Willem Adriaan van Ravesteijn (Amsterdam, 2 April 1938 – Laren, North Holland, 6 January 2015) was a Dutch gallerist and art collector in the Netherlands.Rutger Pontzen, "Conceptuele kunst verliest zijn pionier," de Volkskrant. 16 januari 2015. He and Geert van Beijeren founded the leading Dutch art gallery Art & Project (1968–2001) and publishers of the art magazine of the same name (1968–1989). During its thirty-year existence, the gallery as well as the magazine made substantial contributions to the Dutch art climate.Ed. "Galeriehouder Van Beijeren dood," NRC Handelsblad, 2005/03/06.
Biography Van Ravesteijn studied architecture at Delft University of Technology around 1960.Ineke Schwartz, "Kunst ART & Project Wil van kunst geen kaas maken," Trouw. Meppel, 1990/01/16, p. 15. Geraadpleegd op Delpher op 13-10-2019.
In Amsterdam-Zuid in September 1968 he and a friend opened their own gallery, Art & Project, which Van Ravesteijn ran and which exhibited artists including Gilbert & George, Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, and Lawrence Weiner.
In June 2014, Van Ravesteijn was awarded a knighthood in the Order of Orange-Nassau.
Art collection "depot VBVR"
The largest part of the collection, approximately a thousand works, has been gradually handed over to the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschedé. Other Dutch museums that received loans from the Van Beijeren-Van Ravesteijn collection are: the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. In 2008, after the death of Geert van Beijeren, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City received a collection of some 230 prints, books, posters, photographs and other ephemera from Art & Project co-founder Adriaan van Ravesteijn. The gallery's archives and the owners' personal archives are kept at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD).'Art & Project/Depot VBVR: collection and archives' on website rkd.nl.
In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition entitled "In & Out of Amsterdam", drawing largely on the Van Ravesteijn-Van Beijeren bequest."In & Out of Amsterdam" exhibition at MoMA, Artdaily.
Gift to the Kröller-Müller Museum In 2013, Van Ravesteijn donated a significant part of the Art & Project collection to the Kröller-Müller Museum. This donation contained over 200 works of art, mostly sculptural works by Dutch artists such as Ger van Elk, Jos Kruit, Carel Visser and Leo Vroegindeweij, and international artists as Carl Andre, Adam Colton, Tony Cragg, Barry Flanagan, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, Andrew Lord, Juan Muñoz, Willy Ørskov and Nicholas Pope.
References
Further reading Ton Geerts, 'Interview with Adriaan van Ravesteijn on the Art & Project Bulletins, May 17, 2011', in: L. Riley-Smith (ed.), Art & Project Bulletins 1-156, September 1968-November 1989, Londen 2011, p. 63-84 Rini Dippel, 'Art & Project: The Early Years'. In: Christophe Cherix (ed.), In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976, 2009, page 23-34 (online text partly available at Google Books)
External links In memoriam: Adriaan van Ravesteijn, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam