Stedelijk Museum

Museum · Museum Quarter (Oud-Zuid)Amsterdam,Netherlands

Amsterdam's modern art museum, holding the largest group of Malevich paintings outside Russia because he left them in Berlin and was never allowed back.

The Stedelijk Museum holds the largest group of Kazimir Malevich paintings outside Russia, and it holds them because he never got them home. He took more than a hundred works to Berlin in 1927, was called back to Leningrad, and left them with friends. The architect Hugo Häring kept them through the Nazi campaign against modern art, and Amsterdam bought them from him in 1958. His heirs argued that they had never been Häring's to sell, and in 2008 the city settled by handing five paintings back. Whichever of the rest is hanging when you come, you are looking at what stayed. The museum around them is two buildings joined. The red-brick house of 1895 still carries the name of Sophia Lopez Suasso, a widow whose bequest helped pay for it. You no longer go in that way: the door is now in the white extension of 2012 on the Museumplein side. The collection hangs below it on free-standing steel walls with no rooms at all, a century of art laid out in one continuous space.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do not build a visit around one painting — Only a fraction of ninety thousand objects is up and the downstairs selection changes, so treat a Malevich or Mondrian as a possibility.
Stand under the white roof on Museumplein and look up — It projects about thirty metres with nothing beneath it, and the engineers allowed the tip to move as much as twenty centimetres in strong wind.
The lower floor rewards walking before stopping — With no rooms or doorways you pick your own route, so cross the whole space once at speed, then go back to the few things that held you.

Things to do

1
Go and find the front door nobody uses
Leave by Museumplein and walk round the block to Paulus Potterstraat. Stand opposite the red-brick facade and read the niches one by one — each holds a Dutch architect or painter. Then look along the front for the carved name of the woman whose bequest helped pay for the building.
2
Cross the collection floor without reading a label
Go down into the collection space and cross it in one movement without stopping, ignoring every caption. Because the walls stand free and stop short of the ceiling, you see through a whole century at once. Then turn round and go back to whatever slowed you down.
3
Shelter under the overhang when the weather turns
Museumplein is open grass with almost nothing to stand under. The white roof of the new wing reaches far enough past its wall that you can stand completely dry beneath it and still look straight out across the square. Watch how much of the plein it covers as the rain comes across.