Grand opening at the Rijksmuseum

Rijksmuseum. Photo credit: Iwan Baan. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum

The Dutch city of Amsterdam’s National Art Museum, the Rijksmuseum, opened at last on the 13th of April 2013, after ten years of restoration work.
In its eighty exhibition rooms, which visit eight hundred years of Dutch art and history, including the 17th century, the Netherlands’ Golden Age, eight thousand items –carefully selected from the collection, numbering nine hundred and fifty thousand – are currently on display.
The restoration work was executed by the Spanish architecture agency Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos. Keeping to the slogan “Cuypers for the 21st century”, they honored the Rijksmuseum’s architect Pierre Cuypers, restoring the building to how it looked when it first opened in 1885 while transforming it into a museum suited to the 21st century.

The competition for the architectural design of the National Art Museum held in 1876 saw Pierre Cuypers (1872-1921) as its winner. Cuypers, having worked on more than one hundred buildings, including, among others, Amsterdam Central Station (1889), was one of the leading architects of the late 19th century Netherlands. The museum design he presented would provide three hundred and thirty-three exhibition rooms, adorned with spectacular decoration both indoors and out. According to his wishes, the Austrian painter Georg Sturm (1855-1923) took charge of the architectural decoration.
Upon the building’s completion, however, the issue arose that the splendid decorations interfered with the appreciation of the artworks, until at last in 1903, by reason of its being unsuited to the objects on display, one piece of wall was painted over. From the 1920s onwards, more and more of the decorations were removed or hidden, until the restoration work executed in the 1950s, which left the building far from its original design.

top left: Great Hall. Photo credit: Jannes Linders. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum
top right: Night Watch Gallery. Photo credit: Iwan Baan. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum
bottom left: Gallery of Honour. Photo credit: Iwan Baan. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum
bottom right: Great Hall. Photo credit: Jannes Linders. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum

One of the key aims of the most recent restoration was, to bring these decorations back to life, with an emphasis on the second floor’s Great Hall and Gallery of Honour. The Great Hall’s floor is made up of a mosaic, its large windows glitter with stained glass, and on the wall are artists, scholars and historical figures praising the arts and sciences in an allegorical painting(image at top left). Above the door of the Gallery of Honour, which neighbours the Great Hall, is painted the Allegories of ‘Hope, Faith and Love’ (image at bottom right). In the Gallery of Honour hang works by Vermeer, Hals, Ruisdael and others, representing the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century. At the very back is the Night Watch Gallery, for Rembrandt’s great masterpiece, the Night Watch(image at top right). This amazing collection of works immediately draws one’s eye; but if you chance to look up, your vision will be filled with the elaborately wrought architectural decorations(image at bottom left).
In the ten Lunettes (the half-circles on the upper walls) are young women symbolizing the various fields of the arts, the craftsmen pursuing them, and the coats of arms of the city most closely connected to each field. For instance, the Lunette featuring Ceramics portrays a woman holding Delft earthenware, a ceramist, and the crest of South-Holland, the province to which Delft belongs. The Lunette is in praise of the craftsmen, who bring forth such excellent artwork, and of the Netherlands, which brought forth the craftsmen.

Simultaneous to the restoration, the addition of the Asian Pavilion was made, to bring Asian artwork under the public eye. The Philips Wing is still under construction (due to open late 2014), and will become a planned exhibition space. The National Art Museum of Amsterdam holds its history in high regard, while it continues its transformation into a museum that can match the transitions of the times.

Rijksmuseum

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

Opening times:

9:00 to 17:00 daily, open 365 days a year

The Impressionist Caillebotte and Photography

Image1.　Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor-Scrapers, 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

An exhibition on the work of the impressionist painter Caillebotte is currently up showing at the Gemeentemuseum in the Dutch city of the Hague. Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894), who participated in impressionist exhibitions five times, is considered one of the exemplary painters of impressionism.
Raised in an affluent household, Caillebotte was able to support impressionism in a world that did not yet recognize it, by financing and buying works. At his death, he left the works in his possession to the French state. A great number of works currently on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris are there thanks to his efforts.

In 1874, Caillebotte visited the very first impressionist exhibition. Here he saw new paintings such as Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”, filled with light, and was drawn in. It was right after visiting this first impressionist exhibition that Caillebotte painted “The Floor Scrapers” (image 1). It is an image of three laborers, scraping a floor with wood planes while sunlight coming in through a window bathes their backs in light. This work was praised by Edgar Degas and on his recommendation displayed in the second impressionist exhibition, where it received much praise.

Image2.　Gustave Caillebotte Pont de l’Europe, 1876 – 1877
Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas

From that time Caillebotte took to drawing city sceneries and sights from his neighborhood and as seen from his Paris apartment. In the second half of the 19th century, the governor of the Seine prefecture, Haussmann, had Paris restructured into the wide avenues, parks and railway stations that we know today (also known as Paris’ haussmannization). In “The Europe Bridge” (image 2) we can see, beyond the bridge’s metal ribs, the station of Saint-Lazare. Caillebotte observed the scenery of his rapidly evolving modern city, and attempted to capture the change of the age.

Image3.　Gustave Caillebotte, The Pont de l’Europesketch,
c.1876, Private Collection

The composition Caillebotte used in a study of the same Europe Bridge (image 3), drawn from a different angle, is extremely interesting. In this work the road, which fills a broad span of the foreground, converges at a steep angle behind the man in the silk hat. This characteristic use of perspective is due to the fact that Caillebotte related to photographs while painting.


Thanks to research by Kirk Varnedoe and Peter Gelassi, it has become clear that when Caillebotte was at the stage of selecting composition, he frequently used photographs taken with a wide-lens camera. While on the one hand a wide-lens allows for a wide area to be shot,  it also compresses this wide range, emphasizes the perspective. This effect has been applied to the painting by Caillebotte.

At this exhibition, there is one room displaying stereoscopes of Paris city sceneries, contemporary to Caillebotte. Stereoscopy refers to a construction in which one can view a double photograph with a special pair of glasses, through which the images will unite and appear three-dimensional. Peering through, the optical illusion allows anyone to imagine themselves a time traveller, visiting 19th century Paris. In viewing these photographs together with Caillebotte’s work, we can know one expression of the revolution that photography brought upon painting.


The exhibition of Gustave Caillebotte’s work is open until May 20 (the museum is closed on Mondays).

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

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

Opening times:

Tuesdays - Sundays 11:00 - 17:00
Closed on Mondays

Lichtenstein, A Retrospective

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!,1963, Tate. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2012

On February 21 a retrospective exhibition opened at Tate Modern, of Roy Lichtenstein, one of the central figures of American Pop Art. It is the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of his work since Lichtenstein passed away in 1997 at the age of seventy-three. With the collection of one hundred and twenty-five works from his early days to his late years, it becomes possible to look back over Lichtenstein’s paintings and the borderline they balance between art and mass culture. Lichtenstein is known for his work in which he enlarges single panels from comics. His active years, the 1960s, are the period in which Andy Warhol and his factory first drew from mass media and surrounding urban settings, as well as mass media and the world of commercials, to start producing work.

Roy Lichtenstein, Oh, Jeff…I Love You, Too…But…, 1964, 

Collection Simonyi © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2012

In 1962, Lichtenstein displayed shocking work at Leo Castelli gallery in New York, that overthrew the noble image of art that people had. This work was a painting named “Look, Mickey”. It was the famous Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, in a painting. The characteristics of comic books, such as the emphasized lines and simple coloring, had been reproduced in oil paints to paint these cartoon characters on an enormous canvas. Lichtenstein had transformed the mass-produced, widely circulated printed matter of the cartoon illustration, into a work of art.
Due to its motifs and his manner of painting, his work is often mistaken as simply the enlargement of a piece of printed matter. But is that really all?



For instance, let’s take a look at one of his most important pieces, “Whaam!” This painting is a panel from a comic about a fighter pilot, “Star Jocky”, published in 1962 in the compilation “All American Men of War”. If we compare it to the scene from the comic that inspired it: the background has been eliminated, the lines and coloring have been cleaned up, and the image has been reshaped into a composition with all the more impact. When viewed up close, the dot matrix used by printed matter is visible, but when studied more closely, we see that the precisely arranged dots have not been produced mechanically, but are entirely hand-painted. Although Lichtenstein’s motifs drew from mass-produced printed matter, because he allowed for alteration and hand-painted everything, his works became unique paintings.


 The retrospective also features works that are not nearly so well-known, such as paintings of female nudes, and his landscapes in the Chinese style. His series of paintings, Art History, which recreates artworks in Lichtenstein’s own style, seems to hurtle a challenge at modern art’s views on originality. This retrospective exhibition provides us with a wonderful opportunity to know the many different sides to Roy Lichtenstein.

The exhibition Lichtenstein: A Retrospective will be open from 21 February to 27 May at Tate Modern (open all days).

Tate Modern

Bankside London SE1 9TG United Kingdom http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern

Opening times:

Sun - Thurs 10:00 - 18:00, Fri & Sat 10:00 - 22:00

Dalí the Genius -Centre Pompidou

The expression of his unique view of the world; the eccentric appearance characterised by his long moustache; his presence in the tales of numerous scandals -it is none other than the twentieth-century artist Salvador Dalí. At present, a large scale retrospective is open at Centre Pompidou in Paris. It features not only paintings, sketches, and sculptural work, but also photographs, film, and the television program in which Dalí appeared, in a total of two hundred works.

Among his numerous masterpieces, there is “The Persistence of Memory” (also frequently called “Melting Clocks”). This piece, painted in a superior technique, gives us a world in which reality and dream are strangely intertwined. Although one of the most famous of Dali’s work, when it is before your eyes it is shockingly small - a mere 24 x 33 centimeters. On this small canvas, with the seashore by the Porto Rigato, where Dali’s atelier was located, for the background, Dali’s face is delivered to us like a piece of meat beside these impossible, limp clocks. The long eyelashes make you think of an insect that might start to move at any moment. The piece / Dali’s view on paintings becomes plainly visible: ‘paintings are hand-drawn photographs made of the world generally imagined as a tangible illogicality.’

The second half of the exhibition does its best to carry you even deeper into Dali’s world: an installation inspired by the American actress Mae West. This work is her portrait - a chair in the shape of lips, furniture in the shape of a nose, curtains which look like hair, and so on - a room remodeled to a sculpture. Here viewers literally step inside the work, and can even photograph themselves inside.

After seeing Dali’s original work even once, it sticks in your memory; his eccentric appearance, too, makes an intense impression on people. It’s possible that his long, pointy moustache and his peculiar face are even more famous than his work. Dali excelled at self-production, called himself a genius, behaved in ways that departed from common sense, and constantly provided the topic for newspapers, television and other media. Among so many artists who despised commercial works and show business, Dali’s enthusiastic exposure towards media drew much attention and played a great part in establishing his fame. However, do we really believe in this ‘genius’ that he created?

At this exhibition the ‘genius’ image Dali created is questioned, but his work courteously visited, to attempt to throw into relief the essential form of Dali.

The Dali exhibitionis open until March 25th. (Museum is closed on Tuesdays).

Centre Pompidou

19 Rue Beaubourg
75004 Paris
France
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/en

Opening Times:

11:00-23:00　 Closed on Tuesday

The Road to Van Eyck opens in Rotterdam

Jan van Eyck, The Three Marys at the Tomb, c. 1430-1435. Panel, 71.5 x 90 cm.

The exhibition “The Road to Van Eyck” centering on 15th century Dutch painting has opened at the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam. On view are over ninety works by Jan van Eyck, the perfector of oil-painting technique, and his contemporaries. Never before has such a number of works been gathered in one place as this; and since many of the old works have become very fragile, the chances of ever recreating the same scale of exhibition seem slim.

At the time Jan van Eyck was active as a painter, a period in which artists were creating works all across Europe, and the centres of trade -Amsterdam, Cologne, and so on- not only completed trade transactions but also moved these works of art across national borders. In the midst of all this, Van Eyck studied the works of numerous artists, polishing his skills until he achieved his superior power of expression. Work created by him was met with the highest praise, and continued to influence many painters after him.

Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation, c. 1430-1435.
Oak, transferred on to canvas in St Petersburg
after 1864,  92.7 x 36.7 cm.
Washington DC, National Gallery of Art,
Andrew W. Mellon Collection

In this exhibition, multiple precious works by Van Eyck are on display. In the Turin-Milan Hours we see the culmination of Van Eyck’s earliest work, the minute depictions of which invite the viewer to anticipate his future work. In The Annunciation, the scene of the visit by the archangel Gabriel to the Holy Mother Mary, to announce to her that she is carrying the child of God, has been painted in extravagant colors and delicate brush strokes. Gabriel’s rainbow-colored wings and magnificent robe, the complicated structure of the church interior and the decoration of the floor, all have been expressed to an abundant tactility, by an overwhelming power of depiction.

The painting, The Three Marys at the Tomb which Boijmans van Beuningen possesses, had long been thought to be a work by Van Eyck older brother Hubert; however, there has been contention that it is in fact Jan van Eyck’s work, and it is as of yet a topic on which specialists remain divided. Both Hubert and Jan worked on what would become known as the masterpiece of Ghent: Saint Bavo Cathedral’s altarpiece, the polyptych Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. On an inscription on a frame, discovered during an 1823 restoration of the altarpiece, Hubert was designated as maior quo nemo repertus (greater than anyone) and Jan as arte secundus (second best in the art). At present, however, there are neither any works nor records which are reliably connected to Hubert. The painting The Three Marys at the Tomb is one of a few essential clues left through which we might know the enigmatic painter Hubert.

The Three Marys at the Tomb was restored for the exhibition, and its vivid colors and delicate expression are now more clearly present than before; the restoration process has been made public and is viewable on the Boijmans website. Furthermore, restoration work started on Gent’s Altarpiece on October 2nd, 2012. Although restoration should take five years, only a few panels are to be restored at a time, which means that every panel apart from those being currently restored will be on display at Saint Bavo Cathedral in Gent.

The Road to Van Eyck is open until February 10th. The museum is closed on Mondays, Christmas and New Year’s Day.)

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

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

Opening hours:

Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00-17:00
Closed on Mondays (except Easter Monday and Whitmonday), 1 January, 30 April (Queensday) and 25 December.

Special issue: In 2013, a second exhibition on Mucha will open, with full support from the Mucha foundation! Keep your eyes peeled!

From March 2013, The exhibition “Alphonse Mucha: An Insight into the Artist” organized by NTV will open in five different places throughout Japan.

Although the Mucha exhibition organized by NTV, first opened under the full support of the foundation between 2004 and 2006, it will be renovated to a structure suitable for the second opening. Basing itself on the key concept “The Hidden Mucha”, the exhibition will introduce not only his works, but will also focus on the heretofore unknown philosophy, ideology, and prayers of Mucha himself.


Tokyo
From Saturday, March 9 - Sunday, May 19, 2013
Mori Arts Center Gallery (Roppongi Hills, Mori Tower, 52nd floor)


Niigata
From Saturday, June 1, to Sunday August 11, 2013
The Niigata Bandaijima Art Museum

Matsuyama
From Saturday, October 26, 2013, to Sunday, January 5, 2014
The Museum of Art, Ehime

Sendai
From Saturday January 18, to Sunday, March 23, 2014
The Miyagi Museum

Sapporo
From Saturday, April 5, to Sunday June 15, 2014
Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art



*For more details and information on buying tickets, please visit the official website of the Mucha exhibition. http://www.ntv.co.jp/mucha/

Seeing the Samurai Exhibition in Rotterdam

Rotterdam boasts the Netherlands’ second largest infrastructure and is said to have the most extensive harbor in the world in terms of transactions. It is known for the Boijmans van Beuningen museum, which has a famous collection, and for the Kunsthal, which, while it does not have its own collection, shows consecutive, well-polished exhibitions (and now, of course, known for the recent large-scale art theft, as well..). The city center that was brought down by bombs in the war is represented now by architectural works spearheaded in that period; the first of which were the Cube houses.

At some distance from the city center and the harbor, is the World Museum. Rather than one of Rotterdam’s modern pieces of architecture, it is a traditional Dutch building which was restored and re-released in 2009 as a museum. The World Museum offers a collection made up of roughly two thousand objects from Asia and Oceania, relating mainly to religion.

It is here that an exhibition has opened which is gathering much attention in the Netherlands. The exhibition’s title is “SAMURAI”. Although it is an exhibition on Japanese weapons and armor, it approaches the concept of Bushi, from a different side, represented by the samurai’s manner of doing battle, and considers on its reverse the zen-guided mental world, stepping into the unique culture that was born from this in an ambitious manner. Besides the suits of armor, helmets, swords, banners, and battle emblems, there is an overwhelming collection of as many as three hundred objects: Nō masks representing the art of Nō, loved by the military commanders; a number of ukiyoe prints of the warriors; folding screens upon which scenes of battle are depicted. Especially the room in which the suits of armor and helmets have been so arranged as to give the impression of military commanders holding a strategy meeting, and the room exhibiting just the collection of helmets, make the exhibition a pleasure to behold.

In the Netherlands, where the Japanese-Dutch friendship now spans more than four hundred years, a large amount of Japanese objects are kept at Leiden’s Siebold collection or the National Museum of Ethnology, but for this exhibition most of the armor and helmets were provided by Florence’s Stibbert Collection. At the end of the eighteenth century, the East India Company’s governor-general of the Bengal area, Giles Stibbert had amassed a fortune, and his grandson Frederick put together his massive inheritance to turn his own villa into a museum. After Frederick’s death, the collection was donated to Florence, and although currently open to the general public, its location at the outskirts of Florence is perhaps disadvantageous, and apparently the collection is not visited much.

Despite many of Japan’s helmets and suits of armor having been lost to foreign countries, I am happy that, thanks to collectors such as this, Japanese people have the chance to see these pieces again. Most of the armor and weapons still in Japan have been passed on generation upon generation as the daimyō’s possessions; but the armor on display at this exhibition is, rather than a lord’s possessions, mostly those of the higher and lower classes of warriors. In the Edo period warriors’ lives grew difficult, as if in compensation for enjoying peace, and when the suits of armor which had been passed down for generations were sacrificed for the sake of daily survival, the family crests and old names were erased from them. It is because of this that we still do not know who the original owners were. Might, someday, these suits of armor come home to Japan?

One last thing: the sword and folding screen gifted to the Dutch king Willem the Third by the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as the missive giving notice of permission to establish trade with the Dutch, despite Japan’s being already totally isolated, are items in the exhibition which one truly does not often have the chance to see; they form a true centerpiece to the exhibition.
Rotterdam’s “SAMURAI” exhibition will be open until the 24th of March 2013 (the museum is closed on Mondays).

Wereldmuseum

Willemskade 22-25
3016 DM Rotterdam
the Netherlands
http://www.wereldmuseum.nl

Opening times:

Tuesday through Sunday 10:30-17:30
Closed every Monday, and on 1 January, 30 April and 25 December