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Rotterdam's old art museum has been shut for years for a deep renovation, so the most talked-about way to see its collection now is a building that breaks the usual rule about where museums keep their storerooms. The Depot, opened in 2021, is a giant mirrored bowl by the local architects MVRDV, its curved glass throwing back a warped picture of the city and carrying a rooftop of birch trees. Inside, rather than a curated fraction, the museum's whole holding of around 150,000 objects is on view at once, arranged by the climate each material needs.
The collection took its double name from two donors, the lawyer Frans Boijmans, whose pictures came to the city in 1847, and the businessman Daniël van Beuningen, whose holdings arrived in the 1950s. Together they built one of the Netherlands' great old-master collections.
Its treasures include Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Little Tower of Babel, a swarming spiral of a doomed building, and paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, alongside Rembrandt and a strong line of modern and surrealist art from Dalí and Magritte. Until the historic 1930s building reopens, they hang on the shelves and glass cases of the store itself, seen much the way the conservators see them.
