This time last year was a bit of a whirlwind. We were dealing with nasty weather, Christmas was over, New Year's a day away, and I was three days away from leaving for the airport. My friend Nancy and I were heading for two weeks of fun, adventure, and sinus infections (bah) in Amsterdam and Berlin.
This week for Travel Tuesdays I'm heading back to Amsterdam since this is the only vacation in my forseeable future. (BAH . . . again)
I hope that Santa has found his way to your house and spoiled you with treats.
It certainly looks as if he found OUR house!
Notice the tunnel through the gifts to the left . . . So the cats can continue to make their way to the back of the tree and curl up on the tree skirt. Pet owners will appreciate doing things like this.
Have a brilliant day!
This time last year I was 5 weeks away from a trip to Amsterdam with my friend Nancy. Today, with no vacation in sight, I am think about that trip ...
This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'gray' (or grey as we rightly call it here in Canada).
These grey shots were taken while wandering Amsterdam in January. While it was considerably warmer than it was back home in Canada, it was also quite grey.
This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'cloudy'.
Hmmm - another hunt for which I have a gazillion pics . . .
Cloudy shots from my trip to Amsterdam a d Berlin earlier this year.
Yesterday's post about the movie Monuments Men got me thinking about art and what had been saved from the fires and vicissitudes of WWII. One of the displays in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam touched upon this in relations to the artist's famous 'Sunflower' paintings.
Van Gogh painted 7 sunflower themed paintings to decorate the studio/house in Arles where he lived for a time with artist Paul Gaugin.
This image:
shows one of the seven sunflower paintings that once decorated the Arles studio. It was destroyed in an air raid in 1945.
Be sure to pop on over to Sandi's blog to see what else is happening on Travel Tuesdays!
This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'ripple'.
When I was recently in Amsterdam I visited the Van Gogh Museum. I love how he used ripples of colour in his paintings . . .
This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'door'.
If you have been to Amsterdam and visited the house or have read the Diary of Anne Frank, you know what this is. In the image on the left it looks like a nondescript bookcase. The bookcase is actually a door which opened up onto a steep, narrow staircase leading to a secret Annex where Anne and 7 family and friends hid from the Nazis.
While I was at the Hermitage there was an interesting display on the upper floor overlooking the Amstel. There were photographs of the houses across the river and brief stories about some of the people who lived there. This one caught my attention:
Coenraad van Beuningen was a brilliant member of Amsterdam's regent class (similar to the French intendant class or the old political families of the U.S.) and was mayor of Amsterdam and a master diplomat. His political peak came in 1672, when King Louis XIV tried to claim the lowlands because his queen was Spanish (the Netherlands had won their independence from Spain a hundred years ago). Louis' army had taken nearby Utrecht and Naarden and Amsterdam was in confusion. Van Beuningen managed to forge an alliance that included England to repel the French.
Van Beuningen went into a decline after this. The Prince of Orange, nominal ruler of the lowlands, wanted to use the new alliance to invade France. Van Beuningen demurred, on the grounds that the alliance wouldn't survive the venture. He was right, but he suffered politically and, as it turned out, mentally. A few years later, he speculated wildly in East India Company shares and bankrupted himself. Within this time, he married his mistress of some years. He had been celibate up until this time. It's not known whether he was afterward. Either way, the marriage was a bad one.
In 1689 he went cabalistic. A follower of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, he pestered local theologians with his theories on the nature of the Godhead and generally ranted like a street person. He also had apocalyptic visions, seeing red fireballs and a rainbow-colored coffin floating above the city. Around this time, legend has it that he slashed his arms with a scalpel and scrawled messages in his own blood on the outside wall of his house. Chalk or paint is more likely, but the writings have resisted 300 years of cleanup attempts, including a 1930s effort using acid and high-pressure hoses. One can see a sailing ship, two attempts to write "van Beuningen" and one instance of "Jacoba," the name of his wife. There are also Hebrew letters, but they're difficult to discern.
After years of mental and physical suffering that he likened to the sufferings of Christ, van Beuningen died, on 26 October, in poverty. Among his effects, valued at less than f 100, was an oval mirror. No one knows what he saw in it, and nobody knows where it is now.
Here are some shots I took of these mysterious markings:
Today was a quiet day. There was nothing on the schedule and since my cold has moved to my head I just felt like taking it easy. I realized in the morning - finally heading out about 11.
I crossed the Amstel River to the area known as the Plantage. I have now explored all 7 of Amsterdam's inner areas - I wouldn't say that I have explored them well mind you, but I have walked in each of 'em.
The reason for this visit was I wanted to go to the Hermitage. Those of you who know art will be thinking I am confused - 'the Hermitage is in Russia, Jerry!' Apparently the famed St Petersburg institution was looking for a satellite site and Amsterdam won the lottery. The gallery is housed in a restored poor house that was built in 1681.
The exhibit I wanted to see was called 'Gauguin, Bonnard, Denis. A Russian Taste for French Art'. In the years following the breakthrough of Impressionism, they went in search of new artistic paths. The elusive Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was a shining example for the introverted Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) and the theoretician Maurice Denis (1870–1943). Bonnard and Denis were briefly united with a few other artists (such as Valloton and Vuillars) under the name of Les Nabis, after the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’. These young artists explored fascinating new artistic paths. Unlike the Impressionists, who aimed primarily to capture the fleeting qualities of natural light, the Nabis emphasised colour, feeling, symbolism and imagination. Their work was quickly embraced in Paris, and in Moscow.
The wealthy Russian collector Ivan Morozov was soon charmed by their youthful talent, buying their work and offering them commissions. For instance, Morozov asked Denis to decorate the concert hall in his mansion in 1908. The exhibition will include a unique reconstruction of this exquisite interior, with seven paintings and six decorative panels: The Story of Cupid and Psyche. Bonnard painted the monumental triptych Méditerrannée for the same collector. This work too will be on display in an illusionistic setting, with flat columns in front of the work enhancing the illusion of a Mediterranean view.
The work of the Nabis will be exhibited side by side with French paintings and drawings by their predecessors, contemporaries and immediate successors. With a small selection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Auguste Maillol and Paul Auguste Bartholomé, the exhibition will reveal the many facets of Paris’s flourishing artistic climate in the 1890s.
The term ‘Nabis’ was first used in 1889, by a group of young artists in search of a new approach to painting. They were studying together at the Académie Julian in Paris. The daring experimentalist Paul Gauguin became their inspiration, pointing them toward a new way of seeing and painting. The works on display were made between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War.
Through their ‘flat’ style, initially lacking in traditional linear perspective, the Nabis – together with other avant-garde artists such as Van Gogh and Gauguin – opened the door to modern art. Their paintings in unmixed colours, making expressive use of form and coloration, paved the way to an art that was free and abstract. Their wide-ranging subject matter included city scenes, landscapes, religious themes, portraits and interiors. The Nabi painters used photography to test their compositional ideas, developing a photographic way of seeing. They also embraced the decorative painting of the Art Nouveau movement, making enormous decorative panels for their patrons’ buildings. In all these ways, they explored the artistic boundaries between high and low, fine and applied art.
The exhibit was free with my Museum Card. I paid 4 euro for the excellent audio guide and spent the next two hours enjoying the show.
After I left the Hermitage I wandered around trying to find Rembrandt's House. You'd think it would have been easy but for some reason it was a challenge! The artist lived here from 1639 and 1660. The Rembrandt’s House museum is an interesting reconstruction of painter’s everyday life, his living quarters, and his workshop.
Later, once it had gotten dark and Nancy had gone to bed, I ventured out to explore in the dark. I wanted to see if I could find some of the light sculptures that I had seen from the canal boat. It was a challenge photographing them from the boat because of the movement - I figured on food I might be able to get a decent shot!
One of the great things about slowtravel is the freedom to wander and explore at your own pace. No need to race about! I really appreciated that on this trip.