(Inter)national identities and the promotion of modern art

The period immediately following World War II was difficult for the Stedelijk Museum, as with many other art museums in Europe, because of the challenge of responding to changed socio-political circumstances, the potential publics these new circumstances suggested and the scant resources available. In exploring these broad themes this paper will focus on the promotion of exhibitions of modern and contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum in the period 1938 to 1962. It will examine publicity materials produced for these exhibitions, the visual and typographic languages they employed and the role these materials played in the reception of both modern and contemporary art. Willem Sandberg was the director of the Stedelijk Museum from 1945 to 1962, a period in which it went from provincial obscurity to international renown. Sandberg is seen as central to this change through both his collection policy and the range of temporary exhibitions he organised at the museum. There were tensions evident in both these spheres between the nationalist remit of the museum to serve its metropolitan audience and Sandberg’s concern to reflect international developments in contemporary art. In addition to these curatorial decisions Sandberg was also responsible for the design of most of the promotional materials for the museum. It is suggested that these publicity materials also visually and typographically reflect this tension between the national and international identities of the museum and that this would have been evident to the museum’s potential publics