From Theo and Jo van Gogh-Bonger to a foundation and a contract, 1890–1962.

The Van Gogh Museum exists because a family kept a collection together. Dutch Wikipedia says that when Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 his work passed to his younger brother Theo, and on Theo’s death to his widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. She sold some works but kept a group representative of the whole œuvre, and turned down an offer from Anton Kröller for the entire collection.

After her death in 1925 the works passed to her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh. English Wikipedia says the collection was lent for many years to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Dutch Wikipedia says that in 1960 Vincent Willem set up the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, with his wife, his children and a representative of the Dutch government on its board, and that on 21 July 1962 the foundation and the Dutch state signed an agreement. The family transferred the collection, some two hundred paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, four hundred drawings and all of Vincent’s letters, on the main condition that it be housed in a museum devoted to Van Gogh.

The museum describes that contract in its own words. Its building page says the family worried that the collection would eventually be dispersed, so in 1962 they placed it with the specially established foundation, and the Dutch state undertook to build and run a museum in which it would remain permanently on public view “as if it were state property”. Dutch Wikipedia says the museum opened as a national museum; today it is an independent foundation, and under the agreement the works form part of the national collection. It lists Emile Meijer as director at the opening, and Emilie Gordenker, formerly director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, as director since 1 February 2020, succeeding Axel Rüger. Since 1991 the museum has also been responsible for De Mesdag Collectie in The Hague.

Around his paintings and drawings the museum shows works by contemporaries such as Gauguin, Monet and Signac. Dutch Wikipedia says the museum also holds the artist’s own collection of Japanese prints, along with his letters, written above all to Theo.

A Rietveld design, a Kurokawa ellipse and a glass hall, 1963–2015.

The main building began with Gerrit Rietveld, the architect and furniture designer of De Stijl. The museum says he designed it in 1963–64; Dutch Wikipedia says the commission came from the state’s Rijksgebouwendienst. Rietveld’s sketch design was then worked up by his partners Joan van Dillen and J. van Tricht, who departed from his plans for the façades: instead of alternating glazed brick and hollow steel panels, they chose an imitation rubble stone in concrete throughout. Building began in 1969, the year the library opened, and the museum opened on 2 June 1973. Dutch Wikipedia describes a building of concrete block and glass, with rooms around a central void laid out on a five-metre grid; the museum points to the staircase in the central hall, where daylight falls from a high skylight.

The second building is an ellipse. The museum says Kisho Kurokawa designed the exhibition wing, which opened in 1999, choosing asymmetry as a contrast to Rietveld’s cube, with the box-shaped print room set at an angle to the axis of the wing, and that the wing was made possible by The Japan Foundation and the Tokyo-based Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company. Dutch Wikipedia says it is a concrete building clad in natural stone and titanium, sunk halfway into the ground of the Museumplein, and that its opening exhibition was devoted to Theo van Gogh. While it was being built, the main building was remodelled in 1998–99 to a design by Martien van Goor, who brought the layout closer to the original design and moved the offices into a glass annex. A later renovation for new fire-safety rules closed the museum from late September 2012; Dutch Wikipedia says its key works were shown at the Hermitage Amsterdam until the end of April 2013.

The third phase is glass. Dexigner reported on 7 September 2015 that Hans van Heeswijk Architects had completed a new entrance building, elaborating a draft by Kisho Kurokawa Architect and Associates, the firm behind the 1999 wing, so that the museum’s entrance faced the Museumplein. The report described structural glass fins up to 12 metres long, a façade of cold-bent double laminated glass with 20 fins, a roof of about 600 square metres carried by 30 more, and a glass staircase supported on a triple laminated glass arch. “We want to capture the sunny atmosphere, which you see reflected in many paintings of Van Gogh,” Van Heeswijk told the site. The museum gives the opening date as 5 September 2015.

A Rietveld cube, a titanium ellipse and a glass hall on the Museumplein.

An art museum’s identity often starts with its building. The façade, the roofline or a single unusual window becomes the shape people remember, and posters, tote bags and membership cards borrow from it long before any logo is drawn. Names do similar work. A long official title is shortened in everyday speech to a surname, a place or a set of initials, and many museums eventually adopt that short form as the word mark, sometimes reduced further to a single letter or monogram that can sit on a banner, a ticket or a phone screen. A collection that spans centuries asks for a mark that stays quiet next to the art, so house identities tend to rely on a restrained typeface, a narrow palette and plenty of empty space.

Exhibitions pull in the other direction. Each major show usually gets its own title treatment, colours and imagery drawn from the works on display, and the house mark steps back to a corner of the poster or the catalogue spine. Inside the building, wayfinding carries the identity in its plainest form: floor numbers, gallery names and directions set in the house typeface on walls, lifts and printed maps. The shop and the ticket desk extend it to bags, labels, admission tickets and membership material, where colour can code a ticket type or a membership level. Online, a digital collection site turns the identity into an interface, with image grids, object records and search filters that have to work for researchers and casual visitors alike.

Brushstrokes from The Mower, a stamp-like square and colours from the artist’s palette.

The museum’s identity has been built by two Dutch studios. A 2011 project record for the visual identity credits Koeweiden Postma of Amsterdam, with concept by Jacques Koeweiden and Eddy Wegman. It says the starting point was the characteristic brushstrokes of Van Gogh’s painting The Mower, that a palette drawn from the colours of his key works served as a background for selected quotations from the artist, and that the black-and-white logo, reminiscent of a stamp, was inspired by the angular shape of the museum building.

Studio Dumbar later refreshed the system. The studio says it was invited to organise the museum’s brand governance and refresh its identity, and proposed a more streamlined, monolithic identity that brought the museum’s activities under one recognisable brand. It kept two parts of the existing identity, the black square logo and the typography, and made colour the second key element: a selection drawn from Van Gogh’s own palette that pairs familiar hues such as chrome yellow and cobalt blue with less familiar secondary colours. The agency group DEPT, of which Studio Dumbar is part, dates that identity to 2018 in a case study of the museum’s website, saying each web page was given its own colour adapted to the work shown on it. For the museum’s fiftieth year, in 2023, the museum issued a special anniversary logo and asked the press to use it when referring to that year’s activities.

The two buildings remain the setting for the mark. The Rietveld building shows the permanent collection, the Kurokawa wing holds the large temporary exhibitions, and since 2015 the glass hall between them has been the way in from the Museumplein, the square the museum shares with the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum.

For a design guide, the Van Gogh Museum shows an identity kept deliberately quiet so the paintings can carry the colour: a black square that echoes the angular building, a typography left unchanged through a refresh, and a palette taken from the artist’s own. Compare the Stedelijk Museum and Rijksmuseum guides. For this guide we use square black, chrome yellow, cobalt and gallery white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Van Gogh Museum’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.