Rotterdam museum revives Wim T. Schippers’ peanut butter floor artwork

Two museum employees spent several days coating a 270-square-foot hexagon with 40 buckets of smooth peanut butter inside the Depot offshoot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The revived floor work, Wim T. Schippers’ Pindakaasvloer, uses about 800 pounds of peanut butter, enough for roughly 15,000 sandwiches.

The installation is on view for a two-month run, bringing back a piece Schippers created in 1969 and the Rotterdam museum acquired in 2010. Calvé, the Dutch peanut butter brand, donated the smooth spread, which the museum had workers lay down to a thickness of 2 centimeters, or 0.8 inch.

Schippers died last month at 83, after a career that made him a familiar voice to Dutch audiences as Ernie, Count von Count and Kermit the Frog in Sesame Street. In 1997, when Schippers spoke at an exhibition at Central Museum in Utrecht, he said, “Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?”

The piece has also drawn interference before. In 2011, visitors stepped into it when it was on display, and in 1997 people added 12 slices of bread and bags of hagelslag, the chocolate sprinkles common on Dutch toast. Schippers later told Volkskrant of the addition, “The sprinkles have been applied with a sense of proportion and a skillful hand.”