JACK-AMSTERDAM-Stedelijk museum of modern and contemporary art
Jack
Loire, Belgium and Holland posts are visible with pictures on
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AMSTERDAM-Stedelijk museum of modern and contemporary art
(this essay with the previous essay will be updated on a later day on
my site http://www.jack-travel.com/) Copyright ©
Leaving the Van Goghmuseum, turn left down Paulus Potterstraat, to the
STEDELIJK MUSEUM, whose bourgeois 19th century (1892-1895)
Neo-Renaissance exterior bellies belies in its adventurous contents.
It is my favourite museum in Amsterdam, however it is purely a
personal taste for art. I am a big fan and amateur of twentieth
century art and that's what it is all about in this art shrine.
The Stedelijk museum is regarded as one of the leading museums of
Modern Art and its permanent collection includes works by Monet, Paul
Cézanne (my favourite post-impressionist, announcing cubism), Pablo
Picasso, Bonnard, Dufy, Braque and many others I will name later in
this essay. In fact it houses works from 1850 up. Its vocation is to
reflect all international pictorial tendencies of the moment. It's a
museum of "variable geometry" but impossible to describe all you can
find in these vast spaces, since more than 30 exhibitions are
organised every year. What is left of space houses the permanent
collection? But let's describe it as if there was only an exhibition
at the ground floor.
On entering the museum, climb the imposing marble staircase to the
first floor, where there is a rotating exhibition of works of the
permanent collection. Among them should be some of the museum's lovely
Cezanne landscapes, at least one of the handful Van Gogh's left behind
when the Van Gogh collection moved to its own museum, and works by
Henri Matisse (1869-1964), Marc Chagall (1889-1985) and Wassily
Kandinsky (1866-1944). Pop art and action painting of the 1960s,
including Andy Warhol (1926-1987), Roy Liechtenstein and Jackson
Pollock are well represented, and the museum's fine collection of work
by living artists is an eye-opener. Thus, contemporary artists are
very well represented: Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland,
Frank Stella and Edward Kienholz with its "Beanery", the bar in a
container.
Top billing goes to the unique collection of works (the largest
outside Russia), by the Russian abstract painter Kazimir Malevitch
(1878-1935) and by the Dutch painters of the Stijl movement, Piet
Mondriaan (1872-1944) and Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931). Malevich and
his Dutch contemporaries worked separately through WW I and the
Russian revolution, after which Malevich was unable to leave the
Soviet Union. But their work is very much along the same lines in its
drive to reduce art to the purely abstract means of solid geometric
shapes.
The German expressionist school was not forgotten with unique works by
Max Beckman, Ludwig Kirchner and Karl-Schmidt-Rotluff. The Czech
Kokoschka. Also painters of the second half of the century have their
place here: the representatives of the "Cobra "movement, created in
Brussels, like Karl Appel, Armando, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Peter
Struyken, Rob Scholte.
Walk downstairs to the Print room, whose startlingly eclectic, ever
changing collection includes the work of contemporary photographers.
Finally visit the ground floor. Here is obvious that the Stedelijk
Museum inherited something of the provocative attitude of the Dutch in
the 60s. Here is where the most innovative temporary exhibitions are
held, many of them calculated to send you on your way pondering the
nature of art…..
Bibliography
Holland, by Adam Hopkins (Faber and Faber, 1988), Penguin Guide to
Amsterdam (ed.Vincent Westzaan, Penguin 1990), Dwalen door Amsterdam
en reizen door de Benelux, ( ed. Lekturama 1984), "Amsterdam: The life
of a city" by Geoffrey Cotterell (Saxon house 1974), "20 ste eeuwse
kunst in Amsterdam" by Karel Vervoort (Kunst uitg-Amsterdam 1997)
Jack
My Paris,daytrips from Paris, Provence, Cote d'Azur, valley of the
Loire,Normandy, Belgium and Holland posts are open again at
http://www.jack-travel.com WITH pictures and at
http://home.mminternet.com/~nowhere_man
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