Since 2004, Sjarel Ex (Terwinselen, 1957) has been director of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. One of his first achievements: an adjoining depot, which he launched after only three weeks after his appointment. The building is now under construction and will be a real eye-catcher. Meanwhile, since last year, the museum has been undergoing a major renovation, which will take seven years. The life of a museum director between construction pit and demolition hammer.
Text: Bart-Jan Brouwer | Online Editor: Natasha Hendriks
Image: John van Helvert
"Very surreal. As time passed on that day, things got crazier and crazier. A procession of hardcore fans of the museum walked through the building with a camera, photographing the most unsightly parts: light switches, grates, toilet bowls, doorknobs... 'Yes sir, we don't know if you're going to let that sit and we love this museum so much. Because...' - and then came a story, from people who had already been here with their grandfather or father. Many elderly people literally came to say goodbye. 'Sir, it's my last time. I love coming here so much, but I probably won't make it to the opening of the new museum.' That was very moving. Others were walking around in a hurry, " I have yet to see that. If we saw someone who was clearly not ready, we would take them out after closing time and secretly, one-on-one, show them works of art. Everyone was like 'don't take it away, don't take it away!' I had that myself. It felt like a total lockdown. The next day we moved out of our office, away from the museum. Only at that moment did I feel what it was like not to be able to walk over to Titus at the Rembrandt reading desk, not to be able to see a painting by Jim Shaw or Chris Martin just around the corner. The luxury of working so close to an instrument like a museum, with its beautiful sound and color, only became apparent at that point. Our fringe benefit was actually the primary condition for doing well. Now all the art is stored in seven depots in Holland and Flanders."
"The municipality acted as organizer for an international tender. In the end, 24 teams signed up, each consisting of two or three architects and a whole tail of consultants. Based on the documentation, that number was reduced to three: KAAN Architects, David Chipperfield Architects and Mecanoo. Over four months, we engaged in three one-day dialogues with each firm, delving very deeply into the question: how can the museum, while retaining the quality of earlier architects like Adriaan van der Steur, Alexander Bodon and Hubert-Jan Henket, move forward fifty years in the environment in which it is located, in the park in which it is located, in the city for which it is intended, in the country that is proud of it. With that every architect was given an impossible challenge, namely whether three thousand square meters could be added. While the park is monumental, the hem of it in private property and all the sight lines here are protected cityscape. You had to be a Houdini to solve that. In the end, after huge deliberations, the jury unanimously chose Mecanoo. Architects from the Delft architecture firm had spent a week in the park - fieldwork. With the knowledge of how the public used the park, they developed their plan. So not form follows function or function follows form, but architecture follows audience. They created a building that facilitates the movement of the public. Their plan opens up the museum in many ways while reaching into the garden without violating the red lines. Now the park still consists of small private and public areas. We want it to become one whole in the experience, that the whole park will soon breathe with it. The quality of the Kröller-Müller, moving with nature, only in urban nature. With the addition of a glass corridor that meanders between the Van der Steur and Bodon buildings, as a catalyst and connector, the museum is transformed into a complex with good logistics for both visitors and the back of house. From this "Mecanoo passage," all the museum rooms are easily accessible. We spread our arms, flattening ourselves like a cat in the most beautiful place, without disturbing it. The winding corridor opens into a newly built pavilion, a wing for contemporary art. That's a reach into the future. For we will have the magnificent Van der Steur building from 1935, a fantastic reconstruction building from 1972, the Bodon wing, and the new wing for the 21st century."
"Absolutely. The brilliant curator Okwui Enwezor, who died last year, proved that with an exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where he was director for a long time. For that exhibition, he had pinpointed a number of objective dates in time: the assassination of Kennedy, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Intifada, 9/11... With a team, he went to every country in the world to see if anything changed in art at those moments. Art is permeable to time; art is always dealing with time, but not always about it. Because art is its own world, its own medium, its own language. Enwezor showed that at the moment of the sledgehammer blow, art immediately changed color, material, temperament and activity. Corona is also such a sledgehammer blow, and it affects art in a huge way. Perhaps because we begin to appreciate art again and experience and live it more intensely. The first time after the lockdown that I saw artworks again, live, material from our collection, was at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, where a very beautiful exhibition of our surreal collection opened last June. It was so moving, so beautiful! I couldn't keep dry, even though these were paintings I had seen a hundred times. Art is more than just a mirror, art is more than just beautifully made, art is more than just something you hope for. Art is something that is enormously comforting and at the same time very exciting. You need that for yourself and you need to see that for yourself, and you see that in times of corona. This time is an intensification of what the senses really need for full humanity."
"We made a plan for the renovation for 223.5 million euros. The Municipality of Rotterdam, which manages the building, is providing 168.5 million. The remainder has to come from private parties. That amount is not that big at the moment - we are in full swing. We ourselves are as poor as a church rat: we have no equity, only intangible assets."
"Normally we get 9 million in subsidies every year and spend about 21 million. We earn that 12 million. Later, when the museum and the depot are open, we foresee the museum's budget rising to about 30 million a year."
"With us, that one is huge. That also makes the museum very exciting. If you go searching in the archives, you see that half of us are dealing with the government and half with the giving public. That ranges from entire collections to a single Mondrian or Israel. Every family that worked in the port of Rotterdam was honored to be able to give something back to the city. This often involved gifts of art. Those families, even generations later when they have fanned out, are a strong side of Rotterdam. If you don't give enough, 'you haven't got it to your giving gland yet,' they call it here."
"Yes indeed. We have challenged more, got people much more involved, it brings more pleasure to be in the museum. On the other hand, I have to say - I am also frank about this - that the exponential growth that has taken place in a number of other museums has not hit Boijmans. In Assen and Utrecht, for example, it is occasionally busier than in our museum. Now the Centraal Museum Utrecht is an easy example, because by bringing in the Dick Bruna House I laid the foundation for that myself (Ex was museum director there from 1988 to 2004; ed.). But here we deliberately stopped at 300,000 people at one point. I thought that was a good number for the Boijmans, because museum visits are also about attention, rest, concentration and contemplation."
"Hahaha, I'm not saying that. What you can correct from someone else is something different from what you yourself aus einem Guss get right the first time. It is also very difficult to know exactly your own talent in this, because one thing is very important: museums are not hierarchical, a museum is a team. There was recently an article in the Volkskrant about "the white men in the big art museums in the Netherlands. I was approached about that too. I didn't participate, mainly because of one question that I found very controlling: 'How many art-related people does the museum have?' And then I had to note how many of those were white and how many of color. But we have no difference between art content people and people who work in the museum. If you work in a museum, you are always art content. Every link in the museum is essential. If even one link is not functioning properly, you see it immediately. Then something falls out, someone gets angry, a child stumbles. Everything is about that experience you create six hours a day. The museum is a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, in which both the collection and the people and the building are essential. Those three have to be about on the same level. And we are now hugely catching up on what has been overdue in the building area."
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