Celebrating the Icons of Art at Museum Voorlinden

What makes a work of art iconic? A new exhibition brings together masterpieces in an exploration of how images become embedded in our collective memory and whether even the most familiar artworks can still surprise us

The word ‘icon’ derives from the Greek eikōn, simply translating to ‘image’ or ‘likeness’. In the Orthodox Church, an icon was a divine threshold, a painted image through which the faithful believed they could reach the saint it showed. It was precisely this proximity between image and referent that made the icon dangerous. During the two periods of Byzantine Iconoclasm, from the 720s to 787 and again from 815 to 843, the empire was torn by the question of whether such images were idolatrous. The iconoclasts destroyed and defaced icons, fearing that worshippers would mistake the representation for the sacred reality it stood for. 

Fast forward to today and the meaning of the word ‘icon’ has evolved. Today, iconography exists in footage of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy in 1962 or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans of the same year. Images of people and objects have been reproduced so widely, and so the Byzantine anxiety persists in an inverted form. Where the iconoclasts feared that an image might be mistaken for reality, the contemporary risk is that an image becomes so familiar it no longer needs to be looked at. The philosopher Walter Benjamin argued in 1935 that mechanical reproduction strips the artwork of its aura and its unique presence in time. 

Celebrating the Icons of Art, a new exhibition at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, takes this idea as its starting point. It places contemporary works from the museum’s collection alongside loaned masterpieces of 20th-century art, and asks whether recognising an icon is the terminal point of seeing or a means of re-engaging with it. The exhibition seeks to give familiar works new meanings, placing contemporary works alongside older masterpieces to explore how artists continually return to, and reconfigure, the work of their predecessors.

But why do certain works stay in our collective memory? The museum’s director, Suzanne Swarts, defines an icon by the persistence of its image. “An iconic artwork is something that is fixated in your lens and it doesn’t go away,” she says. “You see something, you’re touched by it, you take it home, and after a day or maybe even a week it’s still in your mind and you’re able to reproduce it with your imagination. It’s something you take with you over the years.” And the exhibition is designed to test that claim. There are no wall texts and the lighting remains neutral throughout the exhibition. The visitor is left with only the artwork and a booklet to reference. “For us, the most important thing is that you get to have one-on-one with the artworks,” Swarts explains. The exhibition is limited to a hundred works “because we want to keep you feeling energised when you leave the museum, not overloaded.”

Celebrating the Icons of Art opens with Louise Bourgeois’s Spider Couple (2004), one of the long-legged, outsized and faintly menacing arachnids through which the artist returned throughout her late career to the figure of her mother. In Bourgeois’s account, the spider was patient and protective, and the sculpture holds those qualities in an uneasy suspension with threat. It faces Damien Hirst’s Hidden Secret Blossom (2019), a canvas heavily loaded with thick, colourfully painted dots. Its lushness is excessive, to the point of sickliness. The pairing sets two meditations on fecundity and care against one another. 

In an adjacent room, Francis Bacon’s In Memory of George Dyer (1971), painted after the death of Bacon’s lover, hangs behind two works by Latifa Echakhch and beside José Yaque’s Falla en el horizonte II, large, fragmented sculptures of broken bells scattered on the floor. Bacon’s smeared, fleshy figures contort against black voids. In the exhibition corridor, Ron Mueck’s Boy (1999), on loan from ARoS in Aarhus, crouches almost five metres high. The sculpture looks like a living, breathing young boy, magnified in scale. His veins are visible beneath his skin, individual hairs rendered in extraordinary detail, and the wary sideways glance of a boy who appears to have just noticed someone watching him.

The most persuasive pairings in the exhibition are the least obvious, and the most persuasive of these concerns water. Claude Monet’s late Blauweregen (1917–20) depicts a wisteria dissolving into reflection, which hangs behind Howardena Pindell’s Oceanic Underwater (2025), in which the sea is constructed from thousands of minute dots. Between them stands Roni Horn’s Untitled (“The immense accretion of flesh … ”) (2012–13), five solid cast-glass cylinders weighing a combined 22,500 kilograms, each some four and a half tonnes. The title quotes at length from Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), whose description of an elderly woman’s vast body likens the flesh that has engulfed her to “a flood of lava on a doomed city.” Wharton’s passage concerns ageing and endurance and Horn’s glass enacts a comparable paradox: immense weight concealed beneath surfaces that resemble still water. “They are all fascinated by how to visualise fluidity,” Swarts observes. 

Nearby, Bruce Nauman spells his own name in a neon light sculpture with an excess of letters, rendering it until it is barely legible as a name at all. In this exhibition room, “all the artists are interested in how you can combine fragments and create a completely different atmosphere,” Swarts says. David Hockney’s Grand Canyon, assembled from 60 canvases, extends that argument to the scale of landscape, its multiple viewpoints placing the viewer at the cliff’s edge above tiny trees far below. Swarts relays Hockney’s conviction that “there is no single point of view on reality. There are always several perspectives.” This remark might serve as the exhibition’s methodological principle.

There are many contradictions to describing an artwork as iconic. Some of the most important and perhaps “iconic” artworks of our collective memory has engaged with sociopolitical sentiments. Images tend to endure when they crystallise something a society is already feeling but has not yet found a form for. For instance, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) became a lasting emblem of the French Republic and Guernica fixed the bombing of a Basque town as the image of modern war. That retrospective recognition carries its own hazard. Once consecrated, an icon can be miniaturised, merchandised and reproduced on tote bags and key rings, until the image circulates freely while the work itself recedes from view. This is the modern counterpart of the danger the iconoclasts perceived. Swarts describes the exhibition as “a celebration of both recognition and surprise.” Recognition is both the source of an icon’s power and its danger; surprise restores the act of looking. Celebrating the Icons of Art makes a persuasive case that a great image, encountered at full scale and in good light, can still exceed its own reputation.