Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which celebrates its 175th anniversary in 2024, has had an eventful history, full of twists and turns. This capriciousness is also apparent in the collection. Some artists have striven for simplicity, balance and stillness, while others have created works that are complex, chaotic and excessive. The theme for the 2024 diary is ‘twists and turns in art’: artworks that feature arabesques, curlicues, spirals, screws, meanderings, undulations and draperies. The collection contains numerous drawings, paintings, sculptures and products that reject tranquillity and a measured mathematical approach in favour of all manner of kinks, bends, distortions and swirls.
The Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, for example, lavished his skill on elegantly complex compositions of voluptuous bodies that tumble over each other. A magnificent drawing by Leonardo da Vinci shows Leda being overwhelmed by Zeus in the sensual guise of a swan. The ceramicist Wouter Dam gracefully renders sculptural dynamism in ribbons of clay.
The physical twists and turns also have their intellectual counterparts: conceptual leaps and experiments that result in exceptional images. They aren’t always easy to follow, but they certainly lead to exciting work. Joan Miró shows this in the recently acquired key work A Painted Poem with dotted spirals like ripples in the Seine. In Landscape with Pink Clouds, his contemporary Yves Tanguy shows us how the Surrealist representation of reality transcends reality.
In order not to completely ignore the counterpart to this exuberance in art, we have also selected a few works that appear simple, direct and balanced. If only to endorse the motto of Dutch typographer and book designer Jan Vermeulen: ‘Nothing is as difficult as simplicity’.