Dutch Art Historian and Curator Rudi Fuchs Dies at 84

Dutch art historian and curator Rudi Fuchs has died at the age of 84 in Amsterdam. His family announced his death on Sunday to the Amsterdam daily newspaper Het Parool.

Born in 1942 in Eindhoven, Rudolf Herman “Rudi” Fuchs studied art history from 1967 to 1975 at Leiden University. In 1975, at the age of 32, he was appointed director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven; at the time he was the youngest museum director in the Netherlands. It was the beginning of a storied career as one of Europe’s leading museum directors.

In 1982 Fuchs gained international recognition as the artistic director of Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. Fuchs’s iteration of the quinquennial exhibition was marked by a rejection of 1970s art trends such as conceptual art, video, and performance—as Artforum noted at the time, Fuchs notably included only one video in the exhibition, Dara Birnbaum’s PM Magazine—in favor of painting and sculpture by the likes of Georg Baselitz, Keith Haring, and a 21-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat. It opened to fierce criticism even as it launched neo-Expressionism as one of the major art movements of the 1980s.

Between 1984 and 1991, partly in tandem with his directorship of the Van Abbemuseum, Fuchs was also the director of the Castello di Rivoli museum in Turin; in 1987 he became director at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hauge, a position he held until 1993. Later that year, despite having left the Gemeentemuseum with a deficit of over 4 million guilders—he would later publicly admit to “having no talent for administrative affairs”—he was hired as director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

At the Stedelijk, Fuchs—who famously disliked wall labels—was known for his impressionistic curation, which he likened to composing music or creating a play. A series titled “Couplets,” for example, paired historical works from the museum’s collection with pieces by contemporary artists such as Donald Judd, Jannis Kounellis, and Karel Appel. He also invited outsiders, including Queen Beatrix in 2000, to curate shows. His tenure, however, was marred by financial difficulties and an ill-fated expansion plan, and he stepped down as director in 2002.

After leaving the Stedelijk, Fuchs remained active as a writer, lecturer, and exhibition curator.

On the Stedelijk’s Instagram page, Rein Wolfs, the current director of the museum, wrote, “[A]s artistic director of Documenta 7 in 1982—the only edition ever led by a Dutch person—[Fuchs] emerged as a champion of new painting; as director of the Haags Gemeentemuseum, he transformed the way Mondrian was perceived; and as director of the Stedelijk, he surprised audiences with unexpected juxtapositions and innovative modes of presentation. … Through his acquisitions, presentations, and publications, Rudi made a significant contribution to the understanding of art; everything he did served as an encouragement to really look.”