Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum Hosts Blockbuster Vermeer Exhibition

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Some art lovers make it a mission to visit and view as many works as possible by 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.

Starting Friday, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is making their lives a whole lot easier.

A blockbuster exhibition at the Netherlands’ national museum of art and history brings together 28 of Vermeer’s paintings from seven countries around the world. Not bad considering only 37 paintings are generally ascribed to the artist who lived from 1632-1675 in the city of Delft.

Never before have so many Vermeer works been put on show together in a single exhibition. Seven of the paintings haven’t been in the Netherlands in more than two centuries.

Rijksmuseum General Director Taco Dibbits believes the exhibition provides a chance for visitors to immerse themselves in the exquisite interior scenes for which Vermeer is best known including “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “The Milkmaid,” but also early religious paintings and two cityscapes, both depicting his home town, Delft.

Looking at the beguiling simplicity of “Mistress and Maid,” one of three paintings loaned for the show by New York’s The Frick Collection, Dibbits said it “radiates this tranquility, this ideal world.”

Vermeer’s use of light — often coming from a window situated on the left of the canvas — the bold colors and meticulous composition can be seen throughout the exhibition.

“Vermeer has this quality of kind of everything is perfect. Everything falls in place,” Dibbits said. “There’s perfect happiness in his scenes. There’s tranquility, there’s intimacy.”

Vermeer earned the nickname “The Sphinx of Delft” because so little was known about him — he left behind no letters or diaries and there are no known portraits of him. But recent research has begun to unravel the mysteries of the painter. Studies being carried out around the exhibition are further broadening knowledge about his work.

“We’re really coming closer to Vermeer than we’ve ever been,” said Pieter Roelofs, the Rijksmuseum’s Head of Paintings and Sculpture. Recent research means that “we really understand more about his life, about his household, about his direct contacts, the people for whom he made these paintings, and what they mean,”

In preparation for the exhibition, the museum has been taking an extremely close look at its own Vermeer paintings, which include iconic “The Milkmaid.” High-tech scans that peer through the surface of the work have revealed that Vermeer tweaked the background as he painted, apparently to ensure that the focus shone solely on the woman pouring milk. A jug holder – similar to a wall-mounted coat rack – that was originally in the background was painted over.

Tracy Chevalier loved another of Vermeer’s best-known works — “Girl with a Pearl Earring” — so much so that she wrote a novel about it that was in turn made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.

Chevalier was at a preview of the exhibition on Monday taking in that painting and the other 27 on show in a suite of 10 galleries.

“I think the curators really understood that for him, less is more. And I feel that way too; that you don’t need lots and lots of stuff. So this exhibition only has 28 paintings, but 28 is perfect because you have the space and the time to really take in each one.”

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” only had to make a short trip from the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, and isn’t sticking around until the end of the exhibition. She returns home after March 30.
Other masterpieces have had a longer journey for the exhibition that has been some eight years in the making.
“Officer and Laughing Girl,” “Mistress and Maid” and “Girl Interrupted at her Music” flew from the U.S. East Coast, leaving the Frick Collection while the New York museum undergoes restoration. That paved the way for more museums to loan paintings to the exhibition. More works come from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Leiden Collection in New York. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which, together with the Mauritshuis, staged the last major Vermeer retrospective in 1995-96, also sent paintings.

In total, the 28 paintings come from 14 museums and private collections in seven countries.

With such a comprehensive retrospective, the paintings that aren’t in Amsterdam almost become almost as noteworthy as those that are. A few of the 17th-century works are so frail that they simply can’t travel. One painting — “The Concert” — didn’t make it to Amsterdam because it is among 13 artworks still missing after being stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 in one of the world’s most notorious art heists.

The show in Amsterdam opens Friday and runs to June 4. It has already become the Rijksmuseum’s most in-demand exhibition — Dibbits said the museum has so far sold nearly 200,000 tickets and has extended opening hours to accommodate more people.

For art lovers who can’t get to Amsterdam or snag a ticket, there is already a digital show available narrated by Stephen Fry.

Online viewers can zoom in on minute details of ultra-high resolution photographs of some Vermeer paintings to see what makes his work stand out.

“I think for Vermeer, light is color, and color is light ...,” Roelofs said. “And I think one of the things we will see is how how he really knows how to focus — and that makes him really exceptional.”

New Rijksmuseum Exhibition Showcases Renaissance Portraits

AMSTERDAM (AP) — As COVID-19 lockdowns ease and borders reopen, there is a gathering at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum’s Rijksmuseum of people from around Europe, depicted in more than 100 Renaissance portraits.

The Dutch national museum’s new exhibition “Remember Me,” covers the century 1470-1570 and features portraits from across the continent by masters including Albrecht Duerer, Hans Holbein and Titian that underscore humanity’s enduring desire to be remembered.

It also shows the lengths artists went to to portray people, their wealth, jobs, power and love for one another.

While the exhibition has been in the works since before the global pandemic swept the world last year, the wish to be remembered is something that felt more pressing than ever amid lockdowns, said the museum’s general director Taco Dibbits.

“We now felt with the corona crisis that people were so far away they couldn’t come to you. You couldn’t travel,” Dibbits said Tuesday. ”That was always the case in the Renaissance, when it was far harder to travel and ... there was this great longing to have the person with you. I think something that we felt over the last one-and-a-half years.”

The show offers a snapshot of European society in the Renaissance period and includes for the first time in a single exhibition the two earliest individual portraits of Black men known in Europe — a painting by Jan Jansz Mostaert of a man in military attire who was possibly Christophle le More, a personal bodyguard to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and a 1508 drawing, “Portrait of an African Man,” in black chalk by Albrecht Duerer that is on loan from Vienna’s Albertina Collection.

For Dibbits, whose museum has just wrapped up a groundbreaking exhibition bringing the history of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies into sharp focus, the two portraits are a way of bringing Europe’s Black population in the Renaissance out of obscurity.

“There was a presence in the Renaissance, so around 1500, of Africans in Europe and we felt it very important to show these two works, to also show that presence,” he said. “I think that for a long time in the history of art, these works were invisible. So people just thought, well they didn’t exist.”

For Dibbits and Matthias Ubl, the museum’s curator of Early Netherlandish, Italian and German painting, one of the standout highlights of the show is the enigmatic “Portrait of a Young Girl,” painted around 1470 by Petrus Christus. The portrait of an unknown girl is on loan from the Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin, the first time the painting has left the museum since 1994.

Ubl said he first became fascinated by the work when he saw it on a poster as a student in London around 20 years ago.

“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘wow, this is just so amazing. This is one of the most beautiful portraits there is.’ And now it’s here and it’s almost unreal,” Ubl said.

Getting all the loaned portraits to Amsterdam from museums around Europe, the United Kingdom and United States, was a feat in itself at a time of travel restrictions. The show opens Oct. 1 and runs to Jan. 16.

“We’re incredibly grateful that we got them all together,” Dibbits said. “And it’s really like a (re)union, you could say. It was like real people now get back together again and also these people from the Renaissance are now here gathered again together.”

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum Opens After 10 years, $500 Million of Renovations

The renovated exterior of the Dutch Rijksmuseum, which will be reopened after nearly 10 years, is seen in Amsterdam April 2, 2013. The Rijksmuseum, after a decade of rebuilding, renovation and restoration, will open to the general public on April 13, 2013, according to the media release. Picture taken April 2, 2013. Michael Kooren / Reuters

Contributed BY MARTIN GAYFORD, BLOOMBERG

Vincent van Gogh once said that he could sit in front of Rembrandt’s “Jewish Bride” in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for a fortnight with just a crust of bread to eat.

It would be interesting to know what he would have made of the lavishly renovated and remodeled Rijksmuseum, which is reopening after a decade-long restoration — five years longer than planned — and which cost $500 million, overshooting the budget by tens of millions of dollars.

Vincent would still recognize the original building, designed by the architect Pierre Cuypers and opened in 1885. Part of the project, rightly, has been devoted to refurbishing this masterpiece of 19th-century architecture.

Added to it are a new entrance atrium, a cafe, and all the smart appendages that 21st-century museums require. The collection itself has been rearranged and reinstalled, and is still what Van Gogh saw: the world’s finest array of 17th- century Dutch art. Personally, I love Dutch art, and you’ve got to love it to love the Rijksmuseum.

It isn’t, like the Louvre or the Prado, an ex-royal collection with a selection of art from throughout Europe. Nor is it an institution, like London’s National Gallery, that has set out to form a representative collection of post-Renaissance painting.

With a few exceptions — a fine Goya portrait and excellent Far Eastern pieces in a brand new pavilion — what you see here is Dutch.

Grand Space

The best of the best is contained in one very large, very grand space: Cuypers’s Gallery of Honor.

Inside, it’s more or less a masterpiece a minute, leading up through Vermeer, Frans Hals and the other great masters, with Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Night Watch” a major highlight.

Here, like Vincent, you really could linger a long, long time in front of Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” “The Jewish Bride,” or dozens of other marvelous pictures.

Because so many highlights are gathered together, once you leave the Gallery of Honor, the tension tends to drop. The biggest innovation of the new installation is that the Rijksmuseum’s fine collection of sculpture and decorative arts is now displayed side by side with the pictures, as in the new galleries at London’sVictoria & Albert Museum.

In one way, this is good. The 17th-century Dutch were among the first societies to discover the pleasures and pains of middle-class consumption. Pictures and other luxuries were not just for aristocrats; successful traders also liked to flaunt their wealth.

Gigantic Banquet

So it is instructive to see eye-poppingly ornate glass and silverware next to a painting of the same in a gigantic image of a banquet by Adrian van Utrecht.

If you like blue Delft china, the Rijksmuseum certainly has it, including some flower holders suitable for containing tulips — that hot asset which, for a time, became the object of an early market bubble.

The downside is that, quite often, the decorative arts upstage the pictures. A fantastic bronze by Adrian de Vries blows away everything else in the same gallery. Nothing on the walls can compete with the almost 4 meter (13 feet) model of the warship “William Rex” from 1698.

On other floors, there are extensive galleries of 19th- century art, mainly for specialists, and — a new addition to the Rijksmuseum — 20th-century works.

Basically, the Rijksmuseum is now a cool version of a 19th- century monument to national artistic splendor, repackaged for 2013.

The reason you come here is to soak yourself in the painting and culture of the people who almost invented modern bourgeois life.

While in Amsterdam, make time to look at the works of Vincent, that wonderfully non-bourgeois Dutchman, whose own museum reopens on May 1.

The Rijksmuseum reopens to the public on April 14. Tickets and information from www.rijksmuseum.nl.