A museum that serves as a hub for creative cross-fertilization

The Van Abbemuseum is one of the first public museums for contemporary art to be established in Europe. The museum’s collection of around 2700 works of art includes key works and archives by Lissitzky, Picasso, Kokoschka, Chagall, Beuys, McCarthy, Daniëls and Körmeling.

The museum from Netherlands has an experimental approach towards art’s role in society. Openness, hospitality and knowledge exchange are important. In the process, it looks to challenge itself and its visitors to think about art and its place in the world, covering a range of subjects, including the role of the collection as a cultural 'memory' and the museum as a public site. International collaboration and exchange have made the Van Abbemuseum a place for creative cross-fertilization and a source of surprise, inspiration and imagination for its visitors and participants.

The Van Abbemuseum plays a unique position in the artistic landscape of Dutch and European museums. The facts and figures in this book will give you new insights to the museum, seen through the eyes of the people who work here and many art aficionados who bring it about. The Van Abbemuseum belongs to the city of Eindhoven as well to the art world.

The Van Abbemuseum’s museum shop stocks a superb range of art books, magazines, artist’s publications and picture postcards. You will find the Van Abbemuseum’s own publications here, as well as international publications which elaborate on the context and deeper implications of works in the museum’s exhibitions and collection. There are also countless other publications related to modern and contemporary art and visual media.

‘An oasis of calm, right in the middle of the city,’ is how one visitor described Karel 1 Museum Café – ‘Just your kind of thing’. The museum café with its adjoining terrace lies to the rear of the museum. Here the River Dommel has been widened to form a unique ‘inner lake’ that is partly surrounded by the museum’s new building.