Museum Beelden aan Zee

A museum dedicated to sculptures, in a brilliant setting in the dunes along the The Hague beach.

One of the nicest private museums of The Netherlands – my taste, admittedly, which is subjective – in Museum Beelden aan Zee (Sculptures on the Sea) in Scheveningen, the harbour and beach front of The Hague, The Netherlands.

The Museum was established in 1994 by private collectors Theo and Lida Scholten, who by then had been collecting sculptures for some 25 years. The collection of the museum is a wide variety of pieces in all sizes and of all materials. Nominally, the overriding motif in the collection is Man, but this principle is not followed too rigidly. For instance, in the current temporary exhibition, of Caribbean artist Yubi Kirindongo (until 1/6/2014), there is very little that reminds the visitor of Man, or it must be the waste materials that Kirindongo uses for his art works. Car bumpers, drift wood, scrap metal, all extraordinarily creatively fused into large, often shiny pieces of art.

 

 

Due to the many temporary exhibitions, like Kirindongo’s, the permanent collection is sometimes not very well represented in the museum, but some of the highlights will always be shown somewhere, usually on the outside terraces of the building. Hidden in the dunes, with Scheveningen beach and pier in the back, it is difficult to imagine a better platform for the sculptures than here. The building itself is a spacious modern construction with a sea of natural light around and below a historical pavilion build for the Dutch King William I in 1826.

Everybody will have a different taste when it comes to appreciating art, but with a minimal interest in sculptures you will always find something of your liking in the Museum Beelden aan Zee.