museum Voorlinden. This very modern building opened a decade ago and houses the largest private art collection in the Netherlands. While there are some good paintings hanging on the walls, perhaps more impressive are some of the sculptural installations that were made specifically for the site. There is a large corten-steel structure by Richard Serra, comprising six standing curved plates, each around 5 metres high, whose combined weight is more than 200 tons. Walking in between these plates along a maze-like pathway, that narrows and widens alternately, creates rapidly changing feelings of claustrophobia and safety. After passing through the work, visitors can climb a staircase and look down on the entire structure, seeing the sculpture from above now that they have escaped from within.
In a neighbouring room is a work by Leandro Erlich, called Swimming Pool, which consists of a large pool-like structure, painted blue, and sunk into the floor of the gallery. The surface is covered by a partially translucent material that mimics the effect of looking through a body of water. Although the pool ladder is not functional, visitors can descend a nearby flight of stairs and enter the main body of the pool, where they can walk around and look up through the surface material into the gallery they have left behind. There is no chlorinated water – the work is not literally immersive – but once again the viewer experiences the sense of being inside an artwork as well as being able to survey it from above. Another work that creates a similar sense of being within it is Skyspace by James Turrell, a specially constructed room with a square hole in the ceiling, through which the changing colours of the sky and shapes of the clouds are framed for the viewers, who sit on wooden benches around the walls. When the weather is poor the roof is closed and the room is filled instead with a repeating programme of ambient light changes, from warm pinks and purples to cool blues, which provoke markedly different senses of mood for the viewers.
Museum Voorlinder is an example of a contemporary gallery that has been purposefully designed to show the biggest and most challenging (in terms of scale and structure) contemporary artworks. It provides the viewer with the opportunity to engage with the work in very different ways to Mauritshuis, where visitors stand in traditionally sized rooms, looking at modestly sized paintings that are hung in traditional ways on the walls. Both of these experiences are valid and effective in their own way, demonstrating that different types of space allow for different types of encounters with art.
One of my favourite art spaces in England is the Kettles Yard gallery in Cambridge, not the modern gallery but the adjacent row of workers cottages, transformed by Jim and Helen Ede into a haven of modernist art displayed in a domestic setting. I am currently reading a recent biography of Jim Ede that describes his remarkable ability to befriend artists and acquire significant works – not only for his own collection, but also for the Tate Gallery, where he worked, and the Contemproary Art Society – during the 1920s and 30s. Later, he moved from Hampstead to Tangier and then to Cambridge, where his collection and his home was eventually bequeathed to the University. In the 1970s, when he was in his late seventies, Ede would welcome students into his home and give guided tours of his collection.
Part of the reason I like to visit Kettles Yard is that Jim Ede’s taste in art is similar to mine. He has paintings by Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood, and sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, Henri Gaudier, and Barbara Hepworh. He admired and championed the British modernists of the inter-war period, when for a few rare years the progressive currents of continental European art were embraced and echoed by the best work being made in England. In addition, I like to revisit because I enjoy seeing these artworks displayed in a domestic setting, The converted cottages, where Ede lived, are full of light, allowing the artworks to be seen to best effect, but they are nothing like the grand scale of Maurtishuis in Den Haag, nor the Museé Jacquemart-Andreé in Paris. What Jim and Helen Ede achieved was the creation of an art museum in an ordinary home, a place lived in by ordinary people, where good art is integrated into the routines of daily life, and where the pleasures of looking, with due attention, is part of the normal quotidian experience. For all the fun and spectacle of the Museum Voorlinder, with its vast installations that amuse and engage its visitors, for me there is something more deeply satisfying about the pleasure of modestly scaled artworks in a modestly scaled home.
Earlier this month, I visited the Chapel in Brompton Cemetery in West London, to view an exhibition of sculpture that was part of an International Women’s Day celebration. This show – deep veins – presented the work of six contemporary women sculptors in a neo-classical building, almost two hundred years old but recently restored, that is still used during the weekdays for funerals and memorial services. The circular domed nave, filled with natural light, offered the perfect setting for modern artworks that do not require to be hung from the walls. Standing sculptures or floor based works were equally successful, with the austere stone of the building structure providing an ideal context for the variety of materials used by the selected artists: colourful fabrics, organic matter, plaster, glass, metal, and recycled plastics.
In her catalogue notes, the curator Catherine Li writes that the exhibition sits within a landscape of remembrance where time feels physical and continuity is palpable. This seems to me a perfect summary of the viewer’s experience of these works in this space. This building was not designed for artworks but for services to commemorate the dead. Yet, for the visitor there is a pervasive sense of being in a space where the living and the dead are connected, where what matters most in life is celebrated, where questions of ultimate meaning are asked and answered. This is a serious space, a solemn space, and therefore a perfect space for the contemplation of serious artworks.
Artworks have always been highly various and therefore the settings in which they are best enjoyed are also diverse. Cave paintings are best seen in caves, and Giotto’s wonderful frescoes need to be seen in the religious buildings in Padua and Assisi where they were first made. The major works by Serra, Erlich, and Turrell on show in the Museum Voorlinder also need to be seen in situ. No doubt they could be moved – at great expense – and installed in equally large buildings elsewhere, but the point is that they were made to be shown in vast, hangar-like art spaces.
By contrast, the relaxed domestic setting of Kettles Yard and the formal institutional setting of Brompton Chapel, both provide intimate spaces for smaller sized artworks, where the meanings of the works can be understood through close proximity. These spaces offer a distinct context for the appreciation of art, away from traditional galleries, where the personal connection between the viewer and the work becomes dominant. Whether we think of artworks as providing a richness and embellishment of everyday experience, or as providing a stimulus to reflection and commemoration, or a means of transition from the immanent to the transcendent, it is evident that art works well not only in traditional and contemporary galleries but also in the home and the chapel. There are many art spaces, all dense with possibility.