As you can see, I wrote this several months ago. We’ve had so many fantastic articles to post, and this got lost in the shuffle. I think you’ll still enjoy it!

August 9, 2023

I’m writing this while flying home from fourteen days in Amsterdam and Norway. My travels took me to Amsterdam and Oslo. These are fantastic cities and don’t need the help of our museum website to enhance their standing among tourists. But, I did have some outstanding museum experiences that I’d like to share.

Amsterdam has so many stories to tell, and where there’s a story, there’s a museum. Let’s start with Rembrandt. The Rembrandt House offers a personal look at the Dutch artist. Visitors walk through the rooms where Rembrandt painted, taught, etched, and entertained (he was somewhat of a self-promoter). His props and collections—often the same thing—are on display, and my mind kept coming back to this prop room every time I saw his paintings later on the trip.

Rembrandt, of course, is for many visitors the focal point of the Rijksmuseum. His Night Watch hangs on a large wall at the end of two adjacent gallery spaces; right now, it’s under examination by the research staff, so the entire painting sits behind a glass box. Several Vermeers from the recent Vermeer exhibit are still displayed nearby.

Rembrandt was also the focal point of the Hermitage Museum’s display of the Leiden Collection.  American businessman Thomas Kaplan and his wife, Daphne, have assembled a collection of paintings by Rembrandt and others of his time, and the resulting exhibition is extraordinary. By the way, Leiden is the Dutch city of Rembrandt’s birth and the Hermitage Museum is the Amsterdam satellite location of the Russian Hermitage Museum (which is currently without any works from the Hermitage’s own collection). 

Not every museum in Amsterdam revolves around Rembrandt, and in fact not every museum revolves around art. Two museums that should be seen in tandem, even though they operate independently of one another, are the Museum of the Resistance and the Anne Frank Museum.  The Museum of the Resistance effectively presents Amsterdam’s history leading up to and during World War II. The rooms take the visitor through the 1930’s, as Nazi sympathizers and variants gain political prominence in the Netherlands, into the war years and German occupation of the early 1940’s. Photos, movies, displays, and even interactive objects all give color and texture to this horrible period.

The Anne Frank Museum then personalizes the war years. The three-story structures that many of us associate with Amsterdam proper stood side to side with their neighbors, and had yards in the back. To increase home and office space, owners frequently built an adjunct three-story structure into the backyard. These structures were impossible to see from the street, and the occupying Germans had no idea about these additional spaces. That’s where Anne and seven others hid. I promised myself to buy a replica of Anne’s diary when I get home (the gift shop was sold out).

Thanks to a canal tour, I was compelled to visit the Canal Museum. Exhibits trace the beginnings of Amsterdam and how canals serviced the growing sea-faring trade economy. Visitors are guided from room to room by prompts. The museum filled-in some important early history of the shaping of modern-day Amsterdam.

For more on the history of Amsterdam, I visited the Museum of Amsterdam, now housed in the Hermitage space. This museum was more of a comprehensive effort. The high walls displayed almost a timeline of the city’s history, while smaller inside rooms addressed specific times or issues in the city’s past. This museum was extremely well done.

That was it for history museums. The Van Gogh Museum and MOCO (the contemporary art museum) sit in the same grounds as the Rijksmuseum. Van Gogh was Dutch, though he’s perhaps most famous for his time in Arles, France. He didn’t embrace painting until his late 20’s, at which point he committed himself wholeheartedly and was prolific in his output. This museum displays a narrative of his life through his work, and an entire gallery is devoted to his last few months.

MOCO is housed in a converted house. I saw many of the names we hear about—Banksy, Basquiat, The Kid, et al. During my visit, the museum was fairly full, and so the experience was a little claustrophobic. And because the rooms are small, the displayed art can feel cramped. I would expect that some day MOCO will move to a newly-built structure that will allow it to exhibit larger pieces with more room for the art–and the visitors–to breathe. Don’t overlook the sculpture gardens immediately surrounding the house.

I’ll finish with Oslo. The brand-new National Museum is near the cruise ship pier. This museum has great art, if not quite what other national collections might contain. But the museum also contains exhibits having to do with Norwegian culture, history, creativity, and design. The chairs that JFK and Richard Nixon sat on during their historic televised debate? They are Norwegian and on display. Ball gowns of Norway’s two queens of the modern era? They are beautifully presented in glass cases. I really enjoyed this museum.

And here’s the last museum I saw: The Kon-Tiki Museum, showcasing the adventures of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. In 1947, Heyerdahl set out to prove that inhabitants of the west coast of South America could have traded with and settled in the islands of the South Pacific. To make his point, he built a raft from South American balsa wood, lashed the logs together with rope, erected a makeshift sail, and pushed off from the shore. Without a keel, he relied on the prevailing trade winds and the currents to take him and his small crew to the west.  Their arrival, just over 100 days later in Fiji, was an international sensation. The raft is on display, and amazing footage from the trip can be seen in the theater. Footnote: this trip set off the Tiki craze in the United States.

That’s my summer European museum story. What is your summer museum story? Share them with us and we’ll post them. These museum moments are special—that’s why we want to hear about yours.