Women with attitude – Jan Veth at the Dordrechts museum

It’s perhaps fair to say that the work of Jan Veth is not widely known outside of the Netherlands, and even within the Dutch art world the names of his contemporaries such as Isaac Israels and George Breitner are more often found in the museums.  All the more reason perhaps for a large scale gathering together of Veth’s work, which is exactly what can be currently found in the Dordrechts museum.

I don’t often go out of my way to see an exhibition that is almost entirely portraits.  But I did know enough about the artist’s work to know that it might be worth the trip and give a look into the faces and lives around the artist in the at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. 

This is of course a period of huge changes in the art that was being made in Europe. The waves made by the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cubists and others were sweeping across the continent. Jan Veth though was ploughing a very different furrow.  Originally, he showed more interest in becoming a painter of the landscape, but became increasingly drawn towards portraiture making paintings, prints and drawings.

Walking around the exhibition there is an extensive collection of the artist’s work that the curators of the exhibition have brought together.  Many of the paintings are quite formal the in the poses chosen, particularly when the subject is a man, although the couple of examples I’ve included below are rather the exceptions to this rule! 

But it was the paintings of the women in the exhibition that I found myself returning to.  These seemed to offer something rather different.  Whether it was his three sisters posed sitting size by side, the stunning side on view of Maria Veldman against a swirling green background or the intensity of Davida Wilhelmina Hacke staring out at us the viewer, these are women and paintings with attitude.  They look at us or past us, but either way, it feels like they know that we are there, and I think this is the reason I enjoyed the confrontation with them, because it did feel like a confrontation, not just a one-way encounter.

Exhibitions I would have liked to have seen…lockdown interruptions

Museums all over the world are shuffling their exhibition programs.  They are also undoubtedly counting the costs of the missing visitors, the entrance tickets, the book shop sales, the cafes and restaurants.  The museums here in the Netherlands are no different.

Dutch museums are in the process of tentatively reopening their doors. Limited visitors are allowed, and everyone has to pre-book their time of entry.  They have also been reorganizing the exhibition programs. 

For example, there was to have been this autumn in the Drendtsmuseum in the north of the country, a large-scale exhibition of the work or Frida Kahlo.  Kahlo is an artist whose work I have only ever seen in odd snippets here and there. It was a visit that I had been looking forward to making. It seems that I will have to look forward to it a bit longer, it has now been put back a year and is now autumn 2021. 

There were other exhibitions that have simply passed by during the lockdown.  I thought that this was the case with the Breitner-Israels exhibition in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague.  The two top Dutch painters from the late 19th and early 20th century had been put head to head for comparison. The show opened shortly before Corona burst loose on us all. I hadn’t had the chance to visit and guessed my chance had been missed. As compensation to myself I bought the extensive catalogue and enjoyed reading it during the peak lockdown weeks for a bit of cultural distraction.

As it turns out the exhibition has been extended over the summer, so there is still the opportunity to visit. But for me there is a catch; getting to the museum involves a journey of an hour and a half on public transport.  The message coming out of government is that public transport should only be used when absolutely necessary……like when I use it to get to my work in education.  There’s a potentially interesting discussion to be had here, that being that after three months of no cultural input of this sort, it does feel pretty necessary and vital to recharge my cultural batteries! Is that needy enough?

A tale of two sketchbooks continued…..

An exhibition visit last weekend and a previous post about sketchbooks have prompted me to write this short extension to the A tale of two sketchbooks post of a couple of weeks ago.

Last weekend I visited the Mondrian exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.  In the museum, as well as this blockbuster show there was a smaller exhibition of work by the Haagse School, a group of Dutch artists working in the Dutch capital at the end of the 19th century.  There was a good collection of interesting paintings but actually what caught my attention most were two walls in the exhibition that had been given over solely to displaying the sketchbooks of some of the artists involved.

These small, and very intimate glances into the working process of the likes of Breitner and Israels were quite captivating.  It is the sort of exhibition display that I would like to bring my pupils at school to see.  Direct, small scale and personal, these are visual documents that somehow bridge the gap between the artist and the finished work.  You see a visual connection with the finished paintings, but also, a much more apparent and obvious presence of the artist themselves.  These are after all books that lived in their pockets or bags, objects that travelled around with them and were a sort of personal forum for the development of ideas.

Sketchbooks are important, we can learn much from them.  In many ways, it is a shame that they are so rarely of display in our museum.  There are places online where examples can be found and pages turned through, such as here.

There are also places such as The Sketchbook Project where the drawing books of lesser known artists and creative people are receiving an online place where others can turn through the digital pages.  I’ll certainly be drawing the attention of my pupils to this source of documentation of the creative process.

Mondrian and his edges

As someone who has always been interested in abstraction in the visual arts Piet Mondrian has continually lurked in the background and often enough forced his way forward into my own work. When I think back to my time as a student in London, he was one of the reasons that a few friends and I made a visit to the Netherlands. We visited the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague to see firsthand the works of this influential Dutch master. To be honest I can’t quite remember which works we saw, but it certainly wasn’t as many are as currently on view at the museum. To mark the centenary of the setting up of De Stijl the Gemeentemuseum has dipped deep into its collection and pulled out pretty much everything in order to mount a hugely extensive exhibition that gives a great deal of context and background to the work that brought him to the abstract images with which we tend to immediately settle on when thinking about Mondrian.

This framing of context of Mondrian’s work is further extended by the presence of a second exhibition, Rumoer in de Stad (Tumult in the city), in the museum that focuses on the Dutch artistic world from 1880 onwards, and in particular around The Hague itself.  It features work by the likes of George Hendrik Breitner, Isaac Israëls and Willem Witsen. It creates a clear image of daily and cultural life in Dutch society at the end of the nineteenth century. The paintings and drawings displayed ooze a spontaneity and a pleasure in the materials that the artists were using. It’s easy to allow yourself to imagine the world that these artists moved in and were recording in their work.

It is very much this sort of context that Mondrian was building on when he moved to the city to begin his artistic career. The Gemeentemuseum documents extensively this early work. There are walls literally covered in landscape paintings. To start with they are often painted in a quite restrained way. But sure enough, as you pass through subsequent galleries we see the familiar process of reduction, abstraction and heightening of colour start to take place leading us to rooms of archetypal ‘Mondrians’ from the collection and ultimately to the museums pride and joy, Victory Boogie Woogie.

Anything but graphic

The abstract paintings of the 1920s and 30s have understandably been responsible for securing the Dutch man’s place in art history. The countless reproductions and reusing of the black verticals and horizontals with zones of primary colour have become the something of a trademark. But they have also become way more graphic in our minds than they are. I’ve always been aware of the painterly qualities of Mondrian’s work, it strikes you immediately when you see the original work.

But when seeing such a quantity of paintings as are currently on display you become more aware than ever how important edges between areas of colour were to the artist. There’s nothing graphic or in any way hard.in the early work the edges are soft and defused.  As the world Mondrian chose to represent became more reduced the edges became areas of paint seeminly pushing together to create an edge with very much a manmade tension to it. Whilst drawing tends to focus on line, painting challenges to artist to deal with edges, edges where two colours come together, Mondrian understood edges and how often details occurring on a very small scale can carry important consequences.

Throughout the whole exhibition you are constantly aware of the hand of the artist, decisions and refinements constantly being considered and worked.  An approach that is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the room with nothing on the pristine white walls, except that is, for the engaging presence that is Victory Boogie Woogie.