From art academy to museum
Visiting time: ●●● Short (10 minutes)The ceramics cabinet on the museum’s second floor is showing a selection of ceramics collected by Jan van Haaren. You will find work here by Dutch ceramists such as Etie van Rees and Jan van der Vaart, but also big European names like Lucie Rie and Lucio Fontana. The vases, dishes and sculptures were collected between 1955 and 1970 to inspire students at the Koninklijke School voor Kunst en Kunstnijverheid in Den Bosch. They form the basis of Design Museum Den Bosch’s current collection
A collection to inspire
In 1955, Jan van Haaren – director of the Koninklijke School voor Kunst en Kunstnijverheid (now the St Joost School of Art & Design) in Den Bosch – set up the Municipal Exhibitions Service. In doing so, he paved the way for what would become Design Museum Den Bosch.
Van Haaren was keen to increase the academy’s appeal to students by staging exhibitions and building up a high-quality collection of art and design, including ceramics. The idea was to inspire and encourage students to experiment with elements such as form and glaze. Between 1955 and 1970, a total of 278 vases, dishes and small sculptures were purchased to this end, including work by Dutch ceramists like Johannes Henricus Andrée, Etie van Rees, Jan van der Vaart and Meindert Zaalberg. Van Haaren also collected work by leading European potters such as Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie.
Foundations of the artists’ ceramics cluster
Van Haaren’s acquisition in 1958 of a vase by the Argentinian-Italian artist Lucio Fontana inadvertently laid the foundations for Design Museum Den Bosch’s future collection of artists’ ceramics. Since then, this cluster within the museum’s collection has grown to include ceramics by world-renowned artists like Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso.
The genesis of Design Museum Den Bosch
The Municipal Exhibition Service was spun off in 1972 and housed on Citadellaan in the seventeenth-century Kruithuis building, the city’s former gunpowder magazine. The service was renamed Museum Het Kruithuis in 1984 before changing again to the Stedelijk Museum ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2005. In 2018, lastly, we became Design Museum Den Bosch – the leading institution of its kind in the Netherlands. A building project scheduled for 2030 will provide the museum with a new home.
