Museum Beelden aan Zee:
Origin and Concept
The museum grew out of a private passion. Theo and Lida Scholten bought their first sculpture in 1966, and over the following decades built up a large personal collection. Eventually they decided to found a museum dedicated to modern sculpture so it could be shared publicly. The museum opened in 1994 in Scheveningen, the seaside district of The Hague, and remains the only Dutch museum specializing exclusively in sculpture.
The architecture is part of the story. Architect Wim Quist designed the museum beneath the historic Pavilion of Wied, built in 1826 by King William I for his wife Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia. The municipality required that the museum not be visible from the dunes, so it was built entirely underground, with terraces set into the dune that also stay hidden from view — you can’t even spot it from the boulevard or beach. Quist gave the concrete walls an unusual slot-system so sculptures and artworks can be hung from bolts set into the many blocks, letting the display configuration change flexibly
The core theme uniting the collection is the human figure — how contemporary sculptors around the world have depicted “man”. Over time this has broadened: while the human figure was originally central, the museum today also embraces abstract and contemporary sculpture more widely, with growing attention to artists from diverse geographic, cultural, and gender backgrounds.
The collection now numbers more than 5,000 sculptures, spanning figurative to abstract work, from intimate portraits to monumental pieces. It also includes around 1,000 plaster models and 2,000 medals as sub-collections, shown in dedicated spaces like the Gipsotheek. Artists represented include Hans Arp, Stephan Balkenhol, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Tony Cragg, Giacomo Manzú, Igor Mitoraj, Jaume Plensa, Kiki Smith, and Ossip Zadkine, among many others.
www.ftn-books.com has a sweet spot for this very nice museum initiative and for this reason you can find many MUSEUM AAN ZEE publications in its collection , including the very first one.
