Golden Age Team: Mr. Rob Kreszner

After a short period of working as a medical analyst, Rob Kreszner (1954) started a degree in museology at the Reinwardt Academie in Leiden. He later supplemented this by doing the Academic Core programme in Art History at the Open University in Heerlen. Since 1982, he has been working in the museum sector in Gorinchem, first as curator of the Historical Museum ‘Dit is in Bethlehem’ (‘This is in Bethlehem’) and since 1995 as head of the Gorcums Museum, located in the former city hall.
Through the years, Kreszner organised dozens of exhibitions about the history of Gorcum as well as about visual art from the past and the present.

As early as 1987, he organised in ‘Dit is in Bethlehem’ the jubilee exhibition ‘Gorcumse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw’ (‘Painters from Gorcum in the Golden Age’), on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the museum. The book of the same name by Fieke Tissink and H.F. de Wit was an important impetus for a further investigation of painters from Gorcum. The exhibition was opened by Schelto Patijn, the then Queenís Commissioner of the province of Zuid-Holland. No less than sixteen museums cooperated on this project, amongst which the Rijksmuseum and the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, the Centraal Museum Utrecht, the Rijksmuseum Kr–ller M¸ller in Otterlo and the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. This shows that work from artists from Gorcum can be found in the leading museums of the Netherlands. Meanwhile, it has become clear that works from these painters are dispersed over the whole world; we come across them in international museum collections and with important antique dealers. The results of recent and future research, at home as well as abroad, are the ingredients for new and fascinating exhibitions in the Gorcums Museum.