Van Gogh Museum

Last day of the trip and we decide to eschew the buffet breakfast at Cafe Moer and take our suitcases for a short walk up Overtoom to the Toasty Cafe we’d walked past on Monday’s exploration. Pink grapefruit juice, coffee and croissant and we’re off to the tram stop heading for Leidseplein – getting the hang of direction of travel and so on by now. The trams are very frequent and easy to use. You can buy a transport card or just touch in and out with a credit card or phone. They look quite small from outside with just two coaches but have Tardis-like interiors.

As we walked across Museumplein yesterday, we’d spied a locker storage facility in the Q-Park garage and so our first port of call was here to leave our suitcases knowing we could retrieve them later and get a tram back to Centraal Station from the stop opposite the Concertgebouw. This proved very easy and secure and saved us either trekking back to the hotel or going to the station twice. We had two more museums to tick off before checking in for the return Eurostar jouney at three-thirty. I had been to the Moco in Barcelona at Christmas and so was keen to visit the original in Amsterdam. Their mission is to present modern and contemporary artists in elegant surroundings. In Barcelona the museum occupies the fine old Palacio Cervelló not far from the equally impressive Picasso Museum. In Amsterdam they took over the historic Villa Alsberg next to the Van Gogh Museum. They have a significant number of authenticated Banksy originals and prints, some Yayoi Kusama pumpkins, a couple by Warhol, Basquiat and Keith Haring – and a Damien Hirst. There were also many artworks and video installations which were fascinating to explore. Some left me cold and uncomprehending, others I revelled in. That’s art I guess. One area was devoted to NFTs which despite all attempts I still don’t understand. One artist in the NFT exhibit that really appealed to me was Andres Reisinger whose environmental messages video Arcadia is accompanied by narration and an undulating minimalist music track. It has some phenomenal animation in the visuals and the poetry is very affecting. The room had a mirror wall so seeing ourselves and the video images stretching off into infinity reminded me of walking the great length of Hockney’s Normandy frieze at Saltmills in Bradford a while back. You can see Arcadia on Vimeo and Reisinger, composer RAC and poet Arch Hades talk about making it on YouTube.

Moco museum exterior and stairwell, Banksy’s faceless policemen, Kusama pumpkin, Takashi Murakami X Virgil Abloh sculpture and an animated NFT

Time for lunch now and we decided to take it in the elegant cafe at the Stedelijk Museum which was to be our last port of call on our cultural marathon. The museum is in someways I suppose the Tate Modern to Tate Britain comparison with the Rijksmuseum. The permanent collection is divided into three sections: up to 1950, 1950-80 and 1980 to the present. It’s striking modern entrance hall conceals a fine Victorian edifice from 1895. I guess we might be having art fatigue but I found it the least interesting of our visits although there were still quite a few objects that caught my eye.

Stedelijk Museum exterior, Vanishing Point cotton sculpture by Lenore Towney, El Anatsui’s In the World But Don’t Know the World made from bottle tops and found objects which reminded me of the huge Miro tapestry with umbrellas I’d seen in Barcelona at Christmas and Paul Citroen’s Escher-like Metropolis.

We set off to collect our luggage with Fran nobly fetching mine as well, as I’d omitted to take photos of the museums as I’d originally thought I wouldn’t be writing a blog about this trip. But we’ve had such a good time I just thought I had to share. We board a tram at Concertgebouw and soon arrive at the main station – another impressive building.

Check in at Amsterdam was less good than in London as we were all cooped up for an hour in a small enclosure on Platform 15 with few seats and no food facilities other than a vending machine. Every visit we’ve made this trip has been followed, almost instantly, with a request for feedback. I am very bored with this constant search for meaningless comment and generally disregard them but I did fill in Eurostar’s with my thoughts about the check in arrangements in Amsterdam. The journey itself was impeccable, so much so that at one point I said to Fran that we must be nearing Lille and she replied that we were already in England. We parted at St Pancras with the words ‘See you tomorrow’ since the reason for our return was to attend Thursday’s Gala Dinner for the Watford Community Sports & Education Trust to celebrate 30 years. Can it really be five years ago that I wrote a book for them? The evening was a total delight with many current and former players present as well as many friends and colleagues. We were presented with a substantial book containing the annual impact review and thirty stories from Trust supporters. Fran and I were delighted to find ourselves on adjacent pages.

The evening was made even more special when Fran collected an award for being the Trust’s Fundraising Champion. We then stayed partying until far too late but it was a brilliant culmination of a week celebrating all the things we love – art. music, travel, beer and wine, food, friends and football.

So day two of our culture trip dawned with a pleasant buffet breakfast in Cafe Moer and then a twenty-five min ute walk through Vondelpark heading diagonally for the Van Gogh Museum which I’d sensibly prebooked for 11:30, which was of course 10:30 on our body clocks and quite early enough to start the serious part of the day. Vondelpark is a huge green space with lakes and ponds, cycleways and roads and some pedestrian paths but it was our first moment of realising just how profuse and dangerous cyclists are in this city. Add to their sheer numbers the fact that motorised vehicles like scooters and golf buggies also use the cyclepaths and you take your life in your hands every time you cross one. It’s also sometimes difficult to know which is the footpath and which the cycleway.

Vondelpark today and as I saw it with skaters in March 2018.

We arrived slightly early at the Van Gogh Museum to see a sign saying ‘Sold out for today’ so feeling very smug at having booked from the UK in advance, we strolled past the waiting line into the museum. It houses the biggest collection of Van Gogh’s works in the world. We had booked for the special exhibition Choosing Vincent. Portrait of a Family History which made it clear to us why this was the case. Vincent’s sister-in-law was married to Theo for less than two years before he died soon after Vincent. But Jo van Gogh-Bonger and later her son – also Vincent – were largely responsible for promoting Van Gogh’s reputation as a major artist and later establishing the museum which bears his name.

The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Circular entry lobby on the right and the manin collection on the left.

We had time to explore the main collection before and after visiting the fascinating family story which was elegantly curated by getting you to follow a timeline on the floor which led to information panels, personal objects, photographs and paintings. It was staggering to find that at periods of his life he turned out a painting a day. It was also interesting to see how his style varied continually – a carefully painted image with oils thinly applied one day and the next the fervent impastoed brush stokes we generally associate with him. It was then time to head of in search of lunch before the manin event – Vermeer at 14:30. My memory from five years ago failed us so we had quite a roundabout trek to Leidseplein where I remember there being lots of bars. I was shocked when we did get there that so many are now chain operations rather than the local bars I recalled. However we found a very pleasant bar-restaurant under the Casino called Grand Cafe Lido in tribute to its predecessor which had been a landmark in the area since 1937. We had a canalside table (indoors), good beer and food and lots of boating and bird activity on the Singel or Leidsegracht canal (not sure what it’s called at this point).

Our rather damp entry to the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum.

But it was well worth it. Again with prebooked tickets we breezed in deposited coats and bag and entered the intimate worlds created by Johannes Vermeer. Having said that, the first thing we see is a View of Delft and Little Street both of which are exterior views of aspects of life in the city. The degree of detail in the characters in each picture is remarkable. You can almost hear the conversations.

The whole exhibition just grew from this simple start. Paintings were elegantly displayed against the dark grey walls. Captions were clear and available from a QR code on my phone and the 28 paintinbgs were all well spaced so although the exhibition is a complete sell out you didn’t feel unduly crowded and had ample time to look at each painting. The most exciting innovation for us was the semicircular barrier at just below waist height around the majority of paintings which meant you could wait briefly for your turn to be one of the six people in the front line with an uninterrupted view. As we moved around it was fascinating to see how the same window, ther same model, the same yellow, fur-edged jacket, a globe and other props from his studio cropped up time and again. It seems that after that early blast of the outdoors he shut himself in his studio and just painted there. One aspect of his work I thought I knew was that subjects were always lit from the left. Quite a shock then to find three lit from the right: Girl with a red hat, Girl with a flute and The Lacemaker.

We took our time and wandered hither and yon, sometimes together sometimes not until we met up the the last room but as we prepared to leave we asked each other ‘Did you see her?” ‘No,’ was the response. We knew the Girl with the Pearl Earring was going back to its usual home the Maritshuis in the hague on 30 March but she should be here still. We retraced our steps, enquired of a guide and did get to admire perhaps, thanks to Tracy Chevalier, his most famous work. And very wonderful it is too. I have been reluctant of late to buy art exhibition catalogues but this was one I had to have and a fine exploration of his work it is. Reproductions of all the paintings but also lots of small detailed views to explore Vermeer’s technique. Many of the paintings were worked on for a lengthy period with evidence of recomposing them with overpainting revealed by x-ray analysis. Worth the trip to Amsterdam? Absolutely and there’s more to come.

As we went down the stairs to the loos at the exit from the exhibition, I noticed white fluffy things whooshing down from ornately plastered ceiling. It was a great installation and from the information desk we managed to elicit that it was by Studio Drift. The web confirmed that it’s called Shylight and there’s a fascinating video of it on their website and on YouTube.

We now had a couple of hours to pass before gpoing to the Concertgebouw for a concert at 8.15 pm. As that would not finish until well after ten, we thought eating first might be a good idea. I remembered finding a great bar to the southwest of the concert hall so we set off in that general direction and happened across a very suitable place. It wasn’t the one I remembered from my last trip – I later discovered that Brasserie van Dam was just one block further west. However the Eetcafé Schotsheuvel did us very well. It was pretty empty when we arrived and we had a beer wondering whether to just have the one and move on before finally deciding to stay and eat. The staff were friendly and became increasingly busy as by the time we left to head back to our concert, the place was heaving with locals – always a good sign. Extremely tasty crab cakes and fries with garlic mayo and a substantial pork rib and a decent bottle of wine saw the time fly by and our decision to stay well justified.

We make our way back to the Concertgebouw and settle into sided balcony seats with a good view of the stage. The concedrt is given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra which came to major international prominence under Simon Rattle who joined it in 1980 when he was just 25 and made it into a world renowned orchestra during his 18 years as music director. Tonight the baton is in the hands of the young Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla the Lithuanian conductor who became MD at the CBSO in 2016 at the age of 20. So what we were about to hear could be called ‘Simon Rattle’s Tyla-made Army’. Watford fans groan, others ask for an explanation in the comments!

*Concert-Gebouw exterior with excellent gold harp on the roof*

*Julia Hagen with cello and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla descending theperilous steps to get to the podium*

The concert started with a piece I’d never heard of by Mieczysław Weinberg who was described as Polish-Russian and died in 1996. It was his Sinfonietta No.1 and was a rousing big orchestra number with loads of percussion – a big night for the glockenspiel and tambourine man – vast swathes of brass interspersed with lyrical folk tunes in the strings. It was 20 enjoyable minutes and had something of a film score feel to it. This was followed by the Shostakovich cello concert played by Julia Hagen a rising star according to the Citizens of Beethoven who awarded her the Beethoven Ring for 2022 and others. When I read she plays a cello made in Cremona in 1684, I was fearful of a trip on the lengthy flight of stairs conductor and soloists must use to make a grand applause-filled entrance. It was very well done and conductor and soloist clearly had a strong rapport. At the interval we went out into the bar and picked up a glass of wine at no charge. As Fran pointed out, it means they can get through the interval drinks dispense much more quickly when they are not faffing about with payments. We sat with two Dutch gentlemen who inevitably asked how we were enjoying Brexit. ‘Not!’ was our emphatic reply. They smiled wryly.

The second part of the concert was Prokoviev’s suite from the ballet Romeo and Juliet. It’s a work I know and love and I don’t think I’ve heard it played better than under Grazintye-Tyla here in Amsterdam. So many earworms from the dance of the Montagues and Capulets to the plaintive tune for the young Juliet – I’m still humming it now. After massive rounds of standing ovations we left the hall and knowing our hotel was in a street called Overtoom we boarded – at my insistence – a tram that said it stopped at Overtoom. Only it stopped at the wrong end and Google maps said we were 20 minutes walk from the hotel. I now know that Overtoom is straight as a die for slightly over 1.5 kilometres. So we walked back to the Rijksmuseum and the tram stop at Leidseplein and took the correct tram this time which left us with a mere six minutes walk to the hotel. Moral – swot up on the tram map before you dash onto the first one you see. So an amazing day of varied culture came to an end with a rewarding last glass of wine to round it off.

Tag: Van Gogh Museum

Last day – more art and a celebration

Culture vultures