Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [192]
Dutch art | The nineteenth century |
Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was one of the least “Dutch” of Dutch artists, and he spent most of his relatively short painting career in France. After countless studies of Dutch peasant life – studies which culminated in his sombre Potato Eaters(see "The collection") – he went to live in Paris with his art-dealer brother Theo. There, under the influence of the Impressionists, he lightened his palette, following the pointillist work of Seurat and “trying to render intense colour and not a grey harmony”. Two years later he went south to Arles, the “land of blue tones and gay colours”, and, struck by the brilliance of Mediterranean light, his characteristic style began to develop. A disastrous attempt to live with Gauguin, and the much-publicized episode in which he cut off part of his ear and presented it to a local prostitute (see "Van Gogh’s ear"), led to his committal in an asylum at St-Rémy. Here he produced some of his most famous, and most Expressionistic, canvases – strongly coloured and with the paint thickly, almost frantically, applied. Now one of the world’s most popular – and popularized – painters, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum has the world’s finest collection of his work (see "The Van Gogh Museum").
Dutch art |
The twentieth century – De Stijl
Each of the major modern art movements has had – or has – its followers in the Netherlands and each has been diluted or altered according to local taste. Of many lesser names, Jan Sluyters (1881–1957) stands out as the Dutch pioneer of Cubism, but this is small beer when compared with the one specifically Dutch movement – De Stijl (The Style). Piet Mondriaan (1872–1944) was De Stijl’s leading figure, developing the realism he had learned from the Hague School painters – via Cubism, which he criticized for being too cowardly to depart totally from representation – into a complete abstraction of form which he called Neo-Plasticism. Mondriaan was something of a mystic, and this was to some extent responsible for the direction that De Stijl – and his paintings – took: canvases painted with grids of lines and blocks made up of the three primary colours plus white, black and grey. Mondriaan believed this freed his art from the vagaries of personal perception, making it possible to obtain what he called “a true vision of reality”.
De Stijl took other forms too; there was a magazine of the same name, and the movement introduced new concepts into every aspect of design, from painting to interior design and architecture. But in all these media, lines were kept simple, colours bold and clear. Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) was a De Stijl cofounder and major theorist. His work is similar to Mondriaan’s except for the noticeable absence of thick, black borders and the diagonals that he introduced into his work, calling his paintings “contra-compositions” – which, he said, were both more dynamic and more in touch with the twentieth century. Bart van der Leck (1876–1958) was the third member of the circle, identifiable by white canvases covered by seemingly randomly placed interlocking coloured triangles. Mondriaan split with De Stijl in 1925, going on to attain new artistic extremes of clarity and soberness before moving to New York in the 1940s and producing atypically exuberant works such as Victory Boogie Woogie – named for the artist’s love of jazz.
Dutch art | The twentieth century – De Stijl |
From De Stijl to the present day
During and after De Stijl, a number of other movements flourished in the Netherlands, though their impact was not so great and their influence was largely local. The Expressionist Bergen School was probably the most localized, its best-known exponent Charley Toorop (1891–1955), daughter of Jan, developing a distinctively glaring but strangely sensitive realism. De Ploeg (The Plough), centred in Groningen, was headed by Jan Wiegers (1893–1959) and influenced by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the German Expressionists; the group’s artists set out to capture the