The magnate who has emptied his museum to bring the great blue triptych by Joan Miró to the Netherlands

Wassenaar (Netherlands)The Dutch businessman Joop van Caldenborgh (The Hague, 1940), when he was sixteen years old, bought his first work of art, an engraving that cost him about 25 guilders that he had saved up by delivering newspapers. Over the years, as the founder of the chemical company Caldic, he has become one of the most important private collectors of modern and contemporary art in Europe. As can be seen in the museum he opened in 2016 in the city of Wassenaar, the Voorlinden Museum, Van Caldenborgh has brought together thousands of works, among which are many by the most renowned artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, James Turrell (who has a permanent installation there), Maurizio Cattelan, Pipilotti Rist, Anselm Kiefer, and Yayoi Kusama.

Wassenaar is about 11 kilometers from The Hague and, surprisingly, the museum is little-known outside the Netherlands. The visit to the Voorlinden Museum is memorable, also for the building, the work of Dirk Jan Postel, and the setting: the exhibition halls are designed to function primarily with natural light and the gardens that surround it are also a key element. A ten-minute walk from the museum, among the dunes, is Jericho, a monumental installation by Kiefer himself that consists of two concrete towers evoking the fragility of human creations.

Joop van Caldenborgh continues collecting at an unstoppable pace, and everything he buys is added to the donation he made to the Voorlinden Foundation, both of the collection and of the museum and the estate. Even so, a collector cannot have it all. Why do many works remain etched in the collective memory and become icons? Which are the works that he can only have in his dreams? To answer all these questions, the museum director, Suzanne Swarts, has emptied practically the entire center to present, starting this Saturday, the great exhibition Celebrating Art Icons, in which works from the collection dialogue with other works on loan from some of the most important European museums. Among these works is the legendary blue triptych by Joan Miró titled Blue I, II and III, which rarely leaves the Centre Pompidou, currently closed for renovations. Curiously, these canvases recall another fulfilled dream: when Miró reached his sixties he was able to afford a large studio, designed by Josep Lluís Sert, at Son Boter (Palma).

"We collect 21st-century art and want to make it dialogue with that of the 20th century," says Swarts. Inside the rooms of the Voorlinden, the triptych is one of the works exhibited within the section of the exhibition dedicated to infinity. Two more anthological loans are Boy, by Ron Mueck, a hyperrealistic sculpture over five meters tall in which Mueck highlights his shyness; and the other is the triptych that Francis Bacon made to pay tribute to his late lover, George Dyer, in 1971. Two days before the opening of the major Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer committed suicide at the hotel where they were staying.

How is it that Van Caldenborgh has managed to get all these museums to loan him works? In addition to the Pompidou, the paintings and sculptures on loan come from major museums, among which are the Stedelijk, the Beyeler Foundation (Switzerland), the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the ARoS Art Museum (Denmark), the Kröller-Müller Museum, also in the Netherlands, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. "We have maintained relationships with all these institutions for many years," the director explains. "Joop has been very generous in lending his work over the decades, so, on the occasion of our anniversary, the museums are willing to share very iconic pieces with us. For us, as a museum, it is a gift."

The 'wow' effect

The exhibition includes a hundred works, organized by concepts into around twenty areas. But above the ideas, the level of the whole constantly provokes an effect of surprise. "The local journalists who have come these days are surprised that this is possible in a town as small as Wassenaar [of 25,000 inhabitants], which almost no one knows," says Swarts. At the beginning of the tour, you can see, in dialogue with Bacon's triptych, two large shattered bells by the Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch, evocative of a moment of destruction. In a world as convulsive as the current one, they make one think that the traditional bells that once marked the rhythms of life have become completely obsolete.

Further on is one of the works most beloved by the public, five cylindrical glass sculptures by Roni Horn titled The immense accumulation of flesh, in dialogue with a painting of a pond by Monet, to speak of the dissolution and changes of state of matter. The seventh room is stunning: to talk about movement, Swarts has brought together a mobile by Calder, a kinetic painting by Tinguely, and a cubist female portrait by Fernand Léger. The counterpoint is provided by the hyperrealistic sculpture of a museum worker asleep on the table, by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset. As a rule for these Nordic creators, the books on the table must be by some of the artists nearby, in this case by Calder. The culmination of the tour with the great sculpture by Richard Serra Open ended is a surprise: the path through the interior is twice as long as what can be seen of the sculpture.