Patronage of the arts isn’t dead in the Netherlands thinks Paul Schnabel and he’s not talking about the BankGiro lottery.

It looked like an Occupy camp avant la lettre. A group of Aboriginals had put up a rag taggly collection of tents and huts in the neat and tidy park in front of Canberra’s neat and tidy parliament building. I was reminded of it last week when the neat and tidy Australian prime minister fled in the face of a number of nor very neat and tidy looking, angry Aboriginals.
Their plight is even worse than that of the Native Americans. Australia’s original inhabitants have a deeply felt, mystical connection with the land. Like the Native Americans in the United States they fell victim to alcohol and diseases imported from abroad. For Australians Aboriginals are an object of both shame and guilt in their otherwise neat and tidy country.
Art
Aboriginal art is valued the world over. The paintings with their almost hallucinatory dots in black, white and ochre suggest a strong and ancient tie with the hot and dusty planes of inland Australia but they also touch a chord with the white middle classes and their penchant for abstract painting. It’s just like modern art, they say. Few people realise that this is exactly what it is: Aboriginal art as we know it is not more than forty years old. Pigments and the bark of a tree, wood or rock have been replaced by acrylics and canvas.
The traditional symbols are slowly beginning to give way to the artist’s personal vision. Many Aboriginal paintings would probably not be classed as such, especially if they lack the traditional earthy colour scheme.
Maecenas
There’s only one place in the world where Aboriginal art is shown in all its intense glory. The Aamu museum of modern Aboriginal art, housed in an outwardly unprepossessing building on the Oudegracht in Utrecht, is a private museum founded and supported by a Maecenas who is not a collector of Aboriginal art but who became fascinated by it after a visit to Australia.
The museum’s collection of several hundred works was added to by the collections of the Groningen museum, the Radboud University and the Tropen Instituut. The museum attracts over 30,000 visitors each year. At the moment it is staging a special exhibition dedicated to the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty from Sydney. It isn’t a huge exhibition but it contains examples of work by all the major Aboriginal artists.
Patronage
A large part of what we call the ‘Netherlands collection’ was not purchased with money from the state but donated by private individuals, a practice that is continuing to this day. ‘Beelden aan Zee’ (Sculptures near the Sea) in Scheveningen and Museum Pont in Tilburg are another two examples of privately funded museums, as was the Scheringa-Museum in Spanbroek until two years ago. A number of important private collections will eventually find their way to a museum. There really is such a thing as patronage of the arts in this country.
Paul Schnabel is head of the government social policy unit SCP