Jardin d’émail
Jean Dubuffet in the sculpture park at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterloo, the Netherlands. I first saw this in September 1989 when I arrived in Arnhem to study for a term. I’ve been writing a couple of applications for opportunities recently and was musing about sculpture parks that I’ve visited in the UK, Europe and America and how my practice has in part been shaped by what I’ve experienced.
I cycled there and remember the Ap.Gebak! (Dutch apple cake).
Here’s some background on Jardin d’émail abridged from the publication Kröller-Müller the first hundred years:
3 May 1974
Opening of the Jardin d’émail by Jean Dubuffet after a long history of preparation and a construction period of over fifteen months.
R. W. D. Oxenaar: ‘This, the largest work of art (600m²) that has ever been placed in the sculpture garden up to now, emphasizes a policy line that has gradually developed. Namely, not only to acquire ‘ready-made’ sculptures and look for a suitable place for them in the garden, but also to commission artists in direct consultation to develop a work for a site chosen by them, or to execute that work on the basis of an existing design in the same way. The Jardin d’émail is an example of the latter. As always, here too the background is ideal for showing off to advantage the connection between nature, architecture and visual art in an ever-changing way’.
R. W. D. Oxenaar: It is a garden within a garden, an artificial garden, if you like, an anti-nature garden. From the outside one sees white walls bounded by black lines which enclose an area of 600m². What happens inside cannot be seen from outside. Only a tree over seven metres high and two ‘shrubs’, all in white as well with black lines project above the wall. Via an underground entrance and a small stairway, one can enter the garden through the trunk of the tree and then suddenly one is standing in a wide-ranging undulating white landscape intersected by black lines. Walking there is deceptive, the white shapes and the black lines follow independent patterns, so that a spatial disorientation occurs. But one can also sit down quietly there in the midst of this completely ‘different’ environment, amidst the white, with green trees in a white circle all around and changing light, depending on the weather.
It is a garden which was intended by the artist for one person, for you, for anyone who wants to meditate there about the relationship between art and nature or whatever’.
Jardin d’émail is only open from 1 April to 1 November, but only if the surface of the work is completely dry, and the work is closed for maintenance every last Monday of the month. I last visited the Kröller-Müller Museum in 2018 and witnessed the work receiving a major overhaul.
