!VAR HAGENDOORN

De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art

The De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art was founded in 1988 through the will of the attorney and businessman J.H. de Pont. In 1992 the foundation opened its doors to the public in a former wool-spinning mill just outside the centre of Tilburg, a small but lively city in the south of the Netherlands.

The central space is really quite wonderful, comprising a huge hall of about 50 x 60 meters, bordered on one side by a dozen or so small, intimate rooms devoted to a single work or artist. Inside the hall are four reconfigurable rooms made out of movable walls. The main hall is surrounded on two sides by a corridor, which also functions as a gallery space, along which lie a number of rooms of varying size, which each accommodate a single work of art.

The museum’s collection is built around a core group of twenty artists with whom it has established a long-term relationship. These twenty artists do not belong to any particular movement or period, although some of the artists do share what I would call a common sensibility. On the one hand one finds artists such as Anish Kapoor, Richard Long, James Turrell, Richard Serra and Raoul de Keyser whose work invite contemplation as it says in the museum’s catalogue, a succint description I can’t improve upon. On the other hand one finds more personal works by artists such as Marlene Dumas and Rosemarie Trockel. In between there are works by Gerhard Richter, Thierry de Cordier, Christian Boltanski, Luc Tuymans and Sigmar Polke to name but a few.

Among the museum’s treasures are a few site-specific permanent installations: “Descent into Limbo” (1992), a work by Anish Kapoor that occupies one of the small rooms, “Wachsraum” (1992), a narrow corridor whose walls are covered with beeswax by Wolfgang Laib and “Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast” (1992), a sculpture by Richard Serra. It is one of his smaller pieces and shows that his work is not dependent on scale.

The foundation’s acquisition policy is based on “gut feeling”, which I think is the best strategy to build an art collection. New works are often acquired following one of the temporary exhibitions the museum organizes every year. They make it possible to judge how a work fits in with the rest of the collection. Of each artist the foundation likes to acquire a number of works so as to show the artist’s full breadth and vision. This works particularly well in the case of artists such as Raoul de Keyser and Gerhard Richter, who is represented by two of his grey monochrome paintings, some abstract and some figurative works.

Over the years the foundation has built a surprisingly consistent and indeed wonderful collection of contemporary art, making it one of the best museums of its kind in Europe. Its main strength lies not so much in the individual works, although it owns quite a few masterpieces, but in the collection as a whole, which like a musical composition consists of points and counterpoints. The core group of twenty artists with whom the museum started has more than doubled and now also includes artists such as Bill Viola, Lothar Baumgarten, Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Guiseppe Penone, Esko Männikko and Thomas Schütte. Of a younger generation of artists the museum owns works by Roxy Paine, Berlinde de Bruyckere and Tacita Dean.

Inevitably there are a number of lapses, but opinions will differ as to what constitutes a mistake. I’m not a great fan of Roni Horn and there are a few Dutch painters that leave me completely indifferent (Robert Zandvliet, Marc Mulders, Kees de Goede). There’s more bloody Luc Tuymans, there’s a metal container tiled on the inside with bathroom tiles by Jean Pierre Raynaud that I almost didn’t notice despite its size and there are some large photos that aren’t any different from some of my own photos.

Personal highlights apart from the works by Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Laib, Richard Serra and the Gerhard Richter room include two paintings by Marlène Dumas. One, “The First People (I-IV)” (1990), actually consists of a group of four life size paintings of recently born babies (pictured above). They are fat, their heads are too big for their bodies, they are ugly and one of them squints. I remember an interview with Marlène Dumas in which she said that she had been criticized for these paintings because her babies are so ugly, upon which she said that babies ARE ugly when they’re just born, that they look like little monsters and that this whole idea of babies being cute is a romantic fiction. The other painting, “The Ritual (with doll)” (1999), shows a procession of girls, which reminded me of the video for “Come to Daddy” by Chris Cunningham.

Another work I really liked was a recent acquisition, “Autoportrait Contre Nature” (2001-2002), a video by the Belgian artist Michel François. A man in dark pants and a blue shirt is filmed from above as he walks in circles on a concrete floor and lits a cigarette. Every now and then an empty wine bottle falls to the floor, seemingly out of nowhere. The man continues walking and smoking his cigarette ignoring the falling bottles, some of which only miss him by an inch or two. Sometimes he stands still. It is one of the best video installations I’ve seen for awhile. For one thing the man and the shattered bottles create an interesting pattern on the floor. It’s like watching a moving painting. What is most intriguing though is the man’s total absorption in whatever is on his mind, as it keeps raining empty wine bottles. There’s not much happening besides this and yet you want to see how it continues and ends. I found the man’s stoicism strangely comforting.

If you’re visiting The Netherlands, Tilburg is about two hours by train from Amsterdam. A good combination for a day trip is to combine it with a visit to the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, about half an hour from Tilburg.