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Sometimes it seems as though the Dutch tourist board has hired undercover freelance PR reps to mingle with the wider population and help out bewildered tourists. I met one after dark when I decided to head towards their parliament. It sounded lively – rather as though a football match had just taken place – and, in the somewhat staid environment of the Hague, offered something of a change. A cyclist must have read my mind as he pulled up to give advice. “I wouldn’t go that way” he said, in perfect English. “There’s a demonstration by squatters who’ve come over from Amsterdam to lobby the government: they’re quite angry.”
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| Village feel, city sophistication |
I took his advice and took a quieter street. Soon I found myself in a small and crowded bar, where a middle-aged barman applied years of practice to pouring me a small Belgian beer and wiping off the froth with a plastic knife. Discreet ashtrays gently flouted the EU smoking ban and it wasn’t long before total strangers came up to chat. Did they all work for the tourist board? Later I walked back through the parliament building. The demonstrators had gone, leaving a scatter of beer cans and a clutter of police vehicles, but the medieval structure was calm. A few late workers drifted out of small doorways and out to the streets in a warmly democratic atmosphere. Government, in Holland, seemed consensual and progressive – though coming from the UK, as I do, even Soviet Russia would probably seem relatively cuddly.
While Amsterdam, Holland’s capital, is constantly flooded with tourists the Hague is strangely overlooked. Most people associate it with the International Criminal Court and I’d be the first to welcome a prolonged visit by Tony Blair, but he doesn’t deserve to be locked up here: it’s too civilised a city. It’s where the Dutch government is based, has a better arts scene than its big brother and even, in the summer months, has the marked benefit of being a city on the sea: just take tram 15 to the end of the line and there’s a choice of sandy beaches washed by a pounding North Sea surf. While Amsterdam seethes, Den Haag soothes.
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| Jugendstil building |
In winter though it’s another side of Den Haag that comes to the fore. Not the seasonal nightmare of yet another Christmas Fayre – the city has far too much class for such crass commercialism – but the tender appreciations of architecture and art. I started with the architecture and took a Jugendstil tour of the centre. Up until 1860 Den Haag was a small village built on sandy North Sea dunes, so its sudden growth into city status over the period where neoclassical traditions were being challenged by the modernist movement makes it something of a treasure-trove for students of architecture.
Flamboyant art Historian Remco Dörr was a perfect host, ushering our small group around the small streets and alleys of the city centre, funnelling us into buildings under renovation and stopping by significant structures to point out characteristic details. Along the way we picked up plenty of little snippets of Dutch culture: the Omar Fitz ‘Grandma’ bicycles, with no gears and back-pedal brakes, that elegantly flit across the tramlines and down streets, and the inner-city tensions between the old city, built on the original sand dunes, and the lower city, built on reclaimed land and still below sea level, where the working classes and immigrants find their homes. “I’m out of my comfort zone” confessed Remco. “The two sides of the city don’t mix.”
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| Murdered, definitely |
Most interesting of all was his insight into how to read the symbolism of prancing-horse sculptures, comfortably predating the Art Nouveau movement. Apparently if both of the horse’s forelegs are in the air the rider died on the battlefield, if the right foreleg is up the rider was murdered, left foreleg raised means he died of natural causes and all four legs on the ground means the rider died in an accident. Apparently this holds true all across Europe and since learning this I can’t pass a statue of a horseman without checking the hooves to see if Remco’s theory holds good.
Den Haag is well provisioned with art galleries: as the home of the country’s royal family as well as its politicians it has more – and better – galleries than Amsterdam. Japanese tourists flock to the Mauritzhuis to see Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earing’, and it’s easy to see why. Her eyes, uncannily, follow you around the elegant wood-panelled room. The effect was even more pronounced in the gift shop, where you can hardly move for reproductions. Serried ranks of fridge magnets, mouse mats, notebooks, plates, wristwatches, key rings, clocks and nightlights were all adorned with her serving-girl face.
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| Fridge magnet, anyone? |
But this privately-run museum in the heart of the city has plenty more art to fill an few hours of silent contemplation, including vast canvasses by Rembrandt, Rubens and Brueghel. By the time I left I had begun to realise why the Dutch ‘Old Masters’ had held such a towering status in the cultural scene, something that has even now barely been ruffled by the wave of new art movements that swept across Europe through the 20th century.
Perhaps because of their stifling weight of dead talent, Holland was not the quickest off the block when the new art movements took root in France and Germany. But if it came late to the party it certainly caught up fast, as convincingly shown by a new exhibition at the Hague’s Gemeente Museum until the 24th January 2010. For the first time this brings together artworks by Frenchman Paul Cézanne, Spaniard Pablo Picasso, and Dutchman Piet Mondrian – and convincingly shows a direct link between these three artists as they worked towards the development of abstract art.
My visit to the Gemeente Museum narrowly scooped the royal preview of Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands, so I got to walk around the exhibition before the pictures had been labelled. This made the artistic connections even more apparent, as I was forced to look quite carefully to be sure which artist had painted which picture. Several of Cézanne’s works were more abstract than I’d expected, and some of Mondrian’s fringed into Picasso territory.
In the cosmopolitan world of the current European art scene it is somewhat reassuring to find a national museum focussing so clearly on one of their own, Piet Mondrian. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this exhibition was its documentary evidence of an exhibition arranged by Piet Mondrian in 1911, that brought – for the first time – works by Cézanne and Picasso to Holland. At the time Mondrian, an established artist in his 40′s, only knew of these artists second-hand, through magazines, and the effect of seeing their work was dramatic. Within 12 months he had dumped his fiancée and moved to Paris, and the change in his art, from this time, was striking. Over the next few years he pioneered, along with Kandinski, the movement to abstraction, a progression beautifully exhibited by the works on show.
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| Art, anyone? |
There’s more to Holland than the bright – and sometimes red – lights of Amsterdam or the quiet canals of Utrecht. My visit to Holland’s royal city, Den Haag, had taught me a lot about the country and its culture. For any visitor to the Netherlands, the Hague should be high on their list.
Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian: a new perspective runs at the Gemeente Museum until the 24th January 2010. For more details go to www.gemeentemuseum.nl. For more information about the Mauritshuis, go to www.mauritshuis.nl. For more the Hague itself, go to www.denhaag.com H. A number of events this year are part of the Holland Art Cities (www.hollandartcities.com) promotion, with a range of unique exhibitions collecting the world’s greatest artworks for display in all the major cities.
Copyright © 2009 Jack Barker
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