Author: Joel Kremer for The Kremer Collection magazine – Edition 1 2025
I wasn’t a fan of art when I was younger, so when my father first told me about buying paintings it did not do much for me. Even when our first Rembrandt – Old man with turban was announced at the 1998 PAN art fair in Amsterdam with loads of press, I failed to grasp the magnitude of it all. I had learned about Rembrandt, Frans Hals and van Gogh just like most elementary school kids in the Netherlands through mandatory visits to museums, and had once done a paper and class presentation on Picasso at the age of 9, but I was into sports and music more than anything else at the time.
My professional background is in technology (Google) and this is where my love for the collection and art was actually born. It was the access to technology that gave me the idea to start using Google maps zoom technology on our high resolution photographs, which in turn enabled me to look at our works in much more detail than a museum visit really ever could. Take our copper etching plate by Rembrandt; the beheading of St John. Zooming into the digital image reveals elements you would easily overlook or simply can not see in real life because the plates are too small and behind glass. At our recent show in Alkmaar, the images were blown up 4 meters high and a whole story unfolds in the background. I recently asked my daughter to count faces in the etching plate on her iPad. She intuitively used her fingers to stretch the image. The result can be seen here.
This is also how I learned to really look at our art and it has triggered a continuous curiosity in me, to find ways to combine my passion for technology with my parents’ legacy. By 2008, I was involved in our websites, and in that process was forced to put names to the images, keep lists, but above all; look at the images. I developed my own taste and I’ve been learning every day since. Works which at first glance I would not ever look at when passing them in a museum, have become super interesting (e.g. night fires or still lifes) and I get inspired with new creative ideas to promote the collection.
Launching our Virtual Reality museum in 2017 was a significant next step. Big tech bet big, and so did we. We were very early, but the project has been a success and has strongly contributed to the Kremer Collection’s brand. We were now pioneers.
And then in 2020, COVID changed the world.It was a wake up call for the art world, although 5 years later, most museums around the world are still not pursuing digital in a significant way. But the closing of all physical ways to reach out to customers, forced organizations to think about reaching them in other ways. VR adoption increased by 50% and we made our museum experience downloadable for free and saw a significant increase in usage. At the same time Moyosa Media developed a way to bring the experience to a web browser, due to increased processing power of devices. This presents an enormous opportunity; there are an estimated 5 billion(!) web browsers active today, approximately two-thirds of which are mobile devices. So instead of relying on the VR industry to make significant strides in their sales efforts, we are now able to show everyone with a smartphone the museum. Whilst it is not a fully immersed experience; it still shows our fantastic museum in an exciting way.
We are now 7.5 years post-museum launch, and my parents have been quite active in acquiring fantastic new works …23 to be precise. So we launched another digital gallery, which will be connected to the original museum, showing our new acquisitions. This space is built as a re-usable space which we can easily alter the interior of, to host digital collaborations with other collections, which would be a world’s first and is quite exciting!
Another big step was not only the publication of our 2025 catalogue, but also our first Kremer Collection Magazine. This magazine was produced in a record 3 weeks, and is meant to be a more accessible way to see and learn about the collection at home, with articles on behind the scenes stories of my parents and their collecting adventures. It was launched in Alkmaar during the opening of our exhibition in February 2025, and completely sold out!
