E.S. Bergvelt

Fashion Exhibitions in the Netherlands: Between Visual Spectacles and Community Outreach

Abstract Recently fashion exhibitions have been blossoming in Dutch museums to the extent that they verged on becoming a trendy phenomenon. Because of this upsurge in popularity we, as academic scholars, decided to devote a seminar to this subject in the context of the Master Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The purpose of the seminar was to find out whether the popularity of museum fashion exhibitions had influenced the fashion collecting and presentation policies of the museums in recent years. The museums we studied staged a whole gamut of fashion exhibitions ranging from visual spectacles to community outreach projects. Although, these various fashion exhibitions cater to an increasingly diversified audience, they all have become attuned to the overall cultural environment audiences are living in, which is predominantly a visual culture of which the spectacular, the sensorial, and the participatory are key constituents. Dutch museums are very much in line with, even at the forefront of, museological movements that try to meet the challenges of the future. This is mainly due to the ever-growing influence of the neoliberal cultural policy on the one hand, to the open and experimental climate that has been pervading the Dutch museum world since the 1950s onwards on the other.

Potgieter’s 'Rijksmuseum' and the public presentation of Dutch history in the National Museum (1800-1844)

In 1844, the celebrated Dutch author Everhardus Johannes Potgieter (1808-1875) published his criticism of the Rijksmuseum (national museum) in De Gids , which at the time was the most important cultural periodical. The chapter describes the exceptional situation in the Netherlands regarding history and art - and thus museums - and sketch the history of the Dutch national art museums in Amsterdam and The Hague until 1844. The first national museum - the Nationale Konst-Gallerij (national art gallery) - opened its doors in May 1800. It was housed in the west wing of a former palace of the princes of Orange, Huiten Bosch (house in the wood), near The Hague. During the Kingdom of Holland (1806-1810) - under Louis Napoleon, the brother of Napoleon - the national museums collection was moved from The Hague to Amsterdam, where it was housed on the third floor of the Royal Palace and called the Royal Museum. Keywords: Amsterdam; De Gids ; Everhardus Johannes Potgieter; Louis Napoleon; national museum; Nationale Konst-Gallerij; Rijksmuseum; Royal Museum; The Hague