The Nederlands Stripmuseum (; "Netherlands Comic Strip Museum") was a
museum
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...
dedicated to
Dutch language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-Europea ...
comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...
s, with emphasis on
native comic creations, and located in the city of
Groningen
Groningen (; gos, Grunn or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen province in the Netherlands. The ''capital of the north'', Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of the northern part of t ...
in the
Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
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, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
.
Overview
Over a decade in the making, the museum was opened on 21 April 2004, by city mayor
Jacques Wallage, with expected visitor numbers in the 40.000 to 100.000 range annually. At the opening, attended by many alumni from the Dutch comic scene, then museum chairman Bert Brink declared that it was justified that the museum was housed in Groningen, as the Dutch comic culture had its origins in the city. Around 1850 the comic ''Monsieur Cryptogame'' from
Rodolphe Töpffer was translated into Dutch as ''Mijnheer Prikkebeen'' by city native, poet and novelist J.J.A. Goeverneur. The translation was also published in Groningen. The museum had 19,790 visitors in 2015.
The premises in which the museum is housed is not owned by the museum or the city, but rented from real-estate managing company
:nl:Libéma. The collection though, is the legal responsibility of a
private foundation
A private foundation is a tax-exempt organization not relying on broad public support and generally claiming to serve humanitarian purposes. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation in the U.S. with over $38 billion ...
, the "Stichting het Nederlands Stripmuseum".
Conceived as Holland's answer to Brussels' prestigious
Belgisch Centrum voor het Beeldverhaal, the Stripmuseum has never come close to the visitor numbers as projected, or to the numbers its Belgian counterpart did achieve (less than 50,000 and dwindling ''v.s.'' a steady 200,000 annually). As a result, the Stripmuseum already ran into trouble in 2014, threatened with bankruptcy and closure, date of closure fixed on May 1, 2014. The museum's demise was temporarily averted for three years with eleventh-hour emergency funding from local authorities and sympathetic sponsors, but has been notified by its landlord Libéma to vacate the premises in 2017. Pursuant its averted bankruptcy, the museum had already planned moving to the smaller
Groninger Forum
Forum Groningen is a cultural center in the city of Groningen (city), Groningen in the northern Netherlands that houses a library, cinema, and parts of the Groninger Museum. Forum Groningen opened in November 2019, and is expected to receiv ...
premises as early as 2014, which is as of 2017, expected to open its doors in 2019, even if that means having to share the available space with other institutions. Libéma actually already wanted to expel the museum in 2014 in anticipation of the bankruptcy, but was persuaded to rescind by the donors who had saved the museum to await the then projected opening of the Groninger Forum in 2017. A spokesperson of Libéma has indicated that the museum will not get a stay of eviction this time in anticipation of the opening of the Groninger Forum, which has already been delayed by two years.
Visitors
References
External links
*
Het Nederlands Stripmuseum official website
*
2004 establishments in the Netherlands
Buildings and structures in Groningen (city)
Dutch comics
Museums established in 2004
Museums in Groningen (province)
Cartooning museums
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