Amsterdam, spring
Museumplein, and the small building on its south side
An afternoon walk across Museumplein, with one observation about its smallest museum — the Moco — which I had walked past for years without entering, and which I have, after one afternoon inside, decided to write about.
Museumplein, in Amsterdam, is the kind of square that wants to be approached on foot from a specific direction. Coming up from the south via Van Baerlestraat, you arrive at the foot of the Concertgebouw, see the long lawn rolling north toward the Rijksmuseum, and the four big museums arrange themselves around you almost too symmetrically. The Stedelijk and the Van Gogh on the west. The Rijksmuseum to the north. And, on the south-east corner — small, narrow, easy to miss — the Moco.
I had walked past the Moco for years. I had assumed, without checking, that it was a private gallery, or a foundation, or a single-collector's vanity project — anything but a museum I would want to enter. I was wrong on at least the third count, and probably the first two.
What the building is
The Moco occupies a townhouse at Honthorststraat 20, on the corner with Van Baerlestraat. The building is neo-Renaissance, late nineteenth century, four storeys including a basement, and from the outside it looks like the kind of place that should contain a notary's office. Inside, it contains modern and contemporary art — predominantly artists associated with the street-art tradition (Banksy, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol) alongside contemporary names like Yayoi Kusama, KAWS, Daniel Arsham, and a rotating selection of newer Dutch and European work.
The collection is curated rather than encyclopaedic. You will not see "all of Warhol" or "all of Banksy" — you will see selected pieces, hung close to each other, on three floors of converted domestic-scale rooms. The smallness is the point. The Stedelijk, across the square, gives you contemporary art at the scale of a warehouse. The Moco gives you contemporary art at the scale of a house. They are not in competition; they are entirely different experiences.
The Stedelijk wants you to be impressed. The Moco wants you to be close.
What is on view
The current rotation, on the day I walked through, included three Banksys ("Laugh Now", "Kissing Coppers", and a smaller piece I did not recognise), a Warhol Marilyn series, a Keith Haring corner, and a basement immersive installation that involved projection mapping onto a darkened room. The basement was the surprise of the visit. I had expected to spend forty seconds in it and walked out forty minutes later.
The exhibits rotate, so the specific pieces I saw will not necessarily be the ones you see. The Moco lists what is currently on display on its own website, including titles, materials, and the year each work was made. I check it before I go, now.
Hours, and the route I take
The Moco is open every day. The hours run from morning through evening, longer on Fridays and Saturdays — on a Saturday in spring, the last entry is around nine in the evening, which is later than almost any other museum in Amsterdam. This matters more than it sounds. It means you can have a normal afternoon — coffee, a long walk through the Jordaan, a lunch that runs an hour over — and still walk through the Moco before dinner.
The route I now take, when I have an evening to fill: arrive at Centraal in the late afternoon, take tram 2 or tram 5 south to the Van Baerlestraat stop, walk one minute east, and enter the Moco at about six in the evening. The crowds are gone by then. The light through the gallery windows on the upper floor is the kind of golden late-afternoon light that no museum can produce artificially, and the staff have softened slightly compared to the morning shift.
Address: Honthorststraat 20, Amsterdam. Trams 2, 5, and 12, Van Baerlestraat or Concertgebouw stops. The building is the small one. Look for the line.
What I would tell a friend
If you have one afternoon in Amsterdam and you have already done the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh, the Moco is the next obvious stop. If you are short on time and have never seen any of the four museums on Museumplein, do the Rijksmuseum first. The Moco is not a replacement for the big collections; it is a complement to them — a small, dense, contemporary counterpoint to the canvas-by-the-square-metre experience next door.
What it does, that the bigger museums on Museumplein do not, is end the afternoon at a comprehensible scale. After three hours of Rembrandt and Vermeer, walking into a narrow nineteenth-century townhouse and looking at a Banksy hung at standing height feels, frankly, like a relief. I cannot remember the last time a museum made me feel relieved. But the Moco did.