Rembrandt Galore at Berlage's Exchange: the Complete Copied Works

The (supposedly) last self-portrait by Rembrandt, 1669. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

The German art historian and curator Wilhem von Bode (1845-1929) once quipped that ‘Rembrandt painted 700 pictures. Of these, 3,000 are still in existence’. One only has to read Gary Schwartz’s piece ‘Yes, But. Rembrandt as an Unstable Medium' in the yearbook The Low Countries to know what Von Bode was talking about. Excluding fakes and false attributions, the count of works by the Master of the Dutch Golden Age is presently at 731. Until September 6 these 731 are on display at the Berlage Exchange in Amsterdam. Obviously this is an exhibition of reproductions, all of them 1:1 and of amazingly high quality, using the latest digital techniques.

This unique and art-historically priceless survey has been put together by a team of Rembrandt specialists led by Prof. Ernst van de Wetering, head of the renowned Rembrandt Research Project. It comprises 317 paintings, 285 etchings, all relevant sketches and drawing, and a number of reconstructions of damaged and lost paintings. The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size has also a perfect and more permanent companion: Ernst van de Wetering’s book Rembrandt. A Life in 180 Paintings, published by Local World.

And if you’re more into the real stuff, then you don’t have time on your side because you’ll most likely have to wait until 2018 to witness a major survey of Rembrandt originals. The Mauritshuis in The Hague is planning an exhibition of the Master’s masterpieces, culled from Dutch and foreign collections, around that time. The ten paintings from the Mauritshuis’ own collection will of course also feature in this gargantuan Rembrandt Fest.

Ann Goldstein Goes Dutch as New Director Stedelijk Museum

Ann Goldstein. Photo by Michael Powers

The Board of Trustees of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has announced that Ann Goldstein (b. 1957) will take up the post of General Artistic Director of its museum in January 2010. Goldstein is currently Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. She has organised and co-organised a variety of exhibitions since joining the museum in 1983, including such large-scale surveys as A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation. She has also set up solo exhibitions of such artists as Barbara Kruger, Judy Fiskin and Roni Horn.

Chairman of the Board of Trustees Alexander Ribbink said that Goldstein ‘is exactly in line with the traditions of the museum, where contemporary art and artists have always enjoyed pride of place. ’ Goldstein herself, who has always maintained a special focus on European artists and institutions, intimated that she is honoured to lead the Stedelijk Museum on the eve of its highly anticipated reopening in 2010. She described the museum as one of the preeminent institutions devoted to modern and contemporary art and design in the world, and expressed her feeling that feels it should become ‘a lively and dynamic place, where programs are highly anticipated and curiosity is piqued, where artists feel at home and the public is constantly offered new and unexpected experiences.’

Ann Goldstein succeeds Gijs van Tuyl, who has led the museum since 2005, and is the first non-Dutch director and the first woman to be in charge of this prominent Dutch institution.

Meet James Ensor at the MoMA

A major James Ensor show opened at the MoMA in New York, where – incidentally – until July 27 you can still go see a number of installations questioning the nature of reality and subverting the traditional relationship between viewer and viewed by contemporary Dutch artist Aernout Mik, on June 28. Ensor (1860–1949), the Ostend ‘prince of painters’, was a Flemish artist of considerable stature and along with Gauguin, Van Gogh and Munch a pioneer of modern European art and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism.

This exhibition investigates Ensor’s artistic influence and presents approximately 120 works that, according to the press release, show the painter’s ‘contribution to modernity, his innovative and allegorical use of light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty, and role-playing.’ To this end, the paintings, prints, and drawings are positioned in an overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of the master’s bold oeuvre. The exhibition, which has Flanders House, the new Flemish cultural forum in the US as its lead sponsor, wants to present ‘a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the very nature of modernism’.

Last Friday, Holland Cotter described Ensor as a classic insider-outsider in The New York Times: part of the art canon, yet also artistically homeless. Fugitive, volatile and hard to pin down, Ensor was certainly a true and literal ‘eccentric’ who labored away from the cultural hotspots where artistic reputations were made. Cotter calls him ‘an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop culture itch’, thus referring to the mixture of high and low culture, of the sublime and the popular in the magical mystery tour de force that Ensor’s work ultimately is. It is no coincidence that in the 1990 High & Low: High Art and Popular Culture exhibition at the very same Museum of Modern Art the man from Ostend rubbed shoulders with the likes of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein and Cindy Sherman.

Cotter’s guess is that a lot of people know Ensor's name without knowing quite who he is. Therefore this exhibition is a fine chance to take this wise advice from a 1994 They Might Be Giants song to heart: ‘Meet James Ensor / Belgium's famous painter / Dig him up and shake his hand / Appreciate the man’.

James Ensor. A retrospective of the Painter continues through September 21 at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, will travel to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009–February 2010. You can shake hands virtually with the artist here.

Dutch Literature Gets a A Leg Up from the British Arts Council

Lending Dutch literature and writers a much-needed hand in their international dealings: that could be one description of the work done by the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. The Foundation’s own mission statement says that it exists 'to promote interest in Dutch-language literature abroad.’ It maintains contacts with a large number of international publishers, and has a stand at major international book fairs, including the Frankfurt Book Fair, the London Book Fair and the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna. It also provides financial support to foreign publishers wishing to publish translations of Dutch or Frisian literature to help cover translation costs, provides subsidies for literary programmes and other promotional activities, and organises writer-in-residence programmes in which a Dutch author lectures at a foreign university for a certain period.

And sometimes those who lend a hand can use an extra boost themselves. That’s why the British Arts Council in London has decided to support a promotional campaign in England for Dutch literature. It’s the first time that an English institution contributes on this scale to the promotion of Dutch literature. The campaign to put a shoulder to the wheel of Dutch literature in England will take place from August 2009 to June 2010. During that period, a number of eminent Dutch writers will visit literary venues, reading clubs, libraries and literary festivals on the Sceptred Isle. According to the press release, attention will also be paid to ‘the work of the translators and the exceptional quality of their work’. The participating authors and their English publishers are: Tommy Wieringa (Portobello Books), Joris Luyendijk (Reportage Press), Arnon Grünberg (Comma Press) , Geert Mak (Harvill Secker), Frank Westerman (Harvill Secker), Cynthia McLeod (Arcadia Books), Toon Tellegen (Boxer Books) and Otto de Kat (MacLehose Press). And it’s a good thing that attention is being paid to translation as well, because in an amazing twist the latter two authors ended up having even their names translated in the list as shown on the IFACCA website: the Dutch ‘tonen’ is ‘to show’ in English and thus Toon Tellegen (whose The Squirrel's Birthday and Other Parties comes out on September 1 in the UK) became Show Tellegen, and De Kat turned into Otto the Cat, which makes him sound like a distant cousin of Felix of cartoon-fame. But let me assure you: he’s nothing but a fine writer, whose book De inscheper has been translated as Man on the Move by Sam Garrett for MacLehose Press.

Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered through Low Countries Eyes & Lenses

Napkin, 2009 © Hendrik Kerstens / Courtesy Witzenhausen Gallery Amsterdam/New York

From June 10 through September 13, the Museum of the City of New York and Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam present Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered. Guest curated by Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of The New York Times Magazine, the exhibition is part of the Henry Hudson 400 celebrations and features the work of contemporary Dutch photographers.

A picture being worth a thousand words, the exhibition tells a multifaceted story of NYC in well-crafted sentences. According to the press release the participating Dutch photographers paint a portrait of what New York City is today through ‘their considered gaze’: ‘The rich diversity, energy, tolerance, and commerce the Dutch brought with them to the first settlements, along with the stunning landscape that originally attracted the Dutch to the region 400 years ago still define New York City today and will be clearly visible in the photographs on display. The concept of the exhibition is created around the theme "portrait of the city’" The exhibition will consist of portraiture, landscapes, still lives, conceptual photographs, and documentary photography. It will be modern work, firmly rooted within the Dutch tradition.’

A fine example of such a modern considered gaze filtered through tradition is the work of Hendrik Kerstens, whose daughter Paola has been his muse and sole sitter throughout his career. His large formal portraits combine a highly recognisable Dutchness (the use of costume and painterly lighting has ‘Old Master’ written all over it) with clever contemporary wit. More portraiture is to be found in the work of the renowned Rineke Dijkstra, who exhibits 3 large portraits from her series depicting bathers at Coney Island and Long Island in New York. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin made portraits of well-known New Yorkers and celebrities, many of which have appeared in The New York Times Magazine such as the Vreeland Brothers and Lou Reed.

Papaya Dog, 42nd Street & 9th Avenue, 2009 © Wijnanda Deroo / Courtesy the Robert Mann Gallery, New York

But it’s not all about striking a pose. There’s also ample room for the (pseudo-) incidental. Wijnanda Deroo reflects on New York’s diversity with photos of interiors of restaurants, coffee shops, snack bars, and eateries in East Harlem, Chinatown, and other city neighborhoods, while Jaap Scheeren sits on the fence of the staged and the incidental with his playful photographs of situations and encounters that, according to the press release, ‘the 17th century explorers may have found, staged within modern-day New York City.’ Which is a fitting description of his pole-dancing beaver on East 3rd Street.

East 3rd Street, 2009 © Jaap Scheeren

Music, Maestro! : Ghent becomes UNESCO City of Music

The Pole Pole Festival stage, bridging one of the city's landmark canals (Ghent festival, 2008).

The Flemish city of Ghent has been recognised by UNESCO as an international City of Music, thus joining Bologna, Sevilla and Glasgow on a select list. UNESCO indicates on its website a number of criteria and characteristics as guidelines for cities wishing to join this network, such as the presence of recognised centres of musical creation and activity, experience in hosting musical festivals and events at a national or international level, and the promotion of the music industry in all its forms.

Ghent has an amazingly varied musical landscape. It boasts over 600 rock bands and a healthy number of choirs, brass bands and other assorted amateur music companies. The East Flemish capital also hosts and/or participates in an impressive range of festivals, such as the International Flanders Festival, the Ghent Jazz Festival, November Music and the annual Ghent Festival in July, which comprises a wide variety of mainstream and alternative musical events. It is also home to prime musical movers like opera authority Gerard Mortier and to quite some organisations. Among them the Logos Foundation (new music and audio-related arts), Democrazy (serving the independent and underground music scene since the early 1980s), and Flanders Opera. On top of that Ghent was the first town in Belgium to appoint a city composer. No surprise then that this city can boast numbers of 185 well-attended performances per 10,000 citizens.

A delegation from the city of Ghent will attend the annual meeting of UNESCO members in Lyon (15-17 June), where new members in all categories will be introduced.

A Pure Translator: NWS Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion for David Colmer

David Colmer (photo by Ronald Hoeben)

David Colmer has been awarded the biennial New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize & PEN Medallion for the body of translations from the Dutch he has produced so far. The jury report makes mention of the large number of recently translated Dutch books: ‘The Dutch are well known for their long history of publishing translations from many other languages, but the publication of large numbers of Dutch authors in English translation is a phenomenon of recent times.’

This report also pinpoints some of the qualities that earned Colmer 30,000 Australian dollars: a combination of penmanship and flair for language, the purity of his style and a keen feeling for sonority. Which accounts for, as Peter Gordon calls it in the Asian Review of Books (about Repatriated , Colmer’s translation of Adriaan van Dis’ Familieziek), his use of ‘words with a rhythm which swings from staccato to syncopation to, occasionally, tropical languor’.

Since 2001 Colmer, who is also a writer himself, has translated seven Dutch novels for major British and American publishers. About The Twin (originally Boven is het stil, by Gerbrand Bakker) Paul Binding remarked in The Independent: ‘David Colmer's translation is distinguished by an exceptional (and crucial) ear for dialogue.’ Colmer's skills are not limited to prose though, as he also won the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize twice. In 2007 the jury report stressed how his rhymes are unforced and that by including small interpretations of his own Colmer makes for greater naturalness, without conflicting with the spirit of the original: ‘He has fulfilled what must be the central criterion of a good translation, to convey the spirit and poetry of the original.’

Colmer, who was born in 1960 in Adelaide, started out as a medical student. But soon he gave that up to start travelling. He ended up in Amsterdam in the early nineties, learnt Dutch and became a literary translator. His translations of Mevrouw Verona daalt de heuvel af (‘Madame Verona Comes Down from the Hill’) by Dimitri Verhulst, and Specht en Zoon (‘Specht and Son’) by Willem Jan Otten are scheduled to appear later this year. Just like the previous novels which Colmer took under his wings, these translations were realised thanks to the mediation and/or financial support of the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature.