from the museum website, 5 February 2009
To mark the 125th anniversary of the Vereniging Rembrandt (Rembrandt Association), the Groninger Museum will exhibit, in the period 22 November 2008 to 19 April 2009, almost all the works that it has acquired with the assistance of this Association.
The Groninger Museum first made an appeal to the Rembrandt Association at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1892, a portrait by the seventeenth-century Groningen painter Hermannus Collenius was purchased. Until long after the Second World War, most of the acquisitions by the museum, for which an appeal was made to the Rembrandt Association, were connected to Groningen art history. In addition to paintings by Groningen masters such as Collenius and J.J. de Stomme, this involved several important pieces of silver from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, the Asiatica collection was reinforced with porcelain, lacquerwork and tapestries.
The first modern art that the museum began to collect on a structural basis was the Expressionistic paintings of De Ploeg, the Groningen Expressionist group. International present-day art was first purchased with the support of the Rembrandt Association during and after the directorship of Frans Haks (1978-1995), and includes an artwork in the form of a mirror by Jeff Koons, silver tea and coffee services by Alessi, a large tapestry by Robert Kushner, and drawings by Andy Warhol. All these works will be on display in Mendini 1.