Each year the Van Gogh Museum outlines its policies and activities of the previous period in an annual report.

Annual report 2011

More than 1.6 million people came to our museum in 2011. The year was packed with museum activities. Picasso in Paris, 1900-1907 took 450,000 visitors back to the early years of the talented Picasso. Our next exhibition was entirely different in character: in Snapshot: Painters and photography, 1888-1915, photography and painting came face to face. Both of these shows shed a unique light on Vincent van Gogh’s times and contemporaries.

A few works from our collection, such as the recently restored Bedroom, dazzled visitors to the Japanese exhibition Van Gogh: The adventure of becoming an artist, which attracted more than 600,000 Japanese admirers of Van Gogh.

The summer months in the Netherlands revolved around the exhibition Van Gogh in Antwerp and Paris: New insights, inspired by our research into Van Gogh’s working methods and studio practice. The second volume of our collection catalogue, Vincent van Gogh, Paintings 2, which was published around the same time, allowed Van Gogh lovers to delve into the details.

Van Gogh's letters
Another special literary moment was the Beijing Book Fair, where we signed a contract for the Chinese translation of Vincent van Gogh - The Letters, which will bring the artist’s more than 900 letters to the Chinese market. In addition, our letters team saw its labours rewarded again in 2011. For the exhibition Van Gogh’s letters: The artist speaks, the museum received the AICA Award 2011 for best exhibition of 2009.

Acquisition
In 2011, generous support enabled us to acquire two relevant works by Camille Pissarro. Van Gogh affectionately called him père Pissarro, a fact that clearly shows how central Pissarro was to his artistic development.

The Mesdag Collection
A splendid complement to our own collection is formed by that of Hendrik Willem Mesdag and his wife Sientje Mesdag-Van Houten. Since 1990, that collection, the museum that houses it and the Mesdag home have been under the management of the Van Gogh Museum. After several years of renovation, the Museum Mesdag in The Hague re-opened in 2011 under its new name of The Mesdag Collection, and visitors could once again enjoy the restored house, the beautiful garden and the collection, now presented in a new format.

Digital annual report
The Van Gogh Museum Annual Report 2011 is the first ever entirely in digital form.