indonesia – FTN-blog

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Dankowa has made more than 400 sculptures, but will always be remembered for her masterpiece ” het INDISCH MONUMENT” , erected at the Prof Teldersweg in Den Haag. She was chosen among many with her design of a group of famished people who mourn and grieve, with in the background bars to symbolize the occupancy of the Indonesian people during WWII.

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The sculpture had to be finished before 1988 and it was because of this set date the pressure to finish and complete the sculpture was immense. While making the sculkpture she fell from a ladder, but despite breaking a hip during this fall, she finished in time and the sculpture has been since in the centre of the remembrance ceremony of the victims who were killed during WWII in Indonesia.

www.ftn-books.com has now a monograph on Dankowa available.

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If there is one artist who brought impressionism into dutch art, it must be Jan Toorop. Roughly you can divide his artistic career into 4 phases. The first being his impressionist period ( a memberof Les XX), the second his neo impressionist period, the third being his symbolistic period and the last period is his realistic period in which he was converted completely into a Roman Catholic artist. Toorop is interesting because of his first 3 periods. Being born in Indonesia he has a different approach to his subjects and experiments with techniques and colors and uses a color scheme completely different from his dutch contemporaries. They focussed on skies and landscapes , whereas Toorop focussed on people and their surroundings. There are some great examples to be found in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag of his very early period where he painted with a palette knife and broad brushes. His very atmospheric scenes in London, a city where he lived for a couple of years and where he painted some great paintings. The “Trio Fleuri” is one of the most appealing painting from his London years, together with the Waterloo Bridge painting and both can be seen in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.