CODART 2020 Congress Online
On this page we proudly present CODART’s first online congress. Now that CODART 23 is postponed to 2021, there will be no large meeting for CODART members this year. As an alternative way to connect CODART members with their colleagues from all over the world, we are organizing various activities on the original congress days (14-16 June 2020). Please see below for more information and links. This page will be updated as soon as new content is available.
Sunday 14 June
On the day that would have seen the festive opening reception of the CODART congress we have a Word from the director by Maartje Beekman, director of CODART, in which she reflects upon the past year and looks forward to a challenging new future.
Furthermore, we proudly present the first CODART Conversations: a recorded conversation between five CODART members from various countries discussing the current situation and the impact on their museums. We are honored that Mark Evans, Robert Schindler, Anja Sevčík, and Júlia Tátrai have accepted our invitation to share their thoughts on the topic. The discussion is moderated by Micha Leeflang, who recently joined the program committee.
Monday 15 June
We will publish a special Curator in the Spotlight featuring Carina Fryklund on Monday. Carina is the curator of old master paintings, drawings and prints before 1700 of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
On Monday at 4pm CEST all CODART members are invited to join the first CODART webinar. Quentin Buvelot, Senior Curator of the Mauritshuis, will host this meeting for which we have asked two speakers – Koen Kleijn, editor of Ons Amsterdam and art-critic for De Groene Amsterdammer, and Jacquelyn Coutré, Eleanor Wood Prince Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1750 of the Art Institute of Chicago – to share their thoughts and ideas on the future of exhibitions.
Tuesday 16 June
On Tuesday we publish the first-ever digital Speakers’ Corner on our website. The three participants have made seven-minute-long videos in which they put questions to their fellow curators or appeal to them for help with a project or research questions. Hopefully this online edition of the Speakers’ Corner will spark as much response as the live version each year.
Stockholm Online
For those CODART members who feel that they are truly missing out on all that Stockholm has to offer, we compiled an overview of virtual visits to locations that were part of the CODART 23 program.
Nationalmuseum
The Nationalmuseum reopens their doors to the public on 16 June! The museum is Sweden’s biggest art museum, housing around 16,000 paintings and sculptures, together with decorative arts and around 500,000 prints and drawings. Besides large holdings of paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dutch seventeenth-century paintings are also well represented within the collections of the Nationalmuseum. To get an impression of the collection, one should explore the excellent online collection catalogue. The museum also houses Sweden’s largest collection of drawings by the Dutch masters. These are included in the online catalogue Dutch Drawings in Swedish Public Collections.
Skokloster Castle
Built between 1654 and 1676, Skokloster is considered one of the best-kept Baroque castles of Europe. The castle was commissioned by military commander Count Carl Gustaf Wrangel but was never fully completed. This resulted in an unfinished banqueting hall and the presence of building tools that remained in the building. Most of the castle has remained in its original state for over 300 years. There is an online exhibit about how the castle would have looked if its construction would have been finished.
Skokloster’s well-preserved rooms can be explored virtually from home. The rooms contain diverse collections of paintings, furniture, textiles, silver and glass tableware, as well as books and weapons. They include a collection of 1,000 paintings, 600 of which are portraits dating from the fifteenth century to 1961. Other genres, such as landscapes, still lifes, history paintings, genre paintings and religious works, are also well-represented. There are notable works by Jacob Jordaens, Roelandt Savery, Gerard van Honthorst, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Jan Steen and Salomon Koninck. Highlights include Joseph and his Brothers by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout and The Holy Family in a Boat by Jacob Jordaens.
Hallwyl Museum
The Hallwyl Museum is closely associated with its visionary founder, Wilhelmina von Hallwyl (1844–1930) who systematically transformed her home into a museum. Wilhelmina von Hallwyl adopted an “encyclopedic” perspective to collecting. She set out to accumulate a wide-ranging selection of objects and artworks. The Hallwyl Museum could well be described as a showcase for her eclectic taste. Through the preservation of the whole house as a museum, the era and the social environment in which she lived would be preserved, as well as the values, interests and norms of her time.
The collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of the highlights of the museum. There are more than 400 artworks in the painting collection, some 160 of which are Dutch and Flemish. Most of these can viewed when walking virtually through the museum.
The Vasa Museum
The ship Vasa foundered on its maiden voyage in 1628 and was raised from the seabed in 1961. The ship is now exhibited in the Vasa Museum, the most popular museum in Scandinavia, attracting 1.5 million visitors annually. The Vasa was one of the most powerfully-armed vessels in the world. However, the ship was dangerously unstable, and capsized and sank almost immediately after leaving Stockholm’s harbor. During the 1961 recovery (which was well documented), thousands of artifacts were found, providing scholars with invaluable insights into details of naval warfare, shipbuilding techniques, and everyday life in early seventeenth-century Sweden. Not everything is recovered though. In 2018 a project was started to retrieve some of the 61 cannons that remain lost. The latest findings of this project are documented on the Vasa website.