Modern Dutch Design More is More
Until 11 June 2017
Wolfsonian-FIU
Miami Beach is home to the largest collection of pre-war Dutch design and decorative art outside The Netherlands, at the Wolfsonian-FIU museum. The institution has highlighted this strength with an exhibition featuring around 200 pieces from its holdings, including furniture, posters and decorative objects, and a handful of loans.
The show looks at major Dutch design groups including the Nieuwe Kunst, which was connected with the British Arts and Crafts Movement; the Amsterdam School, more of a home-grown movement; and the minimalist, primary-coloured work of De Stijl—probably the best-known of the three, due to its links with abstract art and Bauhaus, says the show’s curator, Silvia Barisione.
Though Barisione wants to emphasise the geometric style of Dutch design, she also points to the social engagement of the artists and architects. Members of the Nieuwe Kunst and Amsterdam School were “essentially socialists, but [working] for a rich clientele”, she says, although they also contributed to low-income housing and other civic projects. Modern graphic design was also a way to promote social change, such as a poster designed by Jan Toorop for the proto-feminist National Exhibition of Women’s Labour in 1898, or to present a progressive image for businesses, such as an advertisement for the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam for colonial imports of coffee, tea and tobacco (1930).
The country’s colonial ambitions also influenced the iconography, styles and techniques of Dutch Modern designers and artisans, including the Batik wax-resist dyeing method frequently used by Nieuwe Kunst artists, or references to Indonesian architecture in furniture by the architect and designer Michel de Klerk. A limited-edition living room set by him is a centrepiece of the exhibition. Among the more whimsical objects on show is a miniature mosque that was an advertising display from around 1893 for JW Smitt Tea and Coffee, which imported goods from the East Indies—and built mosques in Indonesia as a sign of tolerance, though in the Moorish rather than the local style.
Concurrently, the museum has brought its exploration of Dutch design up to the present with More Is More, a series of site-specific installations by the Hague-based artist Christie van der Haak. Her work has “the natural and geometric principles that were used by members of the Niewe Kunst as well as the much more colourful and exuberant lines from the Amsterdam School”, says Sharon Aponte Misdea, the museum’s deputy director of collections and curatorial affairs.
Van der Haak’s highly elaborate work involves motifs, hand-drawn and coloured with gouache, then digitised and enlarged onto vinyl. She has taken over the museum’s lobby—“one big feast” of patterns, the artist says—with intricate designs fixed to the floor, ceiling and the full height of the walls. Van der Haak has also covered part of the exterior of the museum’s 1926 fortress-like Mediterranean-revival building (originally constructed as a storage facility for wealthy seasonal residents) “asking you to come inside and take a look”, she says. At night, the museum is projecting an animated video that layers Van Der Haak’s patterns on the north facade.
Van der Haak’s work “is consumed with this intersection between continuity and invention, or reinvention of the past and the present”, says Misdea, adding that this is an aim the Wolfsonian shares. “I’m hoping that we can, through both the contemporary work and the [Modern design] exhibition, help our visitors think about that intersection—so that we’re not a museum full of static objects, but things that are part of a longer trajectory of changing narrative.”