The Mauritshuis in The Hague is to be renovated. Ambitious plans have been announced recently. Some 1.250 square meters will be added to the museum for the exposition of art, as you can see in the above picture.
The Museum will close in 2012 and will reopen in 2014. You can read more about the plans here.
Travelling paintings
One can make a virtue of necessity, is what director Emilie Gordenker thinks: since famous paintings as the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, The Bull by Paulus Potter and The Anatomic Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt will have to leave the building anyway, they might as well travel to… Japan.
Museums in Tokyo and Kobe will pay, of course. Some five million euros, as is heard through the grapevine.
Fragile
This seems to be a perfect deal, but why should works of art have to travel? Are they not too fragile?
Isn't it better that they just stay where they are?
Their being there is always contingent, even arbitrary. (Let us not digress to the ongoing discussion about the Elgin Marbles and their so called “homecoming” to Greece!)
Effort
Shouldn't people have to do some effort in order to see art? These days, you have to go to Malibu to watch James Ensor’s The Entrance of Christ.
Still, it is no use being frustrated about that. “Vaut le voyage”, as they say in French.
But we should be travelling then, not the work of art.
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