Holland
fisun.guner
The Rijksmuseum is reopening after 10 years. What took it so long? Escalating costs, contractual problems, a protracted battle with the cycling lobby (this is Amsterdam, after all). I’m sure there’s more, but one whole decade’s worth? It’s a long time to go without a national museum that represents the best of Dutch art to the Dutch people, and to the world.It’s easy to forget what a spectacular Medievalist fantasy the building actually isBut it’s all OK now. It’s been worth the wait. In fact, the improvement is staggering. The crepuscular gloom has been lifted and light has flooded in. You Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to.But that was all long, long ago, in the days when the Grand Tour didn’t allow for a quick stop-over and art-pillage in Leiden or Amsterdam, and when Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to the latest edition of The Arts Desk Radio Show, originally broadcast live from London's glamorous Dalston last Tuesday on NTS Live. Once again Joe found himself flying solo as Peter was off on his travels – although this time, rather than visiting his usual far-flung destinations he was on the road, driving Malcolm McLaren's Mercedes back from Paris. In his absence, Joe kept things international, causing himself severe pronunciation anxiety by including tracks from Japanese, Lebanese, Welsh, Emirati, Malian and Danish musicians, and welcoming a Zanzibari-Dutch guest for the second Read more ...
fisun.guner
The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was instrumental in developing landscape painting as a genre in its own right. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, is one of five surviving paintings (Bruegel painted six) in his cycle depicting The Labours of the Months. Populated by villagers, peasant workers, farmers, hunters and children, each painting is of a panoramic landscape at a different time of year. This chilly winter scene is a Christmas card favourite. But Bruegel is an artist whose work has also inspired art house directors, contemporary writers and modernist poets. Hunters Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The last night Haitink conducted at the Royal Opera House as musical director the staff wheeled on a moped as a leaving present. Ever since, his conducting has been inextricably linked to that mode of transport in my head. With Haitink, music-making has always seemed to be about getting from A to B in the most dependable, unfussy and often uninspiring way possible. For years, I haven't been able to see the point of him at all. But last night's performance of Bruckner Five with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra made me realise that a straight, uncluttered approach (especially to Bruckner) is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Conversations between artists both verbal and visual are the flavour of the month: the big voice of Picasso is almost but not quite drowning out a septet of British artists over at Tate Britain. Now joining the chorus is a fascinating exploration of the 1930s, in which the Brit Ben Nicholson and his Dutch friend and colleague Piet Mondrian are described by that hotbed of art history, the Courtauld, as "leading forces of abstract art in Europe”. To make the point about both the conversation between Nicholson and Mondrian and the results, the Courtauld has put on a thoughtful, succinct Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich has spent a decade following the everyday lives of Indonesia’s Sjamsuddin family, a working-class clan with their roots in the countryside whose working lives have taken them into the hubbub of the country’s capital Jakarta. Position Among the Stars is the final work of a trilogy, its immediate subject the importance of granddaughter Tari going to college to receive the further education that will give her new opportunities. But, as much as anything else, Retel Helmrich (himself of part-Indonesian descent) captures the sheer variety and vitality of the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Isn’t it strange how national talent goes by subject? Put on a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch painting and the queue will stretch to the Embankment. But can you imagine a festival of Dutch music? Sweelinck (d 1652) and Andriessen (b 1939) more or less sums it up. The BBC brought together three living Dutch composers for this Portrait concert, and one of them wasn’t after all Dutch (“I’ve kept my Swedish passport,” he insisted rather unchivalrously in the pre-concert interview). And I’m sorry to report – as a lifelong fan of Speculaas biscuits and Dutch gin – that the Swedish work was the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The home, and women’s place within it, gained considerable importance for artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Artists such as Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Nicholaes Maes and Gerrit Dou are among those who placed women at the centre of the well-ordered domestic realm. They featured as servants and mistresses, nursing mothers and coquettish girls, or as serious young women dedicated to the pursuits of home-making and suitable leisure. After years of conflict and uncertainty, the Dutch Republic emerged in 1648 and the home, the retreat of the newly powerful middle class, seemed naturally to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If one comes away with any certainty from the New York exhibition Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum (until 10 October) it is that the Golden Age Dutch master (1582/3-1666) keenly understood and sympathised with his fellow human beings. Whether Hals (beloved of Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler and Sargent) was painting drunks and prostitutes in tavern scenes, humble fisher folk, or burghers and intellectuals and their wives, he unerringly captured the essence of his sitters. There is little sentimentalisation or disparagement in his work.Painting from nature, he told the truth as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a black dress, Caro Emerald is playing her UK debut. Behind her, an eight-piece band is squeezed onto the Jazz Café’s small stage. Snappy and pin sharp, they’re in black suits, white shirts and black ties. Except the guitarist, who’s jacket-free. Three brass players are ranged behind music stands. Nothing is overstated. Emerald races through her jazz-grounded pop, the rumba-ish “A Night Like This” ending a set that filters filmic swing through a current pop sensibility.By this time last year - to the week - Caro Emerald’s Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor had been at the top of Read more ...
theartsdesk
On October 10, 1994, a burglar with a sledgehammer smashed a window at the Rembrandt House Museum and stole a single painting, Man with a Beard (1647). The work had once been considered a Rembrandt, but is now attributed to an unidentified student of his. Its theft occasioned this inevitable headline in the International Herald Tribune: “Rembrandt Needed a Night Watchman”. Beard made its way back four years later after being seized from an Amsterdam lawyer who was reputed to be a shady intermediary for art recovery, having been involved in a Van Gogh case as well. The lawyer was privately Read more ...