The story
One of the best-known pictures at the Van Abbemuseum is Marc Chagall's Hommage à Apollinaire, painted in Paris around 1912. A single nude figure divides at the waist into Adam and Eve, and beside it a pierced heart carries the names of four friends who backed the young painter, among them the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. It shows what this museum in Eindhoven has done from the start, collecting the art of its own century while it was still new.
The museum carries the name of Henri van Abbe, a local cigar manufacturer who loved modern art and wanted his city to share it. It opened in April 1936 in a brick building by the architect A.J. Kropholler, with a clock tower above the entrance. In 2003 a large new wing was added beside it.
The collection leans towards the radical. There are two paintings by Piet Mondrian made 17 years apart, Composition XIV of 1913, painted in Paris under the influence of Cubism, and a white square from 1930 cut by three black lines, one of his most austere works. His fellow De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg is here too. The museum also owns one of the world's largest groups of paintings by the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, alongside work by Picasso, the German artist Joseph Beuys and the painter Marlene Dumas.
