By Jen Bidding Venmans
I cannot believe my first art blog post is going to be about a robbery. Last Tuesday thieves broke into the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam and according to Dutch police “took a couple of paintings.” Those couple of paintings happened to be a Picasso, two Monets, a Gauguin, a Matisse, a Lucian Freud and a self-portrait by Dutch painter Meyer de Haan. I live in the Netherlands so the police’s reaction is no surprise to me. This matter of fact tone is pretty standard in the Netherlands when it comes to pretty much everything. Museum director Emily Ansenk’s reaction was far more realistic to me, “It’s like a bomb went off.” This poor woman has probably been in non-stop projectile vomit mode since this whole ordeal went down, and who can blame her?
Public reaction to the heist has been mixed. The collection has only been on view for one week so there is talk about it being an inside job because it went “too smoothly.” One commenter on a news post said “Clearly the thieves were idiots, they stole a crappy Meyer de Haan, they must have mistaken it for a Matisse!” Leading another person to respond along the lines of oh please, pull your head out of your ass, de Haan is a famous Dutch painter and this is one of his finest works.
Others are placing the blame on Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas because he designed a museum with windows. The windows allow criminals to easily eyeball the contents of the museum and mastermind the perfect heist. I have to admit there are a lot of architects who design museums seemingly without any thought about security or the fact that mobs of people will be walking around to view, you know, art. Don’t get me started on the new “bathtub” Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (that’s a whole other blog post).
The Art Bureau 
Good job, Jen! You are off and running!