What’s hot in 2013: Arty anniversaries

With Christmas just around the corner, that means 2013 is hot on its heels, and what a year it will be!  Holland is looking forward to various anniversaries and landmarks, many of them varying great significance in the art world.

• The world-renowned Rijksmuseum will celebrate a grand re-opening on 14 April 2013, having been closed for renovations for a whole decade. The lengthy €375m project to restore the museum has been beset by “a thousand dilemmas”, and only a tiny gallery, The Philips Wing, has remained open to the public. Around 8,000 works of art are being reorganised to tell the story of the Netherlands from the Middle Ages to the present day. Only Rembrandt’s The Night Watch will be returned to its original setting, at the centre of the museum.
• The Van Gogh Museum will also reopen in April after a six-month renovation. Since October, the main Van Gogh collection has been temporarily on display at the smaller Hermitage Museum so as not to disappoint the 1.5 million visitors who visit the museum annually. The museum’s reopening will coincide not only with its own 40 year jubilee, but also with the 160-year anniversary of the artist’s birth, a triple cause for celebration.
• It isn’t just art institutions for whom next year is significant – the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra celebrates its 125th anniversary in 2013. The orchestra will mark the occasion by becoming the very first in the world to visit six continents in one year, taking anniversary concerts  to Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia. In August, the RCO will also perform an outdoor concert on a pontoon on the Prinsengracht, one of the most famous Dutch canals, which themselves will turn 400 years old in 2013.

2013 in Holland is a pivotal year, and any art lover should make sure they head over to join in the celebrations – taking the rail and sail Stena Line route across seems the most artistic way to do it, surely?