The Van Abbemuseum is one of the leading museums for modern and contemporary art.

The museum is a unique Eindhoven institute that presents itself in the international art world and at the same time remains close to its roots in the city. As a quirky museum, it has organized many high-profile exhibitions and has built up a collection of visual art that is among the most interesting in the Netherlands. In the new building of the museum you will see a radically new approach to showing the famous collection, in the Oudbouw you will see the high-profile temporary exhibitions.

Collection
The art collection was started in 1909 by Henri van Abbe. He bought works of art that were mainly intended for his own house on the Bilderdijklaan in the center of Eindhoven. Together with Carl Alandt, an Amsterdam friend from the tobacco trade, he visited exhibitions. There he became acquainted with the work of painters such as Jan Sluyters, Lizzy Ansingh and Carel Willink, from whom he bought all paintings. Van Abbe also had works by Isaac Israëls. Through the museum, his possessions gradually grew into the Van Abbe Collection, with nearly 3,000 works in the year.

The collection features a large number of works by El Lissitzky, as well as works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. There are also works by post-war artists such as Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Rebecca Horn and Sigmar Polke.

Western European artists from the 1980-1990s are also represented, including Jan Vercruysse, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Thomas Schütte, Juan Muñoz, René Daniëls, Marijke van Warmerdam, Douglas Gordon, Aernout Mik, Danny Matthys and Pierre Huyghe. After 2004 there is more focus on international developments. Artworks by Dan Perjovschi, Wilhelm Sasnal, Nedko Solakov, Tintin Wulia, Akram Zaatari, Yael Bartana, Agung Kurniawan, Surasi Kusolwong and others have been purchased for the collection.

American art after 1960 with Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman and Lawrence Weiner and with the west-coast artists like John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha.

Important art movements represented in the collection include cubism, De Stijl, constructivism, expressionism, Dutch figurative art of the interwar period, Cobra, Ecole de Paris, Zero, neoconstructivism, the matter painters, minimal art, conceptual art, German painting from the years 70 and 80 and more recently composed volumes of contemporary sculpture, installations and video art.

Some well-known paintings in the museum include ‘Hommage à Apollinaire’ (1921) by Chagall and ‘Die Macht der Musik’ (1918) by Kokoschka, but also more recent works such as ‘Voglie vedere i miei montagne’ (Beuys, 1971), ‘Tapis de Sable’ (Broodthaers, 1974) and the installation ‘Categorical Imperative and Morgue’ (1999) by Mike Kelley.

Bilderdijklaan 10
5611 NH Eindhoven
The Netherlands
T: +31 40 238 1000
vanabbemuseum.nl