Category: Europe
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The GEM of Berlage
The GEM of Berlage Having lived in Amsterdam for nearly half a century, the name Berlage has become very familiar to me, as have the remarkable buildings he designed for this city a century ago and which are now protected monuments often carrying his name. Like the ‘Beurs van Berlage’ (the commodity exchange) and the…
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The LeWitt-Berlage Stairwell
The LeWitt-Berlage Stairwell With the renovation of the Gemeentemuseum in 1998 the drawing of LeWitt that had been on the walls of the stairwell since 1983 had disappeared. LeWitt must have designed hundreds of wall drawings during his lifetime. I only know a few, but drawing # 373 on the stairwell in the Gemeentemuseum was considered…
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Rothko and LeWitt at a glance
Rothko and LeWitt at a glance Right: a person looking attentively at one of Rothko’s last paintings (Untitled, 1969, acrylic on canvas) made shortly before he took his own life in 1970. Black above gray. Middle: an open glass door. We leave the Rothko exhibition, and partly through, partly reflected in the glass of the…
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Rothko vs Mondriaan
Rothko vs Mondriaan The painting (Untitled, 1970) in this photograph must be one of Rothko’s last, if not the last. In February of the same year he took his life. For over 20 years he had worked in his typical style: combinations of horizontal blocks of colour, one above the other. Some of his paintings are of…
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Rothko
Rothko It was during my visit to the Rothko exhibition in The Hague last year that I was reminded of the frescoes by Fra Angelico in the monks’ cells of the convent of S. Marco in Florence (see last week’s post). Rothko had seen them too and had been equally impressed by them. One enters an…
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Convent of S. Marco, Cell 39
Convent of S. Marco, Cell 39 Around 1440 the artist and Dominican friar Fra Angelico, aided by his pupils and assistants, painted 45 frescoes in the cells and corridors of the Convent of S. Marco in Florence. In the Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (Thames and Hudson 1981) we read about him: “He is one…
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Poster girls
Poster girls Five people gazing, not at each other but each one in a different direction. And then there is a sixth one, me, capturing the scene in my own field of vision. Well, two of the five people are not there as large as life. But, larger than life in black and white, they certainly…
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Sleeping beauty
Sleeping beauty The bacchante sleeps off her glow of last night’s pleasure under the attentive eyes of a row of men. Only they can see from their point of view that this Maenad is actually a hermaphrodite. The generous curves of her soft, feminine body are beyond their reach. The kouros stands tall in the…
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Holiday mood
Holiday mood I happily see myself sitting on this terrace, with a good book, a glass of wine and a bowl of pistachios from the trees below. From time to time looking out over the Gulf of Aegina, daydreaming, seemingly unmoved by the misery in which a large part of the population of this ancient country is…
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Got you!
Got you! Life is: eating and being eaten. In the last instance it means death, but death for one is life for the other. Such is the law of nature. Photos of the week: Vondelpark, Amsterdam, Netherlands 2009
καιρός remembered 