Frommer's Review
The modern-art Stedelijk Museum's permanent premises, on Paulus Potterstraat at Museumplein, have closed entirely during refurbishment, until sometime in 2008. But modern-art lovers can catch the latest exhibit at Stedelijk Museum CS, the temporary quarters just east of Centraal Station (hence the "CS").
The city's modern-art museum has works by Dutch painters such as Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning, and Piet Mondrian, and by Dutch-Americans like Calder, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and Warhol. It houses the largest collection outside Russia of Kasimir Malevich's abstract paintings, but centers its exhibits around the De Stijl, Cobra, post-Cobra, nouveau réalisme, Pop Art, color-field painting, zero, minimalist, and conceptual schools of modern art. The museum cafe features a giant Appel mural from 1956.
The Mondrian paintings displayed here include his Composition in Red, Black, Blue, Yellow, and Gray (1920), and, by way of variation, Composition in Blue, Red, Black, and Yellow (1922) -- the gray's still there, but he chose not to mention it in the title. Van Gogh gets in on the act too, with his Montmartre (1887), Carnations (1888), and The Diggers (1889).
These are alongside a handful of paintings by Chagall, Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, Monet, and Manet, but the primary focus is on post-1945 art. Not all of the collection is on display all the time, and it's possible that you won't see many -- or even any -- of these. Despite the names mentioned here, the Stedelijk is not the place to see van Goghs or works by French Impressionists.
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