A Picasso above your bed
Oxford, Cambridge and Oberlin students can cheer up their student rooms with paintings from their college’s private galleries. In the Netherlands, this practice is virtually unheard of. Curator Sabrina Kamstra of UvA’s Academic Medical Centre (AMC) quite likes the thought of a lending programme for students. ‘If we had enough manpower for it!’
In taking a date up to a dorm room or student lodgings, most of us would be pretty content to see we’ve remembered to put away the laundry. Imagine if said date, instead of complimenting you on your tidy floor, would gasp, staring at the wall and the original Chagall, Kandinsky or Picasso hanging there. The boasting rights and street cred thus earned would be so immense as to seem unattainable. For some students, however, a casual masterpiece displayed over the bed is a reality, and one that’s available for as little as five dollar a year (and sometimes even for free).
In addition to the privilege of living and studying in its venerable halls, undergraduates at Oxford’s New College have the right to borrow a painting from the college’s private gallery to hang in their rooms within the college’s residences. The fourteenth-century college owns world-famous works, though students probably can’t lay claim to its Hans Holbein or Jacob van Ruisdael. Pembroke College even has a student-owned gallery since an undergraduate named Anthony Emery collected one pound from every student in 1947 to buy the first works.
Several other universities have comparable traditions. This month, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum revived its student rental programme, allowing students on campus to rent works by Kentridge, Warhol, Matisse and other famous names for just fifty dollar a year. The programme was made possible by an anonymous donor in the seventies who bestowed a grant on the condition that students should have access to all art purchased with it.
Some art lovers would undoubtedly raise eyebrows at the thought of frat parties going on right under the nose of Picasso’s Goat Skull on Table. Students sign a contract that holds them responsible for any damage to the (often) rare works; but as a registrar at the museum told The Washington Post, they ‘find that the students are very careful’. At Ohio’s Oberlin College, students get an even better deal, renting original prints for only five dollar a year. A student at the college reassured the press that students tend to remove the finer art pieces before a frat party, and that, naturally, they ‘wouldn’t play a game of beer pong next to their art rental’.
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.’
