Readers know and read that i was not very enthousiastic about the presentations of the Stedelijk Museum during our last visits. Very little that was appealing and lacking all the quality the Stedelijk Museum is famous for.
Last week we visited the Stedelijk again and what a difference. This was an excellent presentation/exhibition with all the art the Stedelijk Museum is famous for and with some great additions. the Bruce Nauman exhibition itself was well worth visiting, but what pleased me the most was the way some of the highlights from the collection were put together on show in BASE 1 and BASE 2.
A true feast and the only part i thought was not there was some of the Minimal Art from the collection.
The first picture is the one on the Wim Crouwel publications the Stedelijk commissioned during the Sixties and Seventies. Recognized as top quality design and becominmg more and more important as part of the collection. many of these publications are also available at www.ftn-books.com.
I proud myself in having one of the largest Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam collections available for sale on the internte and i just added a extremely scarce item i want to share with you. I always was under the impression that from the mid Seventies the larger museums in the Netherlands started their educational programs to attract the young and school pupils to the museums.
I was wrong….
Recently i discovered in one of the 1960 catalogues a folder which was added which shows that the Stedelijk Musdeum had its own educational program in 1960. The 6 page folder, probably designed by Willem Sandberg shows an event specially organized for the very young to come to the museum and have fun. An “art” party for the young organized by the STEDELIJK in which childeren of all ages were entertained and encouraged to practisize their own art. A great and important collectable item available at www.ftn-books.com
I have always taken great interest in the works by jean Dubuffet.
A few years ago i was ver impressed with a small exhibit of paintings that were on show in the permanent collection of the Musee des Art Decoratifs in Paris. At the time we visited with David and Monica the Chtchoukine collection at the Fondation Vuitton and seeing the Dubuffets was certainly one of the artistic highlights of the trip. I was delighted to encounter what is (arguably) the best exhibition catalogue on Dubuffet ever.
It is a combined effort of the three venues that all had the same show with works by Jean Dubuffet. The three venues were Akademie der Kunste in Berlin, Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna and the Josef Haubrich-Kunsthalle in Köln. The three combined publihed one of the most impressive and important catalogues with an exhibition ever. 428 pages filled with impressive and important Dubuffet works of Art. This cataloguefrom 1980 is now available at www.ftn-books.com
This an artist for the future and at this time still affordable and a great investment.
Reinhoud D’haese’s works were primarily surrealist outputs depicting small-scale figures performing various activities; Le Contramaitre is just one of the many quirky figures created and exhibited.
Initially, his preferred material was copper, but he eventually went on to explore and create with a variety of other materials throughout his career, namely pewter and glass. D’haese met Pierre Alechinsky in the early 50’s and subsequently displayed a lot of his works . Both had an iconic exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, which catalogue is still one of my personal favorites.
What makes the works special for me and it is the reason i think his art will be of great artistic and financial valu in the future is that Reinhoud walks the road between surrealism and abstraction, making his art related to Alechinsky but also to Andre Breton.
His saculptures are unique creatures and put together are part of the typical Reinhold world.
www.ftn-books.com has some nice Reinhoud publuications available
I think that museum DE PONT in Tilburg is one of the museums that impresses me most. In the almost 30 years of its existence it has build a solid reputation in organizing breathtaking and ground breaking exhibitions and in the meantime expanded their collection of contemporary art in a very personal way. The building, not the most architectural beautiful museum in the world, is fantastic to present the modern art and each time i visit de PONT it impresses me. The man responsibel for this great achievement is Hendrik Driessen.
While i was searching for minimal art in the Netherlands i discovered that many of the contemporary minimal artists in the Netherland had their first museum presentation at the DE PONT. Besides the exhibitions, their publication program is well worth following. Beautiful designed catalogues and posters are published making this one of the most desirable and satisfying museum packages/ visits for me.
www.ftn-books.com has many of the legendary de PONT publications available.
It has been almost 50 years ago that the Stedelijk Museum presented dutch graphic artist Nono Reinhold for the first time. She has never become a “household’ name among dutch graphic artists, but now is the time to recognize the importance of Reinhold . Her works , inventive techniques and place among the arists of her generation , shows that she is important. the Teylers Museum adn Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam have an important collection of her works , which is occasionally on show. When you first see her works the immediate association is the liquid slides from the SIXTIES, with one difference. slides are random, but these compositions and colors are intentional. Until 10 years ago i never had heard of the artists but since i grew my inventory i encountered several books on Reinhold ( availabel at www.ftn-books.com ) and i started to like her works. May be it is time for you to discover Nono reinhold at this moment too.
There is a reason for using the above photograph in which Marlene Dumas stands next to Rene Daniëls. The iconic book for her first major museum exhibition was published by the van Abbemuseum and dedicated to René Daniëls, who had a cerebral haemorrhage in 1987. They boht attended Ateliers ’63 , but did not study in the same period, but after their studies they met at several exhibitions in which they were presented as young promissing artists from the Ateliers ’63.
After they met at the Stedelijk Museum exhibition they became friends and had several (group) exhibitions together.
With the painting “De gele vingers van de kunstenaar”, she had already begun to establish herself as a promising young artist. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, she had moved to the Netherlands to study at the independent art school Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem, near Amsterdam, from 1976 to 1978. Founded in 1963, the institute is now known as De Ateliers and located in Amsterdam. In 1978, at merely 25 years of age, Dumas exhibited her work for the first time as part of the group exhibition Atelier 15 (10 Young Artists) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1982 participated in Documenta 7.
Painted in 1985, De gele vingers van de kunstenaar belongs to the breakthrough body of work The Eyes of the Night Creatures that Dumas created after a five-year hiatus from painting, during which time she had primarily created works on paper. While her drawings oeuvre had been already been subject to her first museum solo exhibition at the Centraal Museum Utrecht in 1984, the debut of this series at Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam in 1985 marked the triumphant return to painting and figuration in Dumas’ practice and signaled the emergence of what would become one of the most daring and influential figurative contemporary painters.
Invitation for Galerie Paul Andriesse, Marlene Dumas, The Eyes of the Night Creatures, 1985
Many of the works from the series now reside in public collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centraal Museum Utrecht.
Installation view of The Eyes of the Night Creatures series in Marlene Dumas, Image as Burden, Tate Modern, London, 2015
It is important to remember that the art world in Amsterdam at the time was very small, with only two major contemporary art galleries and many of the artists, gallerists, critics and curators knowing each other very well. Recalling the great lineage of French Impressionist bourgeois café scenes, De gele vingers van de kunstenaar captures a late night art world gathering of friends that smoke, drink and talk.
The diptych is indeed based on photographs that Dumas took during nights out with her friends in Amsterdam. On the left, eminent artist and close friend René Daniëls is depicted holding a cigarette with yellow fingers, evocative of fresh paint, but also the staining that occurs from extensive smoking — hence the corresponding title.
De gele vingers van de kunstenaar speaks to a particular moment in time in which Dumas and René Daniëls were on the rise as the most promising young painters in the Netherlands. While Dumas and Daniëls did not overlap in their studies at Ateliers ’63, they had notably been included in the 1978 Stedelijk Museum group exhibition Atelier 15 (10 Young Artists).
The catalogue MISS INTERPRETED which is now available at www.ftn-books.com honours this friendship and the appreciation of Daniels his art by Marlene Dumas.
The very first time when i saw work by the Italian CHia was when he was presented together with contemporary artist from Italy presented at the Stedelijk Museum and i decided at that moment that fro me personally i liked the works by Chia the best. Not cucchi, not Clemente and not Palladino i liked most but the semi bombastic paintings by Chia i liked most. They have a classical quality, but look very contemporary. Bright colors and filled with action his paintings still fascinate me.
Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor. A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi. The movement was at its peak during the 1980s and was part of a wider movement of Neo-Expressionist painters around the world.
www.ftn-books.com has some nice Chia titles available.
Lothar Baumgarten is one of those artists who’s fame never was never worldwide, but who rightfully deserves to be known and admired by many more. In recent years a new reveived interest grows in his works. Baumgarten, a conceptual artist< has had his exhibitions in the Netherlands at the Stedelijk Museum and Museum de PONT, but these have been some years ago, but lately i see a raised in interest and the works that appear at acution are sold at fair but rising prices. A good work from an edition is sttill to be acquired far below euro 250,–
Baumgarten is an artist to follow, and if you admire his works, like i do, focus on the editions. These are still to be bought at low prices.
1986….Keith Haring had his retropective at the Stedelijk Museum and made the VELUM for the entrance at that time. Since, there has been a friendship between Wim Beeren and Keith Haring. The 1990 Bulletin published by the STEDELIJK MUSEUM, had a small contribution on the memorial held at the MAZZO discotheque in Amsterdam. With the article a note written by Keith Haring addressed to Wim (beeren) was published for the first time. Here is the letter.
Artist/ Author: Oliver Boberg
Title : Memorial
Publisher: Oliver Boberg
Measurements: Frame measures 51 x 42 cm. original C print is 35 x 25 cm.
Condition: mint
signed by Oliver Boberg in pen and numbered 14/20 from an edition of 20
has some nice Baumgarten publications available.
