Discover talent in time
This begs the question: are there any academic collections of this ilk in the Netherlands, and, more crucially, would such a collection have a Renoir to spare for the discerning Amsterdam undergrad? After all, the country is home to many of the banks, hospitals and universities that make for ideal art collectors. Not only do they have many a bare hallway in which to display art, and, of course, the foot traffic that could admire it; there’s also often money available to spend on aesthetically interesting objects. Perhaps most importantly, however, is the factor of time. An institute like Yale, that started investing in art in the course of the nineteenth century, saw pieces it bought at reasonable prices from promising artists become highly prized masterpieces worth millions.

‘The challenge is to discover talent in time, and to buy from artists before their work becomes unaffordable,’ says Sabrina Kamstra. She curates the extensive art collection that graces the spacious halls of the UvA’s academic hospital. The Academic Medical Centre (AMC) started its art collection early in the eighties when construction of the hospital in Amsterdam’s southeast was finished. Art is part and parcel of public construction in the Netherlands by law: in 1951, the Dutch government decreed that one percent of all building costs were to be assigned to artistic and decorative purposes. The AMC commissioned artwork by Dutch contemporary artists such as Carel Visser and Auke de Vries, but it hasn’t stopped there. Over the past decades, the academic hospital has commissioned and bought thousands of works. Where it focused on the Cobra and other post-war artistic movements at the outset, it now follows a broad range of developments in contemporary graphic art.

Although Dutch universities have rarely matched the extreme wealth and highbrow swagger of private institutions like Yale and Harvard, and therefore lack centuries-old collections, quite a few have begun acquiring art in the past fifty years. The UvA has focused mostly on the Allard Pierson collection of antiquities and its vast Special Collections of rare books, prints and maps. The Erasmus University in Rotterdam and Delft’s Technical University boast modest but high-quality assortments of modern graphic and print art. The Amsterdam VU and Utrecht academic hospitals have been amassing admirable modern collections as well. With few campus-based institutions that house their own students in the Netherlands, however, the practice of lending out art to students is virtually unheard of.

Something colourful
Curator Sabrina Kamstra quite likes the thought of a lending programme for students. ‘If we had enough manpower for it! It would come down to a kind of art rental service, which, in this country, exists on commercial basis through the Kunstuitleen,’ she explains. ‘However, people at the AMC – research assistants and PhDs with offices in the building for instance – are always welcome to hang a piece from the collection in their offices.’

Borrowing works from the AMC’s extensive collection is popular, too: ‘People often change jobs or transfer to the academic hospital, and everyone loves to spruce up their new office – though of course, modern art doesn’t fit everyone’s tastes. Some like a piece of art to be recognisable, like a flower or a landscape; others, notably the exact scientists, prefer the abstract. Many people also come to me asking for something colourful, something cheerful,’ Kamstra says. The UvA-trained art historian does not mind that in the least; ‘I might have been educated to describe art in more precise terms, but then I’m not a doctor: I, in turn, could not tell them how to cure a patient.’

Of the roughly 6000 works in the AMC’s art collection, about five percent is on loan to employees, ‘as long as the works stay on the AMC premises. If people would start taking them home, we would lose our overview of the collection,’ Kamstra says.

It will not surprise anyone that the highlights of the collection are not on loan – many of the hospital’s grand sculptures wouldn’t fit in an office anyway. But there are definitely some charming pieces available says Kamstra. ‘If we have enough work by one artist, we are not at all stingy about making some of it available on loan.’

So what kind of value could a scholar potentially have hanging on his office wall? The curator demurs. ‘It’s hardly relevant, but the worth varies greatly with factors such as the demand for an artist’s work.’ The collection’s best pieces, in any case, are on show for as many people as possible in the hospital’s public spaces – well secured, of course. ‘That way, the fourteen to sixteen thousand daily visitors of our hospital all can enjoy them,’ Kamstra says. ‘It would be a shame to have them hidden in an office.’