Kroller-Muller Museum and biking in the rain

Yesterday Cherilyn, Kinga, Karen and I made a trek out to the Kroller-Muller Museum. It is in a National Park in between a few towns in the Netherlands, like Arnhem and Otterlo. We went to the Otterlo entrance, cos its closer to our house!

Here's the front museum entrance sign - note the puddles and general drizzly day!

In the front yard there are some random pieces of 'art', like this one -

The museum was started by the wife of a rich guy about a hundred years ago when she started collecting 'contemporary' art (she was probably bored!). She liked Vincent Van Gogh a lot, and decided to make a large collection of his work because she thought that it would give his work more weight if someone had a collection of it. The Van Gogh collection is the second largest in the world (second only to the Van Gogh Museum).

Around the 1950s the museum was donated to the state, the grounds and art included. Since then, they've added to the collection every year with new 'contemporary' art.

This is 'Man with Guitar' - see if you can find him. It took us a few minutes of squinty eyes before we worked it out - its weird!

The coolest thing is that you're allowed to take pictures of whatever, you just can't use your flash. Excuse the random photos, they probably need some cropping, but you get the idea.

I saw some pretty amazing paintings, like the original of this one:

And this pretty windmill painting too:

Then there were some weird 'art' things, which I kind of question whether they're art (quietly).

Like this - it looks suspiciously like something my brother drew when he was 8 and entitled it 'The Boncing Elephant' (spelling mistake and all).

Then there was this weird wooden thing:

And this giant alligator-type thing - big huge stuffed animal. The signs said don't touch so we didn't, but Cherilyn did hide behind it. And consider trying to smuggle it on board her flight home as carry on luggage.

Outside the museum, there is a scupture garden and outside of that there is the National Park, with biking paths and other things to see. We biked the 10k path in the rain before meandering through the sculpture garden. Of course it was raining the whole time, but we didn't let that get in our way.