Joop van Caldenborgh’s collection began with a teenage purchase and grew into a museum
Dutch collector Joop van Caldenborgh turned a paper route into a lifelong habit of looking closely. At 16, he used his earnings to buy a portfolio of prints by Peter Struycken, an early choice that already pointed toward the abstract and the exacting. Decades later, the wealth he built through Caldic, the international chemicals business he founded, helped him assemble one of the Netherlands’ most significant private collections.
That collection eventually became too large for his home and company buildings, prompting Van Caldenborgh to create Museum Voorlinden, which opened in 2016 just outside the Hague. The museum’s long, low profile and broad views onto the surrounding gardens were conceived to let art, nature, and architecture sit in close conversation. Van Caldenborgh’s holdings include works by Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, and Anselm Kiefer, and he has since donated the collection to the museum while continuing to add new acquisitions.
The museum is marking its tenth anniversary with an exhibition devoted to William Forsythe, underscoring how Voorlinden has evolved from a private repository into a public institution with its own curatorial identity. Van Caldenborgh says he tends to buy quickly, describing the process as a kind of immediate recognition. His most recent acquisition, he said, is an eight-metre-long painting by Howardena Pindell, purchased at White Cube. He described the work as a field of tens of thousands of small oil brushstrokes that suggest the surface of the ocean.
Not every desired work has made it into the collection. Van Caldenborgh said he still regrets not buying a Louise Bourgeois spider, though he will borrow one from the Louisiana Museum for the anniversary exhibition, Celebrating the Icons of Art, which runs from September 12, 2026, to March 7, 2027. He also said that if he could borrow any work from another museum, it would likely be a large Rothko color field painting, the kind of work that alters a room’s atmosphere rather than simply occupying it.
Asked about Basel during Art Basel, he recommended the terrace at Le Trois Rois, a train trip to Zurich, and, if the weather cooperates, a swim in the Rhine near Museum Tinguely. The advice fits a collector who seems as interested in the setting around art as in the works themselves.
