An artistic rebirth: reopening the Rijksmuseum

Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed to be shut for three years — the taste for colourless voids has come and, please God, is going.

Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the designer behind the museum’s new interior decoration, is obsessively anti-white. It kills anything on show, he says — that’s why he’s gone for a series of hangings of blue-grey shades as the background for objects and paintings. Occasionally, the fine gauze over the windows gives the place a touch of sepulchral gloom, but that’s a minor gripe. The sombre colours work, lingering backstage, not swamping the pictures. And so does a massive new rehang, which has two main elements to it.

First, there has been a cull: now only 8,000 objects, out of a total of nearly a million in the collection, can be seen.