On 14 May 1940, Henk Chabot watched Rotterdam burn from the Rotte. He painted the smoke, heat and red sky in Brand van Rotterdam. The painting now hangs in the Chabot Museum, a white villa in Museumpark. He is a distant relative from another branch of my family.
The bombs fell on the centre from 13:27 onward. The official memorial page records almost 900 deaths and about 80,000 people left without homes. Aunts and grandmothers in my family died in that war. Most of the centre was flattened.
I knew almost none of the dates as a child. Naum Gabo’s steel construction was already on the Coolsingel when I was born, and I cannot remember the first time I saw it. I found the dates this spring while rebuilding the design of this site and reading about Rotterdam’s public art.
One archive photograph shows the Gabo in transit on 7 May 1957. The construction lies on a barge and lorry apparatus as it moves through Rotterdam at night, on its way to the pavement beside De Bijenkorf.
My mother took me to museums in the eighties. She also took me into nature and made things from whatever she found there. I cannot reconstruct a single gallery from those visits, but looking at art became ordinary. Rotterdam made it easy to continue outside because so much of the collection stood in the street. While rebuilding this site, I read about works I already knew by sight.
De Bijenkorf connects the two sculptures I kept returning to. It donated Ossip Zadkine’s The Destroyed City, which stands at Plein 1940 with a hole through its torso. According to Sculpture International Rotterdam, Zadkine got the idea after arriving by train in the devastated city in 1946. The bronze was unveiled on 15 May 1953. Rotterdammers call the figure Jan Gat, or Jan with the hole. I knew the nickname long before I knew the unveiling date.
A short walk from Jan Gat, the department store commissioned Gabo’s abstract construction for the pavement beside Marcel Breuer’s building. I learned its measurements this spring. It is twenty-six metres of steel profile, tube and wire mesh, weighing around 40,000 kilos by Sculpture International Rotterdam’s count. The building and sky remain visible through the mesh. I used that transparency when deciding that images should sit inside the page, with the type visible around them.
I still needed a colour reference. Reading about Rotterdam’s museum collections led me from Karel Appel to CoBrA. Kunstmuseum Den Haag describes its brightly coloured work as a demand for artistic freedom after wartime hardship and oppression. I used CoBrA’s saturated colour as the reference for this site.
For this site I paired CoBrA’s saturated colour with the strict Scandinavian grids of Stockholm Design Lab. The homepage uses the colour in its large fields. The article pages use the grid to place type and images.
Sculpture International Rotterdam groups the public collection into a thirty-stop route from the Westersingel to the Wilhelminapier. Some works on it irritate me. They are still there for anyone walking to work or going shopping, including people who would never choose to enter a museum.
Next time I am home, I want to walk from the Westersingel to the Wilhelminapier and count all thirty works.
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.
