Tag: Art
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Mondria(a)n
Mondria(a)n This painting (The Grey Tree), revealing cubist influence, shows Mondriaan at the crossroads between his earlier figurative work and his later purely abstract paintings. Mondriaan made it in 1911, the year he went to France where he wished to join the Parisian Avant Garde. On his way to Paris Mondriaan dropped one ‘a’ of…
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Bonies in the Art Museum (2021)
Bonies in the Art Museum (2021) (Nota bene: After Autumn Sonata, the first weekly post on my blog almost ten years ago, today’s post happens to be number 500. And I’m still there to continue!) The ‘Kunstmuseum’ (Art Museum) in The Hague, the GEM of Berlage, is a piece of art in itself. I think…
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Cors des Alpes
Cors des Alpes A concert with two alpine horns and two accordions in an old Hydro Power Plant in the Rhône, where the river flows out of Lake Geneva. Very original, as for the music, the instruments and the location.The musicians played arrangements of old baroque compositions and more recent pieces specially composed for these…
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Memento mori
Memento mori When we walk through a cemetery, we may well be glad that we still belong to the world of the living, but it inevitably reminds us of our own mortality. This is certainly true of the Portuguese Jewish cemetery near Amsterdam. Many gravestones feature images symbolising death: an hourglass running out (and which…
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Anno Mundi 5490
Anno Mundi 5490 The Jewish cemetery at ‘Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’ near Amsterdam is called Beth Haim which means House of Life. This tells us something about the Sephardim philosophy of life – and death. The picture shows a detail of a partly submerged gravestone in which we see a shepherdess with her cattle. A…
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Watery grave
Watery grave I saw this sculpted marble gravestone at the cemetery of the Portuguese Jewish community in ‘Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’. The Sephardim Jews had started settling in Amsterdam in the 16th century and their cemetery in nearby Ouderkerk dates from 1614. I used to pass and visit it regularly on my walks along the…
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Maps
Maps Populonia,Via de CrinaleVia dei Cavalleggeri …Not much is left of the map on display telling us about exciting places to visit and walks to take around the Gulf of Baratti on the west coast of Tuscany. I love maps. A map can let us dream of unknown worlds, even when the elements have transformed…
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Selective memory
Selective memory Last week we had a theatre stage covered with carnations, this week we have tree branches hanging from the ceiling of a restaurant. While I still cherish the memory of the ballet performance between the thousands of carnations, the dinner under the tree branches has passed into oblivion. Photo of the week: Restaurant…
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“Nelken” stage
“Nelken” stage Carnations, thousands of them, growing on the stage of “Nelken”, the ballet by Pina Bausch. Since its premiere in 1982 it has been performed by Tanztheater Wuppertal numerous times all over the world. I saw it twice in Amsterdam, in 1995 and then again in 2016. Meanwhile Pina Bausch had died but her…
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A tribute to HM
A tribute to HM I was completely absorbed in looking at ‘The Sheaf’, one of Matisse’s great collages, created in the final years of his life, when he was bedridden and could no longer paint. Then a visitor came into my field of vision. I regarded her appearance as a happy coincidence, a fleeting tribute…
καιρός remembered 