Necrology Museum director Henk van Os

The phone rings on a spring evening in 2001. Henk van Os on the line. That the ‘super professor’ and former director of the Rijkmuseum called had never occurred before, but now higher interests played. At the retirement of the Leiden professor of Art History Anton Boschloo, a party bundle would appear, and I was one of the editors of that bundle. A variety of colleagues and friends brought the upcoming Emeritus Hommage with a short contribution. Van Os wanted it differently: for his text in honor of his dearly friendly professional and age-old, he asked twice the maximum number of words and, as the only one in the book further in black and white, a color image. He would pay the extra costs himself. Henk van Os characterizes the action: on friendly but also persistent tone, he tried to achieve the impossible, a strategy that will not have hurt him in the world of Museum and Kunsthandel in negotiations.

Hendrik Willem van Os (Harderwijk, 28 February 1938), who died on Saturday evening at the age of 87 in his hometown of Amsterdam, played several registers in performance and preferences. For example, you would say that you would say at a curriculum vitae on which different professorships and the directorate of the most important museum in the country adorn. His origins from a well -to -do academic environment, and his appointment as a cultural mentor of the crown prince at the time and his wife complete the image of someone who moved in privileged circles for a lifetime. Nevertheless, Van Os often emphasized that his heart was with the socialist ideals of cultural elevation of broad layers of the population, and his sympathy was with those who are committed to it.

Sometimes the categories overlapped each other. For example, Van Os, when he first visited the Tuscan city of Siena as a student in 1958, met that « all the decent and nice people » were communist, without realizing that communism meant something different in post -war Italy than in the Netherlands. In 1975-1976 he took the professorship for a short time where at the Marxist stronghold that was the then Catholic University of Nijmegen. Van Os belonged to the few professors who managed to gain access to the main building during an occupation of the Literature Faculty, by first changing striking of ideas with the ‘rather nice’, demonstrating students. Once inside, he first went to study violin for half an hour.

National visibility

Community sense and attention to the interests of the collective also appear from a certain democratization among the Rijksmuseum staff, from curators to room watchers, who made Van Os in his time as director (1989-1996), and from the way he in the TV programs Museum treasure and Iconoclasm made artworks accessible to a wide audience. It is also significant that after his rich museum director he was appointed university professor ‘Art and Society’ at the University of Amsterdam (1996-2016).

The national visibility in those years was a lot less in the first part of Van Os’ career. During his art history studies in Groningen, he was seized by the art of medieval Italy. Adventurous was the choice for the study of the art production of the 14th and 15th centuries in Siena. That city south of Florence is nowadays a tourist attraction, but in the 1950s it was almost unexplored territory in (art) historically. Van Os was attracted by, as he later admitted, romantic image he had of the natural functioning of art in a medieval urban community. However, he would do groundbreaking research in the field of performances around local Maria worship (thesis 1969), and later published the two -part standard work Sienese Altarpieces 1215-1460 About decorations of altars in the churches of the city. Five years after his promotion, he was appointed professor of Art History in Groningen in 1974, where he was also dean of the Letterenfaculty from 1984 to 1989. Internationally he was a wanted guest professor, who taught at Smith College Northampton (MA) and the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence.

Religious art from the Middle Ages always kept Van Os’ interest, as is also apparent from important exhibitions about devotion art and worship that he curved. But his art-historical interest was much broader, from the 19th-century Russian painter Ilja Repin to the Groningen pre-war artists’ collective ‘De Ploeg’. And his contribution about a French, 18th-century engraving with a performance by the Byzantine General Belisarius ended up in the middle of the book for Anton Boschloo. Double of length and equipped with a self -funded color image.

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