Breitner: Girl in Kimono

Girl in a White Kimono, 1894, George Hendrik Breitner. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

In museums around the Netherlands, paintings of a charming young girl in a kimono are on view. They are the works of Dutch artist George Hendrik Breitner. In the exhibition Breitner: Girl in Kimono the Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands will display all of the 13 works by Breitner of the girl in a kimono.

The Influence of Japonism

Breitner painted his girl in a kimono series around 1894. This was the period when Japonism was in full bloom, and European artists like Monet and Van Gogh were heavily influenced by Japanese art. Breitner, who was a friend of Van Gogh, also avoided becoming completely steeped in the traditions of Western art. He developed a strong interest in the flat lines and clear contrasts in Japanese prints and became a collector himself.

Girl in Kimono: Geese Kwak

fig. G.H. Breitner, Geesje Kwak in rode kimono, 1893-1895.
Daglichtgelatinezilverdruk, originele afdruk. RKD,
Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, Den Haag

The girl in kimono is Geese Kwak who worked in a hat shop and was a frequent model of Breitner from the age of 16 to 18. Most of these works were painted in the same room. Behind the bed covered with an Oriental rug stands a folding screen that limits the sense of depth and thus heightens the sense of intimacy. Geese lies on the bed dressed in a red or white kimono dotted with small floral print. Her head rests on a cushion, her arms sometimes raised behind her head, and she languidly stares into space.

Photos

The Netherlands Institute for Art History houses some 2,300 photographs taken by Breitner. He would digest what he saw through the lens and depict that onto his canvass. A comparison of the photos (fig) he took for Girl in Kimono with the final paintings offers a chance to trace that path of creation.

Breitner: Girl in Kimono February 20 to May 22

Rijksmuseum

Museumstraat 1
1071 CJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en

Opening times:

Open daily 9:00-17:00

Karel Appel Retrospective

Karel Appel, Vlammend Kind met Hoepel, 1961,olieverf op doek,
320 x 230 cm. Collectie Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,
France© Karel Appel Foundation, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam, 2015

The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands is commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Karel Appel in his homeland with a major exhibition of his work. Appel was one of the founders in 1948 of the avant-garde art movement Cobra, and his expressionist style is regarded as a pivotal and highly influential force in post war art. The retrospective brings together 67 paintings, 12 sculptures and more than 60 drawings, including those from when he was a member of Cobra.

A Battle Against the Canvas

In Jan Vrijman’s documentary film “The Reality of Karel Appel,” the painter appears like a martial artist baring his fighting spirit. Approaching a canvas larger than his height, Appel throws clumps of paint with such force that it shakes the cloth, thrashes colors with his brush and howls as he pours paint directly from its tube onto the canvas. Appel created bold paintings by having the colors themselves express emotion. Once he established his style, Appel maintained it during his more than 60-year-long career, allowing it to evolve endlessly in his experimental works.

Meticulous Preparation for Production

Appel’s style is expressionist and was characterized by a violent hurling of a moment of passion against the canvas, but in actuality he prepared meticulously before embarking on each work. He made detailed studies of the designs of the works of artists like Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso and Mondrian and then drew many sketches to work out his design and carefully selected paints and tools.

After 1950

After moving to Paris in 1950, Appel received one international award after another. He continued thereafter to work vigorously, moving among his four ateliers in New York, Connecticut, Monaco and Tuscany. Appel died in 2006 in his then home in Zurich.

Karel Appel Retrospective: January 16 ― May 16, 2016 (Closed Mondays)

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Stadhouderslaan 41
2517 HV Den Haag
The Netherlands
http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/en

Opening times:

Tuesday to Sunday:　11:00-17:00
Closed on Mondays

From Bosch to Bruegel – Uncovering Everyday Life

The exhibition From Bosch to Bruegel – Uncovering Everyday Life is currently underway at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The exhibition displays a survey of works from the pioneer of genre painting Hieronymus Bosch to the peasant painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Sixteenth century Europe was an era in which the authority of the Catholic Church was losing ground, and new views of the relationship between God and man based on humanism and religious reformation were being introduced. At the time, people were also being liberated from the restrictions of the Bible by movements such as Calvinism. The genre painters depicted that era and its people with striking acerbity: peasants, mercenaries, beggars and loose women, people gorging on food, seeped in liquor, sex-obsessed and lazy, and henpecked husbands. The urbanite purchasers of these works mocked in particular the peasants as “ignorant fools.”

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Peasant and the Birdnester (fig.1) portrays a man about to fall out of a tree he has climbed to steal a bird’s nest, and a peasant pointing to the man and laughing at him. The peasant is laughing at the blunder of another, but he himself doesn’t realize he is one step away from falling into a river. At first glance the piece appears to be portraying the stupidity of a peasant, but it is said that when Bruegel created this piece, he had in mind the satirical In Praise of Folly by Erasmus that parodies philosophers as simple-minded people who don’t notice the dangers ahead of them.

The genre painters often depicted tax collectors, bankers and lawyers dressed up in outmoded fancy clothes, appearing far removed from everyday life. As greedy, money-obsessed people, they were the objects of derision.


Bosch to Bruegel – Uncovering Everyday Life Until January 17, 2016 (Closed Mondays)

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Museumpark 18-20
3015 CX Rotterdam
the Netherlands
31 20 570 5200
http://www.boijmans.nl/en/

Opening times:
Tue-Sun 　11:00-17:00
5, 24, 31 Dec　11:00-16:00

Closed :
on Mondays (except Easter Monday and Whitmonday), 1 January, 27 April (Kingsday; in 2014 on 26 April) and 25 December. The museum closes at 4 pm on Saint Nicholas' night December 5th, Christmas Eve December 24th and New Year's Eve December 31st.

Munch: Van Gogh Exhibition

fig.1 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Palette,
1926. Private collection

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944, fig.1) and the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890, fig.2) never had a chance to meet during their lifetimes. But they embarked on their artistic careers at the same time and lived in Paris at the same time, avidly absorbing the new art scene. And both painters took up extremely similar themes. While their journeys as painters took similar paths, each produced very different paintings. The Munch: Van Gogh exhibit currently at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, examines the similarities and differences between the two, based on many years of joint research by the Van Gogh Museum and Oslo’s Munch Museum.


Van Gogh was born ten years before Munch, but their work as artists started at around the same time in the 1880s. Influenced by the naturalist painters in their home countries, they both took up traditional subject matters and were restrained in their use of color. But both soon felt unfulfilled with orthodox painting and set off to the art capital of Paris. Munch went in 1885, and Van Gogh in the following year of 1886.

fig.2 Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter,
1887-1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
(Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Although living in Paris at the same time, the two did not meet. However, both admired Monet’s expression of light and color, were inspired by the portraits of Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, experienced Pissarro’s pointillism and incorporated the perspectives of Caillebotte. Soaking up new ideas like a sponge, both artists began developing their own style.

A further trait that tied these two artists closely together was their pursuit of the essence of the existence of humanity and its significance. They steadfastly explored unanswerable fundamental and universal issues such as the constant cycle of life and death or the fear and pain that arises from the loss of love and hope. Strangely, both incurred self-inflicted wounds triggered by troubled relationships. Van Gogh took up these themes in Augustine Roulin (La Berceuse), Wheatfield under Thunderclouds and Garden of the Asylum. Munch examined them in The Starry Night, The Scream, The Sick Child and Madonna.

Thus it can be seen that despite mastering the same painting techniques and working on similar themes, the two artists produced widely contrasting works. This is apparent if we compare the representative pieces of each: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Munch’s The Scream. Van Gogh depicted reality after repeated practice to perfect his technique while Munch captured reality without being bound by what he saw. That difference highlights the individuality of the two painters.

Munch: Van Gogh Until Jan. 17

Van Gogh Museum

Museumplein 6
1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31 20 570 5200
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl

Opening times:

Friday 25 December: 9 am to 5 pm
26 - 31 December 2015 9 am to 6 pm
1 January 2016: 11 am to 10 pm
2 - 17 January 2016 9 am to 6 pm, Fridays until 10 pm
All other days: 9 am to 5 pm and Fridays until 10 pm

Dick Bruna. Artist

Illustration Dick Bruna © copyright Mercis bv, 1997

The cute little rabbit Miffy first appeared in a Dutch picture book sixty years ago, on June 21, 1955. Since then the character has been loved by children from around the world. The Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the birth of Miffy in the exhibition “Dick Bruna. Artist,” that showcases the man who sent Miffy out into the world.


When putting his young son to bed, Bruna used to tell stories about a rabbit that they once saw together. This rabbit would become Miffy. Bruna envisioned the rabbit wearing a dress when he saw a piece by Matisse, he recalled years later.
Bruna first came into contact with Matisse when he visited Paris while preparing to take over his family’s publishing business. During breaks from work he frequented art museums and galleries and was stunned by the work of Matisse, Leger and Picasso. Until then, Bruna had enjoyed looking at collected works of Van Gogh and Rembrandt. Now he was deeply impressed by these artists’ abstract and simple shapes using one color and the bold lines that formed them.

Dick Bruna at the Rijksmuseum in 2011.
Photo: Rijksmuseum

During one period, Bruna worked hard to try to master the smooth and flowing lines of Matisse. “In my drawings of that time you can see that I was trying to be like Matisse, without imitating him,” he recalls. There are clear similarities between their works such as circular smooth lines, but of course there are also differences. Matisse moved his brush swiftly without pause, and the same line could vary in degrees of thickness and gradations, while Bruna moves his brush cautiously to achieve a solid outline.

Bruna emulated the lines of Matisse, but his creativity was also stimulated by the clear line drawing and minimalist use of colors of Picasso, Braque and Leger. And the works of Gerrit Rietveld, a member of the Dutch artistic movement De Stijle, influenced the square form that characterizes Miffy’s picture books. The exhibit displays the works of these artists alongside those of Bruna so that we may see Bruna as an artist rather than a picture book author.


Dick Bruna. Artist. Until November 15.

Rijksmuseum

Museumstraat 1
1071 CJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
www.rijksmuseum.nl/en

Opening times:

Open daily 9:00-17:00

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots

An exhibition focusing on the final years (1951-1953) of Jackson Pollock, “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” is underway this summer at the Tate Liverpool. Pollock’s last years reveal a dramatic shift from his vigorous creative processes employing the techniques of “pouring” and “dripping” – terms that have become synonymous with his name. Until now this period of his life has not been the subject of major examination.

Pollock’s life has the drama of a movie character. He shot to fame after the prominent collector Peggy Guggenheim discovered him in the 1930s when he was painting in New York and struggling with mental instability and alcoholism. Pollock garnered attention with his “action paintings” where he poured and dripped paint on a large canvas spread out on the floor. He created numerous historic masterpieces until his peak in the 1950s. (Fig.1)

In the techniques of “pouring” and “dripping” that Pollock invented, highly fluid paints flow onto a canvas spread out on the ground. Pollock produced one masterpiece after another this way, spinning out subtle and unconstrained long lines that could not have been painted by hand.

But this period during which Pollock used these techniques to create pieces with only pure lines lasted just four years. From 1951, concrete images of humans and animals appeared on his canvas, and his colors shifted to the mainly monochrome of black and white. It was as if Pollock were denying his seemingly established techniques and abstract expression. In “Portrait and a Dream” (Fig.2, 1953), on the left side, the full body of a woman can be seen, and on the right side, the face of a woman is discernible. Pollock feared a conventionalization of his style and attempted to constantly transform his art in order to create pieces that nudged a viewer’s blind spot. But perhaps due to depression triggered by the struggle to create new works or distress from the poor reception of his 1951 show, Pollock descended into alcoholism once again, and in 1956 died at the young age of 44 in a car accident, leaving this world like a shooting star.

The exhibition Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is until 18 October 2015 (Open every day during exhibition period).

Tate Liverpool

Albert Dock
Liverpool, Waterfront
United Kingdom
http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-liverpool

Opening times:

Mon—Sun 10:00-17:50
First Wednesday of every month 10:30-17:50
Closed on 3 April and 24–26 December 2015

Rembrandt? The case of Saul and David

Fig.1 Saul and David after restoration, Photographer: © Margareta Svensson, credits: Mauritshuis, Den Haag

Saul and David (fig.1), one of the masterpieces of the Mauritshuis, disappeared from the center stage, since Horst Gerson, a Rembrandt expert and authority in his time, questioned the attribution of the painting to Rembrandt in 1969. After the research and restoration of the painting started in 2007 by the Mauritshuis, this painting is in the spotlight once again at the exhibition “Rembrandt? The Case of Saul and David”, which has been showing since June.

The painting Saul and David represents two biblical figures – Saul, the first king of Kingdom of Israel and David, a skillful harp player, whose soothing music gave Saul great comfort. But after David killed the Philistine giant Goliath, Saul became jealous of David’s victory and tried to arrange for his death. In many paintings depicting these two figures, Saul is portrayed with a spear in his hand trying to kill David from jealousy, as Rembrandt also painted Saul with a spear in his hand in his work of the same theme around 1629. However, in this painting of Saul and David, which was put under a research this time, Saul is portrayed as being moved by David’s music, wiping away his tears with the curtain, with his hands only touching on the spear. This inconsistency in treating the same subject, comparing to his past work, caused the question to the attribution of this painting.

Fig.2 Saul and David on restoration infrared,
Photographer: © Ivo Hoekstra, credits: Mauritshuis, Den Haag

The painting was researched mainly by the curators and the restorers of the Mauritshuis, with a committee composed of international experts. After the process of removing the touches and colors added in the past restoration, there emerged a dramatic revelation: The current painting consists of no fewer than fifteen different pieces of canvas and only two large pieces were from the original, one with Saul and the other with David. The research also showed that the original painting was larger. It was reduced in size, cutting away 10 cm at the bottom and 5 cm on the left.


Even after the true nature of the painting was revealed by removing the touches and colors added in the past restoration and through the research using the latest technology such as X ray photography, the Mauritshuis hesitated to fully attribute this work to Rembrandt. This was because the retouches were made to the painting several years after its completion and certain clumsiness, on a delicately finished part of the work such as the cloak of Saul, was detected. It was not clear whether it had been done by Rembrandt himself or by his pupil. Horst Gerson questioned this work in 1969 because he thought it was far from the technique of Rembrandt. The Mauritshuis, however, pursued the research further to analyze the pigments used on the work and finally decided to fully attribute it to Rembrandt by concluding that over time, the painting had lost its original touches and colors due to the past restorations.

This exhibition presents Saul and David and other works that were referred to in the research. You can follow the images on four screens for the detailed interpretation of the works. The experience may be similar to that of unraveling of a mystery movie: the provenance of the painting, the new discovery in the process of the restoration, and the final conclusion of the full attribution of the painting to Rembrandt reached by a large team of experts. This whole lecture will change the way you view Saul and David.

The exhibition Rembrandt? The case of Saul and David is until 13 September 2015

Mauritshuis Museum

Plein 29
2511 CS The Hague
The Netherlands
http://www.mauritshuis.nl/

Opening times:

Mon　13:00—18:00　
Tue—Sun　10:00—18:00（Thurs till 20:00）
Special opening hours apply during holidays.