Ten Years of Voorlinden: When the Icons Meet
Voorlinden, one of my favourite contemporary art museums in Europe, turns ten this September. It is celebrating the way a good host does, by moving all the furniture.
From 12 September 2026 to 7 March 2027, the museum in Wassenaar stages Celebrating the Icons of Art. For the first time since it opened, the entire building is being rebuilt from the inside for a single exhibition. Contemporary icons from the collection are placed beside the twentieth century works that made them possible. Kusama and Monet. Lichtenstein and Léger. Bourgeois, Bacon, Hockney, Matisse, Miró, Richter, Riley and Ron Mueck, all in one house, all at once. Director Suzanne Swarts calls it "a celebration of both recognition and surprise", which is a fair description of how I feel every time I drive up the lane to the estate.
The first time
The museum opened on 10 September 2016, on a country estate where the polder gives way to the dunes, twenty minutes from The Hague. Joop van Caldenborgh built it to house a private collection he had been assembling since the 1970s, and the building itself is the first thing that tells you what kind of place this is. It is low and pale and roofed with glass, so that the galleries are lit by the sky over the North Sea rather than by anything with a switch. Cloudy days are different from bright days. Winter afternoons are different from June mornings. I have never seen the same painting twice there, and I have seen some of them a dozen times.
On my first visit I did what everyone does. I went down the stairs into Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool, stood dry at the bottom and looked up through a few centimetres of water at strangers looking down at me. Then I found Ron Mueck's Couple under an Umbrella, two elderly figures at an impossible scale, asleep on a beach that isn't there, and I stayed with them remembering when I guided his first major exhibition in Brazil a couple of years ago. Then Richard Serra's Open Ended, a steel labyrinth you enter confidently and leave slightly less so. And then James Turrell's Skyspace, a room with a hole in the ceiling and nothing else, which turns out to be enough.
The pumpkin and monet sharing the same space
The word icon started in churches. An icon was an image you returned to, one that carried meaning because people kept looking at it, decade after decade, generation after generation. The meaning was in the returning. Museums do something similar. A painting becomes an icon when enough people have stood in front of it, argued about it, copied it, hated it, changed their minds about it. Monet's water lilies are icons because of everyone who has looked at them since 1900. Kusama's pumpkins are on their way to the same status, one photograph at a time.
What Voorlinden does this autumn is put the two kinds of icon in the same room, so you can watch the meaning pass between them. Bridget Riley's stripes beside the century that invented abstraction. Roy Lichtenstein's M-Maybe (A Girl's Picture), a painting about the pictures we already carry in our heads, in a house full of the painters it borrowed from. Félix González-Torres, whose work often exists only because visitors take a piece of it home, in a museum built on the idea that art is meant to be passed on. And a new work by Martin Creed, dated 2026, to keep the conversation in the present tense.
Why WE take people there
We run experiences for a living. At Sapiens Travel we spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how culture survives, and my answer, after years of watching it up close, is that culture stays alive when it is looked at, discussed and handed on. A masterpiece nobody visits is a very expensive object in a dark room.
So Voorlinden has been on our Dutch programmes since we opened, and I have taken collectors there, and families, and people who told me at breakfast that they "don't really do museums" and then had to be found in the Skyspace two hours later. It works on everyone, because it asks for nothing except your attention and then rewards it.
Celebrating the Icons of Art is a ten year old museum saying the thing I believe, in the most direct way available: here are the works that shaped us, here are the works they shaped, come and stand between them.
Making a few days of it
Voorlinden sits between The Hague and Leiden. The Mauritshuis, with its Vermeers and its Rembrandts, is twenty minutes away. The Kunstmuseum Den Haag, with the largest Mondrian collection in the world, is about the same. Leiden, with its courtyards and its canals and its university older than the Dutch Republic, is fifteen minutes in the other direction. The beach at Wassenaar is a walk from the museum gate, and the estate's own restaurant and gardens will happily swallow an entire afternoon.
For this autumn and winter we design days that put the exhibition in its landscape, with a Storykeeper who knows the collection and the people behind it, and with the cities and activities around it chosen with the same care.
Celebrating the Icons of Art, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar. 12 September 2026 to 7 March 2027.
