IN THE OPENING sequences of a two-hour-long documentary, ‘The New Rijksmuseum: A Film about Dreams and Ambitions’, screened on Dutch television on 1st and 2nd January this year, the Rijksmuseum’s former Director Ronald de Leeuw explained to a number of people on a hard-hat tour of the gutted building how the Museum was originally created by and for the citizens of Amsterdam. Since 2003 they and the city’s many visitors have had to make do with a very much reduced sampling of the Museum’s holdings (on display in the Philips Wing) while the main building of 1885 by Pierre Cuypers is being brought back to its former glory. The film’s director, Oeke Hogendijk, had intended to document this project from the beginning to its grand finale, the reopening in 2008. As is now well known, the renovation has fallen significantly behind schedule and the Museum currently stands to reopen only in 2013. The film thus became a documentary about the many mishaps that have left us with the situation today: a building site, and a New Rijksmuseum that is still a long way off. Also mentioned in the documentary and probably less well known outside Holland are plans for an integrated display and the start of a collection of twentieth-century Dutch art.

Cuypers’s original building consisted of a central nave on top of a colonnaded archway flanked by two large square structures with inner courtyards. In the 1950s and 1960s these courtyards were filled in with new galleries on various levels, creating a maze of rooms. Those have now been removed, once again providing clarity and light to the building. Although the idea to ‘bring back Cuypers’ is certainly laudable, the downside is that the Museum will effectively end up with less gallery space than it used to have, surely making this whole enterprise perversely unique.

The good news is that permission has finally been granted to start building a new entrance, study centre and Asian Pavilion. The documentary followed the painful process of obtaining the countless permits. The local authority was initially more concerned that Amsterdam citizens should retain their traditional right to ride their bicycles through the central archway than with a New Rijksmuseum, and we see how the Spanish architects, Antonio Ortiz and Antonio Cruz, were driven to despair when the very architectural solution that won them the commission had to be entirely rethought because the ‘Cyclists’ Union’ had been more successful than the Museum in getting the local authority on its side. At least their new Asian Pavilion will go ahead as planned, but the study centre that they designed, a zigzag-shaped tower to the south-east of the main building, did not survive scrutiny by the welstandscommissie (committee in charge of town planning) and has become much smaller than was at first envisaged, so much so that original plans to move the Museum’s Library and its Department of Prints and Drawings there are currently being rethought. This presents an opportunity to make the best of a bad lot. If Cuypers’s intentions are being revived elsewhere, it might be good to return the Library to the famous galleried space that he designed specifically for that purpose along the west side of the building, still largely intact (including much of the original wall decorations that are being recreated elsewhere in the building). And if space can be found there for the prints and drawings, perhaps this is where a study centre would find its natural home. The Museum’s new director, Wim Pijbes, who took over from Ronald de Leeuw after he resigned last year, has time to rethink this before 2013, although obviously any possible changes should not cause further delay.

The Rijksmuseum not only holds Western art but also houses Asian art and, more unusually, a department devoted to national history. The plan was to integrate not only paintings, sculpture and decorative arts, but also the historic collection (for obvious reasons the Asian collection will remain separate). Thankfully the overall display will be chronological (from c.1200 to the present day), the visitors’ route spiralling upwards through three storeys on the west side of the building and then spiralling downwards on the east side. In the past the throngs of people that came to see the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings often ignored the many rooms devoted to the Museum’s impressive (and far more internationally oriented) holdings of sculpture and decorative arts, while the historic collection was frequently eerily bereft of visitors. An integrated display may indeed help to remedy this problem, and in theory the idea to decompartmentalise the collections is persuasive, but will it work in practice? In the run-up to 2013, these plans are still being refined and it can only be to the good that the original plans for far-reaching integration have been amended. Paintings and objects may still be mixed where this makes sense – one can easily envisage an integrated display for the eighteenth century, for example – but can be separated if called for. A painting by Vermeer will not, for example, simply become an illustration of how milk was poured in the seventeenth century; in fact the most important works will continue to be shown on their own in the Gallery of Honour in the central nave.

More problematic is the Museum’s wish to collect twentieth-century Dutch art, for which a separate floor is planned. It has already acquired works by Mondrian, Carel Willink, Carel Visser and, most recently, Karel Appel. Apart from the question of which Karel comes next, one wonders whether this is welcomed by the Stedelijk Museum (itself currently closed for renovation), which has a far more representative collection in this respect, or indeed by the Hague Gemeentemuseum, which has more Mondrians than it can reasonably put on display, to name but two rivals in this field. If the Rijksmuseum feels it should push its boundaries, then it is imperative that it comes to some agreement with its sister institutions in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam, and that long-term loans are agreed. But where do these boundaries end? What does ‘Dutch’ mean in the international world of twentieth-century art? Mondrian’s most important works were not made in Holland. Is Willem de Kooning a Dutch artist? A further issue, as Ronald de Leeuw says in the documentary, is that the quality has to be on a par with the rest of the Rijksmuseum’s collections. This begs the question of how the Museum will be able to acquire art that, if available at all, does not come cheap so late in the day.

In the midst of all this, the Museum continues to be a centre of scholarly excellence – it is currently in the process of publishing a series of collection catalogues, the first two hefty volumes of which have recently appeared (reviewed on p.103 below) – and at least one building has been completed: in November 2007 a magnificent separate new building across the street was opened, also designed by Ortiz and Cruz, providing a superbly up-to-date home for the Museum’s Conservation Department (together with the research and teaching facilities of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage). If this building is anything to go by, we can look forward with confidence to the long-overdue New Rijksmuseum.