WHITE BALLS ON WALLS – Review by Liz Braun

The art world is shrouded in mystery (on so many levels) but writer/director Sarah Vos wades in fearlessly in the documentary White Balls on Walls — a film about Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and that institution’s work on diversity and inclusion. It’s a fascinating film.

Sorting out whose work gets shown and evolving as an institution so more artists of colour and more women artists are included is a tricky business. But it’s crucial, for both ethical and practical reasons.

Tasked with representing the population at large, museum Director Rein Wolfs begins with an almost all-white staff and the understanding that from artists to exhibits, “White middle aged men occupy 95 percent of the space but are only 10 percent of the population.”

So how do you fix that? And how do you include artists of colour without them wondering if they’ve been included not for their talent but to fill some quota?

And what can be done about art that has a racist or otherwise offensive title?

Much of White Balls on Walls is focused on the meetings during which such details are discussed.

The film is sometimes heartfelt — you can really see people struggling with change, both trying to understand it and trying to make it work — and sometimes comical, as every change creates new issues to sort out.

And everyone at the museum has a different comfort level with what’s going on.

Semantics plays a big part. There’s a conversation about how to describe artists, and if the word “background” might be a better way to indicate those who are not European. Then there’s the problem that some titles of some works are unacceptable in today’s world. Should Charley Toorop’s respectful portrait of residents at the Willem Artnsz Huis psychiatric hospital in Utrecht have a name change, or is The Imbeciles still acceptable?

(The alternative title Occupants of the Willem Arntsz Huis is now listed alongside the original title.)

Should a painting with prostitute in the title have a name change to sex worker?

Sometimes the conversations seem to border on farce — but it’s all very serious.

Vos manages to show the humor without disparaging Wolfs or his colleagues, who are obviously trying to get this right, and who were brave to allow the filmmaker into their world and behind the scenes.

Others are less charitable. At every turn, the admirable Wolfs is criticized by critics and the public for being too politically correct or similar; he asks, “Can we be politically incorrect? That can’t be an option in this world, can it?”

As part of the effort, the museum works with Dr. Charl Landvreugd, who became Head of Research & Curatorial Practice in 2020. (Filming began in 2019.)

Dr. Landvreugd is black, as is the new-ish Curator of Photography, Vincent Van Belsen.

Interview snippets with Landvreugd seem to make him an anchor of sorts to the story, and his insights cut to the heart of the matter.

As the film shows, the museum mounted an exhibit in 2021 that puts the work of expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde in a new and somewhat less flattering light. Kirchner and Nolde: Expressionism. Colonialism involves the investigation of appropriation and power imbalances and includes much talk of context; Landvreugd says, “I think Kirchner and Nolde should be seen as whiteness looking at itself.”

The presence of black people in the work, he continues, “is circumstantial.”

When critics savage the exhibit, Wolfs, Landvreugd and their devastated museum colleagues discuss the anger the show seems to have inspired.

Maybe the critics are more conservative than we realize, one suggests, adding, “they’re white men too.”

But as the museum’s curator-at-large Yvette Mutumba suggests, all the angry reactions actually show how important the exhibit is.

White Balls on Walls is likewise important. Vos has captured a massive, crucial, ongoing transformation with a surprisingly light touch.