Benno Tempel

(Harderwijk, 1972) is an art historian and director of the Municipal Museum in The Hague. He started his career as guest curator at the Dordrecht Museum, worked as assistant curator at the Van Gogh Museum from 1997 to 2000, as curator at the Mesdag Museum and as a member of the scientific staff at the Rijksmuseum. He was curator of exhibitions at Kunsthal Rotterdam from 2000 to 2006. He briefly returned to the Van Gogh Museum in 2009 before taking on his current position in The Hague. He was a jury member for the TV programme The New Rembrandt, searching for new artistic talent. Tempel has written a number of books on art, including Escher Meets Islamic Art (2014), which investigates how the patterns of Moorish art from southern Spain influenced his work. In Discover the Modern (2012), he shows how political and social events have influenced the development of art.