De Pont Foundation For Contemporary Art

Profile

De Pont has been named after the attorney and businessman J.H. de Pont (1915-1987), whose estate provided for the establishment of a foundation to stimulate contemporary visual art in 1988. In the southern Dutch city of Tilburg,

De Pont is housed in a former woolspinning mill that has been transformed by Benthem Crouwel Architects into a space where contemporary art can be seen at its best. The vast, light main area of the monumental old factory and the intimate 'wool-storage rooms' constitute a beautiful environment for the many works of art that De Pont has collected since its opening to the public in September 1992.

The start of a collection

At the official start of De Pont, in September 1992, it was not at all certain whether our policy, which focuses on a limited group of artists and on long presentations of both the collection and temporary exhibitions, would prove to be a formula that could count on interest and appreciation from both artists and the public. To our delight, it is indeed so to an increasing degree, and De Pont is now one of the most visited modern art museums in the Netherlands.

A start was made with twenty artists, a group whereby we believed to have a fair representation of the various attitudes that can be found among contemporary artists. More rapidly than expected, that modest group has since tripled in size. The number of works in the collection increased by about thirty every year, from fourty at the end of 1992 to about four hundred and fifty by the beginning of 2009. Most of the purchases were made from the temporary exhibitions that we organize at De Pont.

The layout of this collection has come about more intuitively than rationally, though discussions with the board of our foundation formed its basis. Such an instinctive approach has its advantages, but also the disadvantage that the coherence in the collection takes shape more slowly then when one follows a particular development or generation of artists. We have opted not to become linked with a trend or group but to have the capacity to set our sights on any living artist who draws our attention. Of each artist selected by us, we would eventually like to possess a number of works that provide an understanding of his or her ideas and expressive means.

Collecting is an adventurous undertaking: there is no watertight formula for determining whether something will continue to have value many years from now. The creation of coherence among the works is dependent on much more than a mere sense of the times and the developments that characterize these times. Edy de Wild e, my director during the period that I worked at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and later board member of De Pont, had it right, I believe, when he said, in one of our conversations, that everything which is of quality ultimately grows together. I consider that a reassuring thought, but at the same time his statement offers us sufficient challenge to continue working with the greatest ambition to find and gather that high quality.

Hendrik Driessen
director