Why the Netherlands and Belgium Are the Art Destination of This Autumn and Winter
Some places are known for their food. Some for their coastline. The Netherlands and Belgium are known for their art, and this autumn and winter the region is making that case louder than it has in years!
We launched a book called The Art Movements that Shaped Benelux. A small enclave in the northwest of Europe, home to roughly thirty million people, gave the world, just to name a few, Van Eyck and the perfection of oil painting, Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Ensor, Magritte, Mondrian and De Stijl, CoBrA, and Willem de Kooning, who left Rotterdam as a stowaway and carried Dutch painting to New York.
The Flemish Primitives, the Dutch Golden Age, Belgian Surrealism, geometric abstraction. Movement after movement, out of a stretch of flat land crossed by car in only a few hours. We admire it every day, and we still find it slightly unreasonable.
The season, exhibition by exhibition
Yayoi Kusama, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, until 17 January.
Seven decades of work and a newly created infinity room, in the retrospective we announced here and wrote about more personally here.
Willem de Kooning at Work, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 9 October to 17 January.
One hundred years after he sailed from Rotterdam as a stowaway, the painter comes home with over 120 drawings and the canvases that made him, a story we told in our De Kooning article.
Van Gogh, All Our Paintings, Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo, until 3 January.
For the first time since 1984 the museum in the Veluwe forest hangs all 88 of its Van Goghs, the collection assembled by Helene Kröller Müller a century ago.
Celebrating the Icons of Art, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, until 7 March.
For its tenth birthday the museum rebuilds itself from the inside, hanging Bacon, Warhol, Hockney, Matisse, Miró, Richter, Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois beside the Ron Mueck, Leandro Erlich, Richard Serra and James Turrell that made the house famous, with Kusama beside Monet and Lichtenstein beside Léger, as we described in Ten Years of Voorlinden.
Thyssen Bornemisza at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, 15 October to 17 January.
Twenty five masterpieces from Madrid, among them Van Eyck, Dürer, El Greco and Piero della Francesca, hang beside the Vermeers and Rembrandts of The Hague.
Amsterdam Light Festival, 26 November to 17 January
The fifteenth winter of light art on the canals, best seen from a private boat, as in our festival guide.
Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels, opening 28 November.
A former Citroën garage on the canal becomes one of the most anticipated museum openings in Europe this year, and we have been following it since the first plans.
TEFAF Maastricht, 13 to 18 March 2027
The world's leading fair for fine art and antiques, with more than 260 dealers, and we are taking a Sapiens Travel group, in the format of our TEFAF experience.
And in 2027...
Mondrian. Boogie Woogie, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, from September 2027
The museum with the largest Mondrian collection in the world is preparing, with MoMA, the exhibition that reunites Victory Boogie Woogie and Broadway Boogie Woogie in the Netherlands for the first time in over eighty years.
How we work with it
An exhibition list is easy to find. What happens around it is our work. Our Storykeepers include art historians, curators and people who work inside the contemporary art scene of Amsterdam, Brussels and Antwerp. They walk clients into a collection carrying the story of the movement behind it, so a morning with the 88 Van Goghs in Otterlo leads to the birth of De Stijl a few rooms later and to the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrechtthe next day.
Then we leave the museum. The Mauritshuis pairs with a walk through The Hague and lunch by the sea in Scheveningen. Voorlinden pairs with the dunes at Wassenaar. The Kröller Müller pairs with De Haar Castle or the Hanseatic cities of the IJssel. Kanal pairs with the galleries of the Brussels canal district and, an hour away, the fashion scene of Antwerp.
TEFAF pairs with Maastricht itself. The Light Festival pairs with dinner on a private boat, served by three chefs, while the Storykeeper explains the works overhead. Art is the thread. Castles, food, opera and the coast are what we tie to it.
Winter helps. The collections are quieter, the light is low, and the opera and ballet seasons of Amsterdam, Brussels and Antwerp run alongside.
For your clients
Tell us who is travelling and when, and we build the days around them, with entries booked ahead, a Storykeeper who has already visited the exhibition, and the surroundings arranged.
A percentage of every Artsy Group goes to Inspirar-te, which brings children from public schools in São Paulo to art exhibitions.
A small corner of Europe has spent six centuries teaching the world how to look. This winter it is doing it again!
