The Crow's Nest

Amsterdam
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Amsterdam Canal, Photo by Sharon Nelson

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Amsterdam Begijnhoff, Photo by Tim Lyon

Loved it. Hated it. Loved it again.

Possibly Amsterdam and this family got off to a bad start, since we waited too long to make hotel reservations. By the time we did, it was the height of the tourist season, and hotels, etc were rather pricey. We bought a couple of IAMsterdam passes for three days and just broke even, so the pass was worth it, given that it includes access to the city’s extensive metro/bus/tram system. But almost every site we visited was having a "special exhibit" which was always several euros extra, even if we didn’t want to see it. And lots of places wouldn’t take credit cards for anything less than 20 euros, so we kept having to go back to the ubiquitous cash machines.

In the end, it was an expensive weekend, and we didn’t even visit the hash bars or the hookers. More on that later.

For now, let’s just say that Dutch society is permissive, and an emphasis is placed on personal responsibility to a degree that most Americans would find uncomfortable. There’s parallel parking along most of the canals, for instance, but only some of them have guard rails to prevent cars from sliding into the water if the driver’s aim is off. Several of the 17th century houses along the canals have been turned into B&Bs and restaurants, but their only exit remains a single narrow spiral staircase up the spine of the building. In the US, they’d call that a fire-hazard and demand to be protected, but that’s not the case here.

The attitude is so pervasive that Mike and I began to joke about it every time we found an example: Say, isn’t that a bit dangerous?—Well… (shrug) Pft! At the same time, this attitude makes them politically and socially a very open society. And that’s rather nice for a change.

Houses

ANYway, it’s Rembrandt’s 400th birthday, and we were happy to pay extra to see those special exhibits. We began with a tour of the canals and Rembrandt’s house on the evening we arrived, and it was the highlight of the trip. The top floor of Het Rembrandt-huis has a series of exhibits this year, currently "Quest for Genius," which has gathered Rembrandt paintings from museums and private owners all over the world to trace his artistic development and changes in his style over time. It’ a wonderful opportunity to see works that aren’t always accessible. "The Girl in a Picture Frame" leans forward into a third dimension; you get the impression Rembrandt did it just to show that he could. But his portrait of his son, Titus, is intimate and loving, perfectly capturing a dreamy boy in a moment of rest. We chose the audio guide for the show, which we don’t usually do, and the taped commentary by the curator was insightful and not a bit condescending.

Dutch 17th c houses—we visited three on our trip-- are charming: tall narrow brick structures that have gone all higgle-de-piggledy over the centuries. The oldest buildings are set on timber piers set into the marshy earth of Amsterdam, so shift has occurred and it’s rare to see an old block of buildings that is still more or less straight. Dutch kitchens are typically on ground level, often beautifully tiled on both floor and walls, with low timbered ceilings and a large welcoming hearth. Very comfortable and homey. A narrow winding staircase spirals up through the center of the structure…and up…and up. At Rembrandt’s house you must hang on to a handrail on one side and a rope on the other. The rooms are light and open, two to three on each floor. They aren’t especially large, but they seem bigger because the ceilings are quite high.

The box beds that Rembrandt’s household used, and can been seen in some of his paintings, are still here. His studio and office were also located in his home, and his office has a massive carved cabinet that once held his business papers. Rembrandt kept extensive records so we have a lot of information about who commissioned which paintings, for how much and when. But he left few personal papers, so his domestic life is open to speculation, particularly now that fine art has profited from The DaVinci Code.

Night Watch and Nightwatching

Maybe the conspiracy theories will lead a whole new audience to art, but when it comes to Rembrandt, I think British film director Peter Greenaway has gone a bit far.

We saw a multi-screen digital slide show based on his new film, Nightwatching, at the Riiksmuseum. Most of the museum is closed for renovation until 2008, but they have their greatest hits on display in the new building, fine examples of delftware, three beautiful Vermeers, and of course Rembrandt’s famous "Night Watch." Before being admitted to the room where the painting hangs, visitors are crammed into a holding area where Greenaway’s slide show is played, so we saw it about three times before we were able to see the actual painting.

Rembrandt’s largest painting, a group portrait of the militia company of Frans Banning Cocq, only became known as "The Night Watch" years later, after the varnished surface of the painting had darkened with age. The work has since been cleaned and restored to nearly its original condition, and shimmers with light and shadow. The work was commissioned for a hefty price by members of the guard in 1642 to hang in their headquarters. The central figures are Cocq and his Lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburgh, who probably paid a proportionately larger share of Rembrandt’s commission, according to their rank. Years later the painting was cut down, most likely to fit in its second home, the town hall, and three of the original figures were lost.

Greenaway suggests that the painting implicates several of the depicted figures in the murder of Frans Banning Cocq. The accused were powerful men, and Greenaway contends that they convinced their wealthy friends to pull their support for Rembrandt. This supposedly, rather than a change in fashion or Rembrandt’s well documented spending, accounts for his financial decline. Greenaway also implies that Geertje, the woman Rembrandt was living with at the time, was a plant, meant to gather incriminating evidence to use against the painter. It’s all very juicy, but rather vague.

When I tried to find information about Greenaway’s take on "The Night Watch, to see if it might have some basis in recent scholarship (and if so, whose?) I could find nothing at all, only interviews with the film maker that suggest that Nightwatching will soon be a major motion picture. This troubles me a lot.

When you get into the little gallery that houses "The Night Watch," you are urged into rows of seats and treated to a sound and lightshow consisting of a thunderstorm, a barking dog, shouts and a gunshot. Bright white lines of light trace the figures in the painting, then the painting pops into three-dimensions. Surely these are holographic images. They can’t be projected onto the painting itself, can they? Couldn’t that be damaging? —Well… (shrug) Pft! After this extravaganza you are allowed to look at the actual painting for a few minutes before you are herded out and the next group is herded in.

It is all quite spectacular, and as a lightshow it’s wonderful. I don’t think I’d mind it if it weren’t a prelude to the painting. But. Do we really need this to make "The Night Watch" exciting? It’s a beautiful painting, compositionally, technically. There is color and light in it already. Does the pre-basketball-game hype really add anything to our understanding of this painting, or is it just a distraction?

Vice Tourism

Speaking of distractions (I knew I’d find a path back to this topic) Amsterdam is big on the "vice tourism" circuit. Prostitution is legal, so is cannabis and many bars offer absinthe (made from the semi-toxic wormwood herb) for those tourists who absolutely have to try everything. Prostitution is confined to a "red light district," but sex toy shops and condom boutiques spill over the boundaries. "Coffee shops" where you can indulge in various cannabis products are almost everywhere (most amusingly near the Hortus, Amsterdam’s botanical garden) and tourists start lining up before they open at 9am. Unfortunately, the densest concentration of the vice trade is in the city center, not far from shopping and the museums, and it drags the whole area down, making the city feel quite seamy.

I’m not a prude about such things, honestly I’m not. If you want to order up a plug of hash and take a hooker home, in a place where it's perfectly legal, who am I to complain? But I didn’t like the blatant commodification of the sex trade. We had to walk through a short stretch of the red light district to get to De Oude Kerk, the oldest cathedral in Amsterdam, known for its 15th century painted wooden ceilings. We passed through a street where garishly decorated women were on display in store windows like so many sides of beef in vinyl lingerie. I’m not sure which was tackier, the prostitutes or the middle aged American couples brazenly window-shopping. But what’s that old joke: If you don’t think sex is dirty, you aren’t doing it right? We are a strange species of chimp, I supposed, and if it weren’t sufficiently seedy, it probably wouldn’t be big business.

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VanGogh's The Raising of Lazarus, used by permission of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Caravaggio

But we chimps can also make art, and there’s an awful lot of it is in Amsterdam. (How’s that for a transition back from my digression?)

The Van Gogh Museum is not just Van Gogh, but there’s plenty of VG and his friends here. The permanent collection displays dozens of works from every phase of Van Gogh’s career, and additional galleries exhibit the works of artists who influenced him, both directly and indirectly. An exhibit on the top floor presents a forensic analysis of his works, examining his materials and techniques, kind of a "CSI" of art. And dozens more of his lesser-known works are on display there for study. When you see this many Van Goghs together and keep in mind that this is only a fraction of what he produced in a relatively short career, you realize he must have been painting almost every waking moment of his life from the time he first decided to become an artist.

The highlight of the museum for me was finding Van Gogh’s "Raising of Lazarus," a painting I’d never seen, even in reproduction. The composition is based on a Rembrandt etching of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead, but Van Gogh leaves out the figure of Christ entirely, and Lazarus is almost a self-portrait. Van Gogh painted the work while he was confined in the asylum at Saint-Remy after his breakdown in 1889, and its tempting to read the painting as a self-portrait of the artist in recovery.

Not to be left out of Rembrandt’s 400th birthday celebrations, the Van Gogh Museum hosted "Rembrandt and Caravaggio," a special exhibit that paired paintings of the two great masters. Rembrandt was only four when Caravaggio died, and there’s no evidence that he ever saw one of Caravaggio’s paintings. But both painters were masters of chiaroscuro, the use of light and shade, to convey emotion. Encouraged by our audioguide experience at the Rembrandt House, we eagerly signed on for this one, too. But it was back to condescending Coke vs Pepsi generalizations ("Which painter do you think was more successful?") and comparisons that were stretched a bit too thin. The art was marvelous, though. I’d never seen a Caravaggio in person, and though I came away preferring the works of Rembrandt (I’ll have a Coke, please) I gained a new appreciation for the Italian master.

Food

Dutch cooking is not one of the great world cuisines, every dish seems to have mayonnaise or an egg in it somewhere, but Amsterdam has a lot of Indonesian and Middle Eastern Restaurants so we took great advantage of those. (Though oddly, even then, every single meal we had, included an egg somewhere, even Moroccan stew. ) My nominee for best restaurant in Amsterdam goes to The Arabic Lounge, a Moroccan restaurant on the second floor of a 17th century Dutch house on Spiegelgracht overlooking a canal. The architecture is Dutch, but the decor is Arabic. You sit on cushy benches, eating authentic Moroccan food prepared by a mom-and-pop kitchen crew, and can order a hooka after dinner if you’re so inclined. We had pastillas, the house specialty, for starters, a flaky filo triangle filled with spinach, currants and pine nuts, followed by lamb tangine (kind of an oven stew baked in a clay dish) and chicken couscous. Absolutely delicious food and the best value we had all weekend. (Restrooms are up a winding staircase to the attic, and it’s pretty cool to see a 17th century attic.)

For pie and a good cup of coffee with atmosphere we especially enjoyed the Garrison Café near the train station. The place is basically a pub with snacks, a one-woman operation when we were there, set in a 14th century stone tower that once served as a defense for the city. A trip down the winding staircase to the restrooms at the basement level brings you to about 2 feet from water level, which is kind of a neat experience.

By the way, if you are a bit of a clean freak, you may want to bring your own handtowels, since it’s common in public places to share the one on the towel-rack with those who have come before you. Say, isn’t that a little….well, you get the point.

Go on to Last Days

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Copyright 2008 by S. E. Stemont  For information contact belcorv@yahoo.com