There is a museum in Rotterdam with my family name on it. Henk Chabot belongs to another branch of the tree, a distant kinship rather than a direct ancestry, but his painting Brand van Rotterdam brings the connection uncomfortably close. On 14 May 1940 he watched the city burn from the Rotte and painted the smoke, heat and red sky.
The painting now hangs in the Chabot Museum, a white villa in Museumpark. Almost 900 people died in the bombing and about 80,000 lost their homes. Aunts and grandmothers in my family died during the war. Most of the centre disappeared.
I grew up in the city that came afterwards, and as a child my mother took me to museums. She took me into nature too, and made things from whatever she found there. I cannot reconstruct those museum visits room by room. What remained was the expectation that art belonged in ordinary life. Rotterdam reinforced it by keeping so much of its collection outside.
I knew Naum Gabo’s steel construction on the Coolsingel as part of the city long before I knew anything about constructivism. I knew Ossip Zadkine’s The Destroyed City as Jan Gat—Jan with the hole—before I knew that Zadkine conceived it after arriving by train in the devastated city in 1946. These were not works I had to seek out after developing an adult interest in art. They stood beside shops, roads and appointments, available to anyone with somewhere else to be.
The dates came much later, while I was rebuilding this site and trying to understand the visual instincts behind it. An archive photograph from 7 May 1957 shows the Gabo travelling through Rotterdam at night, stretched across a barge and lorry apparatus on its way to De Bijenkorf. It is a wonderful, slightly improbable sight: forty thousand kilos of steel being carried through the dark so that a department-store pavement could accommodate abstraction.
De Bijenkorf also gave Rotterdam Zadkine’s bronze. The Destroyed City was unveiled at Plein 1940 on 15 May 1953, its torso opened where a heart ought to be. Rotterdam knows it as Jan Gat—Jan with the hole—the name I knew long before Zadkine’s title or the history behind it.
The Gabo refuses that bodily language altogether. It rises twenty-six metres in steel profile, tube and wire mesh beside Marcel Breuer’s department store. Its mass is real enough to make the transport photograph look like an engineering operation, yet the finished construction lets the building and sky pass through it. That transparency stayed with me when I was deciding how images should inhabit this site: part of the page, with type and space still legible around them, rather than little sealed worlds dropped into an article.
Colour took me along another route. Reading about Rotterdam’s museums brought me back to Karel Appel and then to CoBrA, the short, unruly postwar movement named for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. CoBrA’s painters rejected the manners of official art in favour of saturated colour, rough marks, myth, folk art and the liberties they found in children’s drawings. Kunstmuseum Den Haag describes the work as a demand for artistic freedom after wartime hardship and oppression, giving the exuberance a history I had not known.
It also helped me recognise something I had absorbed before I could name it. Rotterdam was rebuilt with modern architecture, public sculpture and a confidence in strong colour. Some of it is beautiful and some of it irritates me, but all of it is exposed to weather, argument and indifference as people go about their day.
For this site I paired CoBrA’s appetite for colour with the strict grids of Stockholm Design Lab. They offered different kinds of confidence: unapologetic colour held inside an exact grid.
Only after choosing the direction did I see how much of Rotterdam had returned with it: the hard planes, public typography, saturated fields and art treated as part of the civic surface. I picked the design because it felt right and understood part of the reason afterwards.
Sculpture International Rotterdam maps thirty works on a route from the Westersingel to the Wilhelminapier. I know some of them by sight and some only by reading. Next time I am home, I want to walk the complete route and count all thirty, following the collection that helped teach me to look.
Source notes
- CoBrA period and collection context: Fondation Constant and Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
- Rotterdam bombing figures and the 14 May 1940 memorial context: Gemeente Rotterdam and Museum Rotterdam.
- Public art route and collection context: BKOR and Sculpture International Rotterdam.
- Public artwork details: Zadkine’s The Destroyed City and Gabo’s Untitled.
- Museum and design context: Chabot Museum, Chabot Museum on Brand van Rotterdam, and Stockholm Design Lab.
- Photo credits: Museumpark photo by Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0; Gabo transport by Herbert Behrens/Anefo via Nationaal Archief, CC0; Zadkine photo by Anna de Ruijter via Stadsarchief Rotterdam, CC0.
