Art Diary

Our Selection for the Summer Season 

Hermitage for Children
Art and culture are vital elements in the education of children, which is why Hermitage in St. Petersburg has worked on building an educational tradition. From the beginning, the idea was for the Hermitage in Amsterdam to also contribute to this tradition. The Neerlandia Building, located on the Nieuwe Herengracht and home to the first phase of Hermitage Amsterdam, will become the Hermitage for Children as of June 20 of this year. Annually, 20,000 children are expected to visit the five ateliers and two classrooms. There will be three different programmes, all focusing on the Hermitage exhibitions. The programme is based on the concept of social inclusion: every child has a right to discover its own talent. The Hermitage School has been created for children age 7-9, who will have followed Internet classes in preparation of their visit and who, after a tour, are given a creative project that ties into the exhibition. The Hermitage Atelier is to see if individual students have a particular talent, based on which they will be invited to further pursue it as part of a special Wednesday afternoon or weekend programme. Those who complete this programme will have reached the age of 11 or 12 and will be offered a three-year follow-up programme, The Hermitage Academy, aimed at not only developing their talent, but learning art history as well, which will including visits to other art institutions.
Location: Neerlandia Building, Herengracht 14, Amsterdam
For more information, visit: www.hermitage.nl/en/hvk  
  

Room for Art, in 17th-Century Antwerp
Only three paintings and several prints by this master are known. Nevertheless, the oeuvre of the Antwerp painter Willem van Haecht (1593-1637) is nothing short of remarkable. His paintings present so-called kunstkamers, or art cabinets; interiors brimming with paintings and other art objects. Van Haecht’s painted kunstkamers combine reality and fantasy. Virtually all of the paintings that he depicted in these interiors were copies of existing works by famous masters. However, they were never part of the same collection. Van Haecht assembled them in his painted world. Moreover, his cabinets are full of narrative elements referring to the artistic and cultural life in contemporary Antwerp.
Van Haecht’s three known paintings are in the Mauritshuis, the Rubenshuis in Antwerp and in a private collection. They have never before been shown together, and will form the core of a small exhibition that brings to life the fascinating world of art in Antwerp in the first half of the 17th century.
Dates: March 25 – June 27
Location: Mauritshuis, Korte Vijverberg 8, The Hague
For more information, please visit: www.mauritshuis.nl  

Paul Graham – A Shimmer of Possibility
In August of 2004, Paul Graham (British, b. 1956), who had moved from London to New York in 2002, set out on the first of many trips around the United States to see and photograph the country for himself. This exhibition has been selected from the resulting series of photographic works, which Graham published in twelve volumes as A Shimmer of Possibility (steidlMACK, 2007). Each simple but structurally inventive series includes varying numbers of pictures, from one to more than ten, and provides a vivid glimpse into unheralded moments in the lives of individuals Graham encountered on his travels. 
Dates: April 2 – June 16
Location: Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam
For more information, please visit: www.foam.nl  

Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers
‘Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers’ is an exhibition of ten famous forgeries of Han van Meegeren. Most are in the style of Johannes Vermeer, but the works also include forgeries of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch. The exhibition explores Van Meegeren’s technique, his masterpieces and his downfall.
Van Meegeren’s technique remains exceptional. For his masterpiece The Supper at Emmaus, Van Meegeren used a genuine 17th-century canvas and historical pigments. He bound the pigments with bakelite, which hardened when heated to produce a surface very similar to that of a seventeenth-century painting. This technique, combined with Van Meegeren’s choice of subject matter and composition, was an important factor in convincing so many people of the authenticity of his works.
At the end of the Second World War a painting from the Netherlands was found in the collection of the Nazi minister, Hermann Göring. The painting was traced back to Han van Meegeren, who was immediately arrested on suspicion of collaboration. Van Meegeren admitted to having sold the work, but also claimed to have made the painting himself. He had sold Göring a forgery. Van Meegeren’s confession became worldwide news and he was hailed as a hero as ‘the man who swindled Göring’. Meanwhile the art world was thrown into disarray.
Dates: May 12 – August 22
Location: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
For more information, please visit: www.boijmans.nl  

The Young Vermeer
Concurrently with ‘Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers’ the Mauritshuis in The Hague is hosting the exhibition ‘The Young Vermeer’. The exhibition explores Vermeer’s development by focusing on three early works. The unique association between the two museums allows them to offer a discounts to visitors to both museums during the exhibition.
For this presentation, the Mauritshuis has brought together Vermeer’s early work: one painting from Edinburgh, one from Dresden and one from the Mauritshuis itself. These early works are quite different from the richly decorated interiors with attractive women you might expect from Vermeer. Instead they depict a mythological subject, a story from the Bible and a brothel scene, and they are all surprisingly large. Nonetheless, they all reveal the master’s hand and the seeds of his later style. They also show a young Vermeer already captivated by tranquillity and light, qualities that would later make him world-famous. Two works from the museum’s permanent collection will also be on display.
Dates: May 12 – August 22
Location: Mauritshuis, The Hague
For more information, please visit: www.mauritshuis.nl
 

Jan Dibbets
Figurehead conceptual artist Jan Dibbets is exhibiting this spring at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Dibbets is showing his latest series, entitled Horizons and based on his Sectio Aurea (1972), a work now in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum. Dibbets creates an ever-changing tension between perspective and horizon which produces optical confusion in the viewer. At the same time, the multitudinous variations within the series suggest a quest for the perfect horizon.
As an avant-garde conceptual artist, Jan Dibbets stands alongside contemporaries like Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth. The importance of his work to post-war Dutch art is universally recognised. This exhibition of recent work includes two series: New Horizons / Land + Seaand Sectio Aurea.
Dates: May 22 – September 12
Location: Gemeentemuseum, Stadhouderslaan 41, The Hague
For more information, please visit: www.gemeentemuseum.nl 

The Exhibition
The Exhibition will be presenting a choice from the collecting activities that have taken place in the building on the Praediniussingel in the last hundred years. Accordingly, the exhibition consists of a small selection of contemporary art characteristic of the policies of three consecutive directors: paintings by artists such as Jakob Smits and Herman Kruyder, acquired during the directorships of Jos de Gruyter and Bram Westers, with works from the New Figuration by Lucassen, and the geometric abstracts by Struycken.
At the same time, the Museum will present furniture by Mendini and Sottsass and others, from the Frans Haks period. In addition, work by De Ploeg will also be on show, as well as 17th and 18th-century painting and applied art from Groningen.
Dates: May 30 – September 5
Location: Groninger Museum, Groningen
For more information, please visit: www.groningermuseum.nl 

70s
This international exhibition gives us an unique image of one of the most important and fruitful periods in the history of photography: the seventies. Finally photography was to be accepted as an art discipline, colour was allowed and the raw daily life became a full worthy theme. The 70s show brings icons such as Cindy Sherman, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, David Goldblatt, Willian Eggleston and Eugene Richards, which never before where to be seen on the same show. Do not miss this exhibition, only showing at the Fotomuseum.
Dates: June 5 – September 19
Location: Netherlands Photography Museum Rotterdam, Rotterdam
For more information, please visit: www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl
 
Wall Street Stop
When the financial crisis of 2009 was at its peak, Reinier Gerritsen photographed people in the subway between Wall Street and Grand Central Station, New York. We see masses of introvert subway travellers in unposed group portraits. They reflect the collective feelings of a world in shock, not understanding that things have reached the stage where the global financial system has collapsed.
Gerritsen assembles his photos from a number of shots that he takes within a few seconds. He is able to realize pictures of a striking clarity and strength. He expressly presents his documentary series as a construction, and thereby places his work in the centre of the discussion on the importance of the documentary in the year 2010. In his subject choice he consciously places himself within the tradition of documentary photography by retracing the footsteps of Bruce Davidson (1980’s) and Walker Evans ( 1930’s) and their fascination of everyday life in the big city.
Dates: June 26 – September 12
Location: Netherlands Photography Museum Rotterdam, Rotterdam
For more information, please visit: www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl

From New York with Love
For more than ten years, Matthijs de Clercq has been supporting the museum by means of his acquisitions of art. De Clercq, who lives in New York, but grew up just outside Haarlem, largely focuses on sketches and specifically from periods that are ‘under-rerpesented’ in the museum’s collection. This has led to a collection of more than 70 drawings, including works by Pieter Aertsen, Crispijn van den Broeck, Corneille, Jacob Matham, Jan Porcellis and Maerten de Vos. All important masters from whose hand the museum had not previously owned any work.
Dates: June 10 – September 19
Location: Teylers Museum, Haarlem
For more information visit: www.teylersmuseum.eu

The Hague Sculpture – Freedom, American Sculpture
Dates: June 17 – September 12
Location: Lange Voorhout, 10 minutes from The Hague Central Station
For more information visit: www.denhaagsculptuur.nl  

Welcoming the Rijksmuseum: Jacques Villon
In its annual presentation in the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum will show a selection of works by Marcel Duchamp’s ‘unknown’ brother Gaston Duchamp, who went by the pseudonym of Jacques Villon. After his training in Montmartre, Villon succumbed to the influence of artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. After 1906, however, he experimented with a more Cubist style. The Rijksmuseum owns an extensive collection of prints by Villon thanks to regular gifts by Ernst and Else van der Vossen-Delbrück, who have devoted themselves to collecting Villon’s graphic art.
Dates: July 9 – September 26
Location: Van Gogh Museum, Paulus Potterstraat 7, Amsterdam
For more information visit: www.vangoghmuseum.nl


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