Rudi Fuchs, Director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, might appear to be a contradiction in terms. One of Europe’s star curators, he has been recognised as audacious, an art zealot, a risk taker, a passionate supporter of the avantgarde. He has also been cast as retrograde, an incurable romantic bolstering a Eurocentric art tradition. The truth is, of course, neither and both, and far more subtle. Rudi Fuchs loves metaphor and you can see that in his writing. He wanted to subtitle his Documenta 7 ‘In which our heroes after a long and strenuous voyage through sinister valleys and dark forests arrive at the English Garden and at the gate of a splendid palace’. It was this 1982 survey of contemporary art that really made Fuchs’s name. Documenta 7 proved crucial in focussing world attention back on European artists, particularly on those exploring the legacy of national traditions and mythologies, like German neo-expressionists Georg Baselitz, Anselm Keifer, Markus Lupertz, and A.R. Penck.

Fuchs is known for the verve and precision of his installations. He likes to stage an experience rather than simply make a point. Documenta was no exception. With its poetic juxtapositions, the show traded in sensibilities and feelings—in aesthetics—rather than in arguments and conclusions. Fuchs placed old statues of female figures symbolising the arts of painting and sculpture on the covers of the two catalogues. American critics especially scolded Fuchs for his romanticism and ahistoricism. And yet his Documenta would prove prophetic, making space for new brands of art and curatorial practice that would flourish throughout the decade. After Documenta, Fuchs was appointed director of a new museum, the Castello di Rivoli, a huge, damaged Baroque castle in Turin. The semi-restored building provided a dramatic and novel setting for contemporary art. Some of the rooms were retrofitted as white cubes, others retained their original opulence. Some rooms combined the two, as crumbling old frescos were patched with plain plaster. Into this space of tradition in decay, Fuchs installed contemporary works by artists, including James Lee Byars, Lothar Baumgarten, and Jannis Kounellis. A conversation between currency and history, the Castello di Rivoli complicated the party line of modernism as an absolute break with tradition. Such charged contradiction would always inform Fuchs’s work as an exhibition maker and as a museum director.

After Rivoli, Fuchs took charge of the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, which boasts a great Mondrian collection. It was not until 1993, however, that he fulfilled his ambition to become director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, one of the world’s great modern-art museums. Here he developed his Couplets exhibition series, with imaginative and insightful juxtapositions of artists. In addition to his ongoing curating and writing, Fuchs is currently overseeing the expansion of the Stedelijk. The new wing, designed by the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza Vieira, will greatly expand the presentation of the permanent collection.

In the last few years, Fuchs has become involved in the New Zealand art scene. In 1994, he contributed a paper to Is Art a European Idea?, the Under Capricorn conference in Wellington. In 1996, the Stedelijk collaborated with City Gallery Wellington on another Under Capricorn project, the exhibition The World Over: Art in the Age of Globalisation (curated by Wystan Curnow and the Stedelijk’s Dorine Mingot). The show occurred simultaneously in Wellington and Amsterdam, and included work by an international roster of artists, including New Zealand’s Ruth Watson, Michael Parekowhai, and Colin McCahon. And now, The Exhibition of the Century, a show of modern masters drawn from the Stedelijk’s collection, is being showcased at City Gallery. Fuchs visited New Zealand to finalise and promote the show. On his last night in New Zealand, he talked to Artspace director Robert Leonard.
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Robert Leonard: So, what brings you to New Zealand?
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Rudi Fuchs: You know the reason. There’s this show of the classics of modernism from our collection, from Van Gogh to Jeff Koons, coming to New Zealand. It’s a concise view, a condensation of some of the major moments of twentieth-century art history. It’s really standard modernist stuff: the canon. It was made for Japan and the Japanese wanted the famous bits.
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This kind of masterpieces show, the canonical blockbuster, the art-history show, this isn’t at all the kind of show that you are known for doing. 
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I understand now why City Gallery wants this exhibition. They said they wanted it because they would have just renovated the gallery and there was the opportunity to work with Telecom and set up an almost entirely new . . . to make this City Gallery into a more important place than it had been before. It was only after I came here that I realised that it also had something to do with Te Papa. They didn’t tell me about that in our correspondence. I understand now that there is some kind of competition. If it were a business, they would say it was very healthy, and, in a way, it is very healthy. Actually, I initially suggested that we do something else, a different kind of show, something more critical, which could also have involved Malevich and Mondrian but in a different kind of presentation, and maybe have left out the Van Gogh and the Cezanne. But they didn’t really want to do that.

Two or three years ago, I was in Japan, just before the new art museum in Tokyo opened. It’s a huge building but the collection is very small, and they were discussing buying an early Roy Lichtenstein, not a very big one. And I think the asking price was like $7M. They finally bought it. But the reasons they bought it were completely different to the reasons that the Stedelijk bought their Lichtenstein triptych back in 1960s, the one with the plane, which is coming to Wellington. It was bought the year it was made, more or less. It may have been the first Lichtenstein bought by a museum. That painting came into the Stedelijk, as many other things did, at a critical moment: critical for the artist, critical for the museum, critical for the culture. Because there was a question: do you accept it or not? And that’s always the point. But the exhibition in Wellington is of stuff that has now all been accepted, which is fine, but, from a moral point of view, I don’t want to feel that I am just selling them an exhibition of masterpieces. That would not fulfil the ambitions of the Stedelijk. Since the Second World War, since the great Willem Sandberg became director, the Stedelijk has sought to be a museum with a very strict and close relation to the avantgarde itself, a museum which actually takes part in the creation of culture.

I realised, the first time I met an artist here, in New Zealand, when I had lunch with Ralph Hotere, that it would be important to do a second show, which the City Gallery could have in a year or so. Dutch collections would provide an exhibition, this time of art of the last ten years; young artists, mostly in their 30s and 40s—Dutch, French, Italian, American … We collect all that stuff, and at a time when the things are not yet expensive and are still critical. And I am sure I will be able to convince my colleagues to collaborate, because it will be good for art. I called my lecture in Wellington ‘This Is Only the Beginning of the Controversy’, because, here, in New Zealand, where visual art is a suspect entity anyway, the first exhibition will be controversial, but there will be another controversy—bringing out this second exhibition.

It will be good for the artists here. Yesterday, I was talking about it with John Reynolds, Richard Killeen, and Stephen Bambury, and I spoke to Peter Robinson about it down in Christchurch. For them, they can engage with this. There’s something that they can relate to. Ralph Hotere, who is 67, which is only slightly younger than Antonio Tapies or Karel Appel, might, in retrospect, become part of their tradition. And Stephen Bambury, in retrospect, may become part of the tradition of Mondrian or Malevich; more Malevich I believe. That will take years, but we will see that. But now, it is important that they can see themselves in relation to their contemporaries.

In a country like this, from what I have seen, what artists are making, the way they mix up things, the way they are irreverent towards traditions, and the way they are recreating something of their own around or through McCahon, this great naive master—it might be interesting for artists here to see the work of Georg Herold, a German artist from the tradition of Beuys and Sigmar Polke. And, in fact, one of the first things Peter Robinson did when he was in Aachen was go to meet him. There is something in Herold’s work which is completely uncontrolled, disorderly, different things in one. Not the particular, precise way of Mondrian or Barnett Newman or Dibbets or Jonathan Lasker—that’s neat painting—beautiful, orderly painting, where nothing can slip in because it’s all already in there. But in these things by Beuys or by McCahon or by Herold, you can feel it still is an open form or an open discourse. In the disorder, there’s the attempt and expectation that other things can slip in.
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You are known for installing works in challenging, speculative ways. Will that approach to installation inform the second show? 
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Well, it should be like that. I’m not sure how the first show is going to be. I’ve promised to make a design on paper now I’ve seen the gallery, but I’m not sure if they will do as I say. I would hang it in a dialectical configuration. I would not hang all the Mondrians in the same room. I would give them different perspectives to other things. But that’s too detailed to talk about now, making those kinds of exhibitions where the hanging makes an argument. That’s only possible when you work with your own collection or you can borrow some things from people you know very well, so there’s freedom to do that.
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How did you get involved with New Zealand?
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Well, it started when I met Wystan Curnow at the 1982 Sydney Biennale. We got on well. I think he’s two years older than I. And I sensed this kind of melancholy, the melancholic nature of his artistic feelings. It made me think that there was something deeply spiritual and interesting in New Zealand, but that there was also something else, something to be remade, as if it were an island that had drifted away from the main. And then there was also the fact of Colin McCahon, who was in The World Over in Amsterdam. McCahon was intriguing because there is a melancholy in his work which was like the melancholy I had sensed in Wystan. And the idea came to my mind that it would be possible to make a serious McCahon exhibition in Amsterdam, which might also be seen in other places in Europe. That was my secret agenda with this trip.
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What are your impressions of the scene here? 
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As Paula Savage was always telling me, you have to be careful in New Zealand. It’s a small country where everybody knows everybody. When a country gets fairly large, even a country the size of Holland, which is now sixteen million, you don’t have it anymore. But here, it is an important fact, anyway. It’s something I noted also in the poetry of Allen Curnow, that lots of the poetry is about his relations—his father, his mother, his sister, his uncles, imagined uncles. Like you are always telling your history and that history taken all together is becoming the history of the country. You have to mind that everything I say I say after ten days of being here. But I have a bit of experience at looking at things.

I find that the art world here, there’s something edgy about it, something vital, which is because of McCahon. There is something obsessive in its core which is not in Australian art or French art or in Swiss art. The reason German art does so well is because of Beuys. He was this obsessive presence. He addressed many problems; he talked about and questioned many things. German artists today, though they make very different kinds of work, they all respect the kind of man that he was. English art is also very good at the moment and that’s because there’s something energising in the work of Gilbert & George. If you look at English art, from Gainsborough and Reynolds, and on and on from then, through the nineteenth century, up to Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, and David Tremblett—wonderful artists that they are—there is this strange genteel, almost pastoral tradition. And then suddenly, there’s Gilbert & George, who literally fuck up everything, and they speak in this horrible cockney accent. They pulled the cork out of the bottle so all this stuff could come out. They changed the approach to subject matter. You can find the same thing here, with Colin McCahon. When you were an artist in England in the 1960s or 1970s, the first idea was to go to America, just as, before the war, it was to go to France. But these young English artists, they stay at home now. Not just in London, but Newcastle, Glasgow, Leeds—places like that. Here, as soon as people realise that McCahon has this kind of evocative power, they’ll know that there’s no reason to go to England or America, they can actually stay here and develop.
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McCahon didn’t travel much. He drew a lot on European modernism but read it in very strange ways. Wystan was really disappointed not to be able to include McCahon’s Here I Give Thanks to Mondrian in The World Over in Amsterdam.
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There’s another McCahon, of the sea and a cloud, but the cloud is actually a chrysanthemum of Mondrian’s. Mondrian’s flower becomes a cloud hanging above the black sea. A lot of such things are here, so it’s been very energising in a way. Coming here, talking to the painters here, I now know McCahon much better. I would really like to include one or two of his paintings in our collection. They would go so well with Kounellis, with Beuys and with Tapies.
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How do you see yourself, as an exhibition maker?
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Galleries can be incredibly boring, one painting after another, all about the same thing, more or less: a tree to the left, a tree to the right—some sun, some mist, some shadow. And they can also be very exciting. I believe that you have to create situations that are arresting. Like when you go to an opera and there is this moment between the various elements, between the form of the music, the sets, the singing, the decolletage of the soprano, the colour of her dress, the lighting. Suddenly, an incredible marvel is happening, and you can create that in galleries.

When I was in Italy doing the Castello di Rivoli, the Italians had no word for curator, so they had difficulty with what I was. The Italians call people like Germano Celant ‘critico’, so they called me critico. I told them that was a term I took offense to. I also didn’t like it because they were called critico, and I didn’t want to be like them. So I said, I am an ‘artigiano’, which is a craftsman. I am a craftsman of the eye.

I had a nice experience recently. I did a very classical exhibition, with Jan Hoet, of twentieth century Flemish and Dutch painting at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. In Italy, for an exhibition, they always have an ‘architetto’ and a critico, and the architetto installs the work. But we didn’t have an architetto. I wouldn’t allow it—we installed. And this architect, she said she could see that I had done the installation. And someone said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘I can see that when I see the intervals between the paintings.’ And I kind of like that. Maybe it’s allowed, to be a little proud of what I have learned to do, apparently not too bad.
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Sometimes the installations have been incredibly contentious. I was looking through an old issue of Artforum which had a bunch of reviews of your Documenta. The reviewers were all extraordinarily … 
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Upset.
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… harsh.
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I was called a ‘romantic fascist’. Thing is, now they are all doing that kind of exhibition-making, making things unclear. There’s something in art history itself, this unfortunate tendency that most curators have accepted, that they have to do it in a certain way, say chronologically or by country, because otherwise their public would not understand it. Americans want everything to be clear—they have this explanatory zeal. If you talk to American curators, when they speak of their trustees, they say they want everything explained to them, from A to Z. I can’t do that. There is something secretive about art, something that can’t be explained. I don’t pretend that I can explain Mondrian. I can give some hints. I can hang this next that. I’ve hung Mondrians next to extremely realistic paintings.
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And furniture!
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And furniture, even worse. But the precision of the realism in say this particular 1920s painting … it offers a similar kind of detail to a Mondrian. In that case, I wanted to show that the Mondrian was also done by the eye, painted by hand with one eye closed, looking carefully, intently. Things like that are important. But they take time, they take longer to get, and they take a public which is fairly sophisticated, but you can make them more sophisticated. So it’s less about explaining the work than making people understand that they should take that time, take the time to look at something, instead of just drifting through the gallery like it’s a shopping mall. With an installation, you can emphasise things like the basic difference in the abstraction of Malevich and Mondrian, say. The Malevichs are thickly painted and have almost no space behind them, they’re like surface things, while the Mondrians are very transparent, and you can actually enter into this endless space. Mondrian has to do with the tradition of Dutch landscape painting, while Malevich is from the tradition of Russian icon painting. From there, with an installation, you can develop these things, presenting alongside a Mondrian, say, a Dibbets work, a photographic reconstruction of a piece of gothic architecture. You look endlessly into this space, which is a Mondrian tradition. However, a Kounellis, with a metal cross on a plate of metal, it’s the Russian thing, the Malevich thing, the orthodox thing which is confronting you. Things like that you can indicate, but not much more.
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What’s your view of Te Papa?
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You cannot expect me to praise or criticise Te Papa. I can only understand it in terms of a country’s need for a national shrine. Someone said they preferred the British Museum, but actually it’s a similar kind of thing. You have to understand that the British Museum is the absolute and proper expression of a combination of historic interests—the enlightenment and imperialism. Similarly, Te Papa is also an expression of its moment—the modern age of media—and of a very different kind of historical judgement. In the British Museum, there is absolutely no doubt that the culture of white Christians is the superior culture, and in Te Papa, at least, there is that discussion. But what I object to, or what I would like to warn of—and I’ve said this to many of my colleagues here already, as every discussion in the last twelve days has begun and ended with Te Papa—is that Te Papa has nothing to do with the world of galleries and museums. It is something in itself. Most art galleries, by contrast, are fairly small. They have fairly precise programmes and a particular style to how they do things. I think we should talk more about how the new Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch is going to be, because it is exactly that kind of gallery, and they are being built all over the world, and they are entirely different to Te Papa. I fear that people might get confused, that Christchurch might think they have to do something like Te Papa, to become popular in that way. But they can never become popular in that way, they have to become popular as a precise institution. It’s like certain people like going to shopping mans and large warehouses and there are people who like to go to specialist stores. And both are important things to have and exploit, but they are different from each other, they cannot be the same. The installational side is very different too. The installation at Te Papa can only be as it is. It is like a Hollywood set, like Titanic. A big movie. You can’t expect it to be refined or discrete. You can do things in a small gallery you can’t do in a big museum, and vice versa. Of course, I must admit that my heart lies with the smaller gallery, but even the smaller gallery can be quite large, like our gallery in Amsterdam or the Tate Gallery in London.
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What of the future, the future for contemporary art, the future for museums like the Stedelijk? 
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After 100 years of modern art, the times are changing. The thing comes apart all over the place. There are all kinds of influences: the new youth culture, Internet, new countries entering the discussion—New Zealand, Australia, China … And you can’t say to China; ‘This modern art thing is ours, is West European, is North American.’ They’ll come anyway, and they will fuck it up. So there’s some kind of interchange going on, and the solidity and the authority of the traditional canon is failing. It’s coming apart like an old ship, creaking and starting to leak, and the mast falling down. So, it’s a good time to start the new contemporary art, which is not modern art anymore. Modern art is a style, a distinctive entity with particular elements and qualities. I think it’s time to create a museum of the art of the twentieth century somewhere. That’s something we have to confront urgently—it’s a big debate amongst my colleagues now. A lot of them want to have a museum of the twenty-first century! But if you look at the whole history of Western culture, next to the fifteenth century—which saw the emergence from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the development of perspective, the invention of oil paint in Flanders—after that, the second greatest moment in art was in the twentieth century with modern art. It was the invention of something entirely new—abstraction. And it saw an enormous expansion in terms of media, from Beuys using fat and Piero Manzoni using shit to people using electronics. And things also became very international—again very new. And all this happened in a very short time span. The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Pompidou … they are the great collections of that stuff. We can’t just move on and continue collecting and presenting the new contemporary art alongside the modern art as if nothing had happened. We have to put it into perspective. We have to make proper installations like the installation of sixteenth and seventeenth century arts in the National Gallery or the Louvre—it has to be something like that. I mean, everyone would find it ridiculous if the Rembrandt paintings from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam went into storage because of some speculative idea that something else was as interesting. Similarly, in the Stedelijk, we have some seven really good De Koonings, and they can’t be put into storage anymore. They are no longer speculative artworks that might be superseded—they are heavy. And that’s why we have to create a museum of the twentieth century.
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[IMAGE: Documenta 7]