The Van Gogh Museum Has Tapped the Longtime Director of the Mauritshuis to Lead the Venerated Amsterdam Institution

Emilie Gordenker has been named the general director of
Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, one of the Netherlands’s top
institutions.

After 12 years of leading the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which
has a world-renowned collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings,
the American art historian and curator will head to the Dutch
capital to take her new post in February 2020. She succeeds Axel
Rüger, who left the Van Gogh Museum in June to become the CEO and
secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The Van Gogh Museum will provide a special opportunity and new
challenges. It touts the largest collection of works by the
Dutch painter worldwide, with more than 200 paintings, 500
drawings, and nearly every single one of the artist’s letters.
Around 85 percent of its 2.2 million visitors are international
tourists; by comparison, the Mauritshuis, which is dedicated to a
period of art history that ends in 1648, saw 416,000 visitors
in 2018.

“Emilie is an experienced museum director with an extensive
national and international network, who will be able to develop,
together with the museum’s staff, a clear long-term vision for the
Van Gogh Museum,” Jaap Winter, chairman of the supervisory board of
the institution, said in a statement.

At the Mauritshuis, Gordenker initiated experimental digital
projects such as “Meet Vermeer,” which was run in cooperation with
Google Arts & Culture.

Van Gogh is having a big year in Europe. “Making Van Gogh: A
German Love Story” opens at the Städel Museum this month, following
on the heels of “Van Gogh and Britain” at Tate Britain. There is
also a major Van Gogh show at the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch
city of Den Bosch focused on his “inner circle,” which
cuts against the widely believed idea that the artist was highly
isolated.

When she starts her tenure, Gordenker will oversee ongoing
exhibitions including “In the Picture” (a show of
self-portraits and portraits by other 19th- and early 20th-century
painters) and “Van Gogh’s Most Beautiful Letters” at the
Mesdag Collection in The Hague, a partner of the Van Gogh
Museum.

The post The Van Gogh Museum Has Tapped the Longtime
Director of the Mauritshuis to Lead the Venerated Amsterdam
Institution appeared first on artnet News.