Is Rotterdam alone in having an artwork by Picasso standing in a street, with only a small plaque on the ground to identify it, exposed to the Dutch weather? Admittedly, Sylvette, as the sculpture is known, is a large piece of concrete and a joint artistic endeavour with Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar. But it is still a Pablo Picasso and it is standing by a road. The model for this piece was Sylvette David who met Picasso by chance when she was still a teenager.
She became known as ‘the girl with the ponytail’ and it’s clear that the aging Picasso was obsessed with her. The art world celebrated their collaboration as a great new creative period for Picasso, and in an intense few months in 1954 Picasso produced more than sixty drawings, paintings and sculptures of Sylvette. The sculpture that was erected on Westersingel in the heart of Rotterdam in 1970 is an enlarged version of an original from that period.
In a nod to how unobservant I am, I have walked past Sylvette on numerous occasions without even noticing it was a Picasso. Yet it stands right outside one of the finest art museums in the Netherlands, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. It’s currently closed awaiting a grand reopening in 2026. Instead, just down the street in the Museum Park, is the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, a mammoth new mirrored art warehouse.
It has been described by critics and admirers alike as a salad bowl, a spaceship, and a plant pot. Describing itself as the world’s first public art storage facility, I prefer the plant pot motif as the roof terrace has trees growing out of it like a real plant pot. The exterior is covered in 1,664 mirrored panels, giving you a reflected view of the Rotterdam skyline, the surrounding area and your place in it. It’s almost as exciting as the interior.
The Depot is a gigantic vault, home to the museum’s 154,000 works of art. The value of all that art comes in at a staggering €8 billion, and includes masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Hieronymus Bosch, and Peter Paul Rubens. This literal treasure trove is like a bonded warehouses of world class art. Everything is stored by its climatic needs rather than period or type of artwork.
It gives the whole experience of visiting a feeling of being in an old curiosity shop filled to the brim with weird and wonderful sights. As you move around and up inside the building all the walls and doors are transparent to reveal the valuables inside. One moment you are looking at a medieval painting, the next some pop art, and the next a latex sculpture. The ancient and modern in no discernible order. It’s mind boggling and we loved it.
The theory behind the madness is that the museum could only display eight percent of the total collection at any one time, so this is an exciting and innovative way of making more of it accessible to people. What it achieves is something far more than that, it provides a unique (and popular) experience, one other museums around the world are now looking to emulate.
We finished our visit on the roof garden, with great views over the city, and then headed off to explore the Witte de Withkwartier. Passing by Sylvette again we entered this fascinating area full of bars, restaurants, trendy shops, galleries and street art. Here we discovered Love Birds, a street art piece of a magpie holding an engagement ring in its beak with the words ‘Sam Will You Marry Me?’ above it.
This is the work of Tymon de Laat with which he proposed to his girlfriend. A well known Rotterdam street artist, his work is influenced by Latin American culture and can be found in cities around the world. We had lunch in a Latin American restaurant called Supermercado, and took one final walk along the city’s river and wharves before hopping on the train back to Brussels.
