AMSTERDAM.- The exhibition Blue Dots opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s IMC Gallery on November 29. In a time of looming war and mounting tensions, the Stedelijk Museum looks back to an earlier period of geopolitical rivalry: the Cold War.

In 1951, the Dutch government introduced a system that required museums to categorize their collections for evacuation in times of war. They used ‘evacuation dots’ to indicate which works should be saved first: red for ‘very important’, white for ‘important’, and blue for ‘less important’.

Curator Nadia Abdelkaui, who joined the Stedelijk in 2024, stumbled upon this system while researching the collection. “This system was new to me, and we had forgotten that, at the time, this was standard practice. I immediately dived in, curious to see which choices had been made back then. I wanted to put the ‘blue dots’, the works that had once been deemed ‘less important’, center stage. It turned out that not all of the sub-collections had been ranked according to this dot system; only the painting collection had been done. They’d started, but hadn’t finished, classifying the sculpture and drawing collections. In those days, applied art, photography, graphic design and industrial design were evidently seen as less important. Autonomous, non-reproducible art was given pride of place.”

Blue Dots features work by renowned 19th-century artists like Jozef Israëls and Thérèse Schwartze, as well as lesser-known names like José Maria Rodriguez-Acosta and Marie de Roode-Heijermans. At the time, the work of Nola Hatterman — an almost forgotten artist who is celebrated today — was also given a blue dot.

Rein Wolfs, director Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: “If the exhibition tells us anything, it is how the vision of a collection can change over time. For several years, Op het terras, (On the Terrace), a portrait of Louis Drenthe by Nola Hatterman, has been one of the key works in the Stedelijk’s permanent collection. Last year, it was even featured in the groundbreaking exhibition about The Harlem Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Stories about art are rewritten and reinterpreted all the time.”

In total, between 1951 and 1965, roughly 10% of the artworks — mostly (floral) still lifes, landscapes, and cityscapes — were allocated a blue dot. The dots bear witness to the Stedelijk’s modernist orientation: abstraction and expressionist paintings were considered of greater importance. Willem Sandberg, the director at the time, believed that artists should be ‘forward-thinking’ and concentrate on innovation. Traditional painting and modern figurative painting were often relegated to the sidelines.

75 years on, Blue Dots invites us to think about what is important. And about what, when it comes down to it, we would like to preserve for future generations.