Overview of the Stedelijk Museum

General Information

Stedelijk Museum (the City Museum) is another art museum in Amsterdam located on the Museumplein (Museum Square). It is the place for modern and contemporary art and design in the Netherlands. Through the years (the museum was established in 1874) it has acquired a huge collection of art works, starting with the post-impressionists from the end of the 19th century and going through the 20th-century’s movements De Stijl, Bauhaus, CoBrA, pop art.

Artists on Display

Some of the masterpieces of the Stedelijk (the way the Dutch call it with affection) include works of Jackson Pollock, Kazimir Malevich, Mondriaan, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Gerrit Rietveld, Kandinsky and Chagall. In the rotating permanent collection of the museum, which exhibits 700 pieces at a time, you can see some of these works. The museum works also with temporary exhibitions that showcase contemporary artists and designers.

Most Notable Artwork on Display

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol launched an assault on what he saw the elitist pretentions of Abstract Expressionism. He looked to remove art from its intellectual ivory tower and to bring it into the realm of the everyday. This image of a patient at the Bellevue Asylum who had committed suicide, printed fourteen times on the canvas, unflinchingly presents death – not as something abstract or philosophical, but as an unsensational fact of life. Warhol’s trademark process of repetition represents modernity’s commodification of the individual’s value. Through this pattern, Warhol cynically shows how mass-media has led to the desensitization of the public and has distanced us from empathizing with the subjects. Rather than considering the tragic circumstances in which this patient died, Warhol turns us into obsessive voyeurs of this image of death. Bellevue II is a truly unsettling and provocative masterpiece.

Opening Hours

The museum is open daily from 0900 until 1800.

Ticket Prices