PARIS.- Beware of cultural particularities. Rigid associations. Categories and cliques likely to lock a body of work assembled by one and the same person into a national straitjacket. So what would a Dutch collection actually look like? What would be its specific character? In the historical context of contemporary art and its official channels, the Netherlands are known to have loomed large in the dissemination and reception of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Land Art in the late 1960s. One has only to think of the pioneering work – not just in Europe but internationally – of the museums in The Hague (Gemeentemuseum), Eindhoven (Van Abbemuseum) and Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum). Of the exhibition Minimal Art at the Gemeentemuseum in 1968, curated by Enno Develing. Of Wim Beeren's Op Losse Schroeven, the counterpart of When Attitudes Become Form, at the Stedelijk in 1969. Of Sonsbeek 71 in Arnhem two years later. And of all the events organised by Jean Leering and Rudi Fuchs in Eindhoven during the same decade. It is hardly surprising, then, that Minimal Art in the broad sense should be so generously represented in A Dutch Collection. A matter of DNA. Of heritage. And of a local aesthetic fuelled by centuries of Calvinist simplicity and involving the works of Mondrian, van Doesburg and well before them, Saenredam. Not to mention a way of seeing honed by the austere, full-time spectacle of landscapes knitted together around an unalterable horizon line, "that elusive join between an ever-changing sky and land which, via the interplay of every kind of nuance, sets off in search of the void".1

It would be mistaken, however, to reduce A Dutch Collection to its apology for Minimalism and, incidentally, Land Art. Here too, it is worth observing the paths followed by Dutch institutions, which very early on sought to combine these lines, rectangles and circles with other narratives which, because of their supposed incompatibility, demonstrate a salutary complementarity. One only has to look back at some of Rudi Fuchs's hangings at the Van Abbemuseum in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where rooms had a Carl Andre cohabiting with a Daniel Buren and a Georg Baselitz. Or to recall exhibitions such as Eye Infection (Stedelijk, 2001) and Exile on Main Street (Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2009), which in recent decades have given pride of place to dissident American figuration. A figuration we find once again in this collection through the free spirits that are William Copley and John Wesley, happily reunited with Carl Andre, Alan Charlton, Ad Dekkers, Richard Long, François Morellet and Merrill Wagner. —Erik Verhagen

1. Paul Claudel, L’œil écoute, Paris, Gallimard, 1946.