04.01.2010
Museum für Asiatische Kunst
The National Museums in Berlin are proud to welcome Klaas Ruitenbeek in his new post of Director of the Museum of Asian Art. His appointment follows the retirement of Willibald Veit.
Ruitenbeek is an esteemed connoisseur in the field of East Asian art, architecture and literature with a professional history spanning all these areas. For almost ten years, Ruitenbeek worked as a conservator of East Asian Art in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, before taking up a chair as professor of East Asian art history and archaeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, he became the Senior Curator at the renowned Royal Ontario Museum. Now at the National Museums, Ruitenbeek plans to attract and delight future visitors not merely with the permanent exhibition but with innovative exhibitions of old and modern art. Like many of his contemporaries, he views the planned Humboldt Forum in the Palace as the unique opportunity to present the artistic and ethnological collections no longer as two separate worlds, but in their rightful context, as complementary entities.