Light is Everything

Editorial #39

Article

No. 39 • September 2025

text: Nicole Ex

You could quite reasonably argue that humanity has bigger concerns than the lack of daylight in museums. Yet something remarkable happens when you delve deeply into a subject: connections begin to reveal themselves, you catch a glimpse of the larger whole, and you realise anew that everything is, in fact, interconnected.

Light, then. Daylight, to be precise – the essential, the life-giving, the happiness-inducing element, and indeed the human right, to the gold of the sun and the silver of the moon. On the streets. At home. And inside museums. And yet, strangely enough, in recent decades daylight has been increasingly banished from museum galleries.

I remember the magnificent natural light in the cabinets of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in the galleries of the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. Light that lifted you, that filled you with joy, and that connected the indoors with the outdoors, with the time of day, with rain, clouds, or shafts of sunlight.

Today, the windows are boarded up and you wander through the gloom to look at art. Three veteran activists – artist Peter Struycken, emeritus professor of art history Wessel Reinink, and former museum director Hans Locher – are making a case for the return of natural light to our cultural institutions. Read their radical manifesto.

As I worked on this issue, I found myself becoming more light-sensitive and began to see an unsettling parallel: what is true for art is also true for humanity. Both live deprived of sunlit days. We stare into the blue glow of our LED screens, only to find, when night finally falls, that the city is more brightly lit than it is at midday. We have created a world in which natural light struggles to reach us, while artificial light fills every corner: our days are dimmed, our nights over-illuminated. Living beyond the natural rhythm is no small burden on our wellbeing.

So yes, it may seem futile to fight for daylight in museums – until you trace the connections and recognise the urgency. How can we accept false light when looking at art, where every shadow and every nuance of colour matters? We need true light: revealing, cleansing, and hopeful – especially in museums. Who knows, perhaps art and daylight together might even help preserve one another?

Mary Oliver writes in House of Light: ‘I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing – that the light is everything.’ I want to believe that too: that light is everything. So yes, let us overcome the darkness, wherever we can.

This is the editor’s letter of See All This #39 (Dutch Autumn 2025 issue). Order a copy here.