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Leaving the Van Goghmuseum, turn left down Paulus Potterstraat, to the STEDELIJK MUSEUM, whose bourgeois 19^th century (1892-1895) Neo-Renaissance exterior bellies belies in its adventurous contents. It is my favourite museum in Amsterdam, however it is purely a personal taste for art. I am a big fan and amateur of twentieth century art and that’s what it is all about in this art shrine.
The Stedelijk museum is regarded as one of the leading museums of Modern Art and its permanent collection includes works by Monet, Paul Cézanne (my favourite post-impressionist, announcing cubism), Pablo Picasso, Bonnard, Dufy, Braque and many others I will name later in this essay. 
In fact it houses works from 1850 up. Its vocation is to reflect all international pictorial tendencies of the moment. It’s a museum of “variable geometry” but impossible to describe all you can find in these vast spaces, since more than 30 exhibitions are organised every year. What is left of space houses the permanent collection? But let’s describe it as if there was only an exhibition at the ground floor.
On entering the museum, climb the imposing marble staircase to the first floor, where there is a rotating exhibition of works of the permanent collection. Among them should be some of the museum’s lovely Cezanne landscapes, at least one of the handful Van Gogh’s left behind when the Van Gogh collection moved to its own museum, and works by Henri Matisse (1869-1964), Marc Chagall (1889-1985) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Pop art and action painting of the 1960s, including Andy Warhol (1926-1987), Roy Liechtenstein and Jackson Pollock are well represented, and the museum’s fine collection of work by living artists is an eye-opener. Thus, contemporary artists are very well represented: Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Edward Kienholz with its “Beanery”, the bar in a container.

Chagall	Kandinsky	Malevich	Mondriaan

Top billing goes to the unique collection of works (the largest outside Russia), by the Russian abstract painter Kazimir Malevitch (1878-1935) and by the Dutch painters of the Stijl movement, Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) and Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931). Malevich and his Dutch contemporaries worked separately through WW I and the Russian revolution, after which Malevich was unable to leave the Soviet Union. But their work is very much along the same lines in its drive to reduce art to the purely abstract means of solid geometric shapes.
The German expressionist school was not forgotten with unique works by Max Beckman, Ludwig Kirchner and Karl-Schmidt-Rotluff. The Czech Kokoschka. Also painters of the second half of the century have their place here: the representatives of the “Cobra “movement, created in Brussels, like Karl Appel, Armando, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Peter Struyken, Rob Scholte.
Walk downstairs to the Print room, whose startlingly eclectic, ever changing collection includes the work of contemporary photographers.
Finally visit the ground floor. Here is obvious that the Stedelijk Museum inherited something of the provocative attitude of the Dutch in the 60s. Here is where the most innovative temporary exhibitions are held, many of them calculated to send you on your way pondering the nature of art…..

Bibliography

Holland, by Adam Hopkins (Faber and Faber, 1988), Penguin Guide to Amsterdam (ed.Vincent Westzaan, Penguin 1990), Dwalen door Amsterdam en reizen door de Benelux, ( ed. Lekturama 1984), “Amsterdam: The life of a city” by Geoffrey Cotterell (Saxon house 1974), “20 ste eeuwse kunst in Amsterdam” by Karel Vervoort (Kunst uitg-Amsterdam 1997)