Anne Goldstein, the American modern art expert who has led the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam since January 2010, is standing down on December 1.

The museum said in a statement Goldstein had ‘indicated that her work at the Stedelijk Museum is now done and that the museum is poised for a new artistic director to lead it into the future’.

Goldstein’s time at the museum coincided with a problematic rebuilding process. The new look Stedelijk has now been open for almost a year.

Happy

According to Rutger Pontzen in the Volkskrant newspaper, the combination of Goldstein and the Stedelijk had never been a happy one.

‘She did not bother to learn Dutch, was abroad a lot, had an awkward relationship with the press and the government, and received a lot of criticism for her neat, predicatable and introverted presentations, Pontzen wrote.

The paper speculates that Goldstein’s decision may be connected to the departure of controversial director Jeffrey Deitch from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She was senior curator at MOCA before moving to Amsterdam.