Art among the ruins
A work of art gains meaning through research and by being shown alongside otherartworks. Then it becomes part of a larger story. Our extensive collection offers us aninfinite number of possibilities to do this. In this, we are highly dependent on yoursupport. Not only for the research but also for the presentation, accompanyingprograms, educational materials, and publications. Your support makes morepossible.
We are currently working on a project where your support makes a difference.
Rotterdam during the Second World War deserves more attention. Following on from the Boijmans Study “Controversial Past” and the exhibition “Boijmans in the War”, Boijmans is initiating the first city-wide art-historical study of Rotterdam during the Second World War, in collaboration with citizens such as relatives of artists and cultural institutions from the city with relevant collections.
The project
During the Second World War, the art scene in Rotterdam did not come to a temporary standstill, as many people think, but instead flourished. This created a complex situation, full of dilemmas and contradictions. First of all, after the bombing of May 1940, a major municipal art commissioning policy was launched to decorate the emergency shops that opened in the damaged part of the city just a few months after the bombing. Museum Boymans remained open and offered Rotterdam artists a platform, and more exhibition spaces were added elsewhere in the city.
Subsequently, the occupying forces also demonstrated considerable cultural interest. This manifested itself in art theft and expropriation, which has been the subject of provenance research in recent years. The occupying forces also increased national funding for the arts at the state level, and part of this subsidy ended up in battered Rotterdam, the intended port city of the Third Reich. The art trade also flourished considerably. As a publication from that period stated: art flourished on the ruins. And behind it all, the horrors of war were unfolding.
The flourishing of the Rotterdam art world during the war has received little attention and disappeared from view after 1945. Instead, the idea has been created that artists were heavily involved in the resistance and that the post-war arts budget was a reward for their heroic stance. This is incorrect. The increased budgets were a continuation of the occupier's national budget. However, 1945 did mark a break in another respect: stylistically, art underwent rapid changes after the liberation. All this makes the war a crucial period in modern art history, a turning point between two eras. This was certainly true in Rotterdam, where the bombing in particular, but also the municipal art commission policy, made the war more tangible than elsewhere in the Netherlands.