up to now

Actually, the Stedelijk should be closed for renovation. At the last minute the renovations were postponed and the Museum is still open.

Turning a necessity into a virtue, for the first time in many years nearly the whole of the Stedelijk is devoted to showing its own collection. 
The presentation which is assembled by departing director Rudi Fuchs and a number of the Museum's curators includes all of the disciplines in the collection. The emphasis lies on the postwar period, although many familiar (and less familiar) classic moderns also are shown. 

By far and away the largest number of the galleries on the upper storey are arranged by Fuchs himself. He opted for a somewhat polar approach in which realism and abstraction confront one another. Works by various artists are brought into dialogue with each other in each gallery, but sometimes there is a gallery between them devoted to one artist, such as Bruce Nauman. 

Several very recent acquisitions are also included in the presentation, such as the video project Bros (2001) by Liza May Post. A wall painting by the American Sol LeWitt, given to the Museum years ago by Carl Andre, is specially installed in the Stedelijk for "Up To Now". In the four corner galleries of the upper storey playful groups of classic modern works are to be seen, including among them Chagall, Mondriaan and pre- and postwar expressionists. 

In the other galleries the accent is on acquisitions from the period of Rudi Fuchs (1993-2002), but older work from the collection is also abundantly present. Fuchs combines works by various artists, as well as various disciplines. Almost all the sculptural work by Willem de Kooning from the collection is being shown. The Museum's collection of photography and prints is being drawn on for the two series of cabinets. In the Print Cabinet itself are found high points from the collection of works on paper.

On the ground floor various curators made a selection in which paintings, applied art, industrial design and photography are more or less combined with one another. At Fuchs's request they concentrated on the 1960s and '70s, because that period is of great interest among artists today. These galleries draw on Pop Art and Hard Edge, hippy design, neo-constructivism and minimalist jewellery design, combined with seldom shown reportage photography by - for instance - Pieter Boersma (the riots over demolition for the Amsterdam subway) and Koen Wessing (Chile) from the collection.