De Pont Museum is a contemporary art museum in Tilburg, Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands. De Pont has been named after the attorney and businessman Jan de Pont (1915-1987), whose estate provided for the establishment of a foundation to stimulate contemporary visual art in 1988. With its founding director Hendrik Driessen, the decision was made to transform a Tilburg wool-spinning mill into a museum. Since its opening in 1992, the collection has grown to include more than 800 works by approximately eighty nationally and internationally known artists, among them Marlene Dumas, Bill Viola and Anish Kapoor.

History[edit]

Attorney Jan de Pont, who died in 1987, had decided that part of his estate was to be used to stimulate contemporary art, but left it up to the board of the new foundation to determine how and where that would take shape. This created the exceptional situation of a private ‘museum’ (director Hendrik Driessen avoided this term for the first couple of years, in the belief that one has to earn such a title) which did not begin with a collection bequeathed by the founder, and which made no appeal for support from government organizations or funds. That financial independence continues to exist to this day. ^[1]

The fact that the museum eventually came to be located in Tilburg has had everything to do with Jan de Pont. As a former resident of this city, he was concerned about the fate of the vanishing textile industry and, during the 1960s, had helped the Thomas de Beer wool-spinning mill to get back on its feet after bankruptcy. Twenty years later the business could eventually no longer compete with corporations abroad and had to discontinue its operations. This conveniently coincided with the foundation’s search for housing. The property was acquired for a symbolic amount, and four of the six remaining employees of the mill were hired by the foundation.

De Pont opened its doors on September 12, 1992. Since then, the museum has expanded both its collection and its building. Since 2016 photography and video art have been displayed in the museum’s new wing specially designed for this purpose.

Hendrik Driessen retired in June 2019, passing on the directorship to Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen.