Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is dedicated to modern and contemporary art and design, housing over 90,000 works from the mid-19th century to the present. Its collection includes major movements such as Bauhaus, De Stijl, CoBrA, abstract expressionism, and pop art, featuring artists like Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian. The museum is located at Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam, and offers a dynamic program of temporary exhibitions alongside its permanent collection.

Planning your visit

The Stedelijk is the modern counterweight on Museumplein, and its building tells you so from outside: a nineteenth-century neo-Renaissance hall with an enormous white composite extension bolted onto the front, universally known in Amsterdam as the bathtub. Inside are over 90,000 works from the mid-nineteenth century onward, covering the movements that defined modernism — De Stijl with a major Mondrian holding, Bauhaus, CoBrA, abstract expressionism, pop art — alongside one of Europe's strongest design collections, running from furniture to graphics to industrial objects.

It is the third of the three museums on the square, and consistently the least crowded, which is worth knowing when the Van Gogh Museum next door is at capacity. The Malevich holdings are among the largest outside Russia. Temporary exhibitions are ambitious and often the reason to visit.

Practically, the design collection is what surprises people — Dutch graphic design and furniture shown seriously rather than as an afterthought.

Bookable options include entry tickets, guided tours of the modern and contemporary collections, and combined formats pairing the Stedelijk with the Rijksmuseum or with a one-hour canal cruise. Given all three Museumplein institutions sit within a two-minute walk, deciding in advance how many to attempt in a day prevents the common mistake of rushing all three badly. Current availability is listed below.