October 8, 2017 Day 7 Amsterdam 2

We started the day by taking the #2 tram two stops to the Van Gogh museum. We got there at 9:30 on a Sunday morning and there was already a line. However due to our I Amsterdam ticket we were able to cut the line and not pay the entrance fee.

The museum was very good. Four floors, mostly of his works and the works of artists he admired and was inspired by. It also has many of his sketches and his numerous letters, primarily to his brother and other family members. Thus it is more than the paintings, since the museum uses his paintings and other works to chronicle his life and journeys  from Holland, where his work seemed very dark and focused on peasants, to Paris where supported by his brother Theo (Who as an art dealer made enough to support Vincent who sold only one painting (it hangs in a Moscow museum) during his life, and married a rich Amsterdam lady who, after Theo’s early death not long after Vincent’s, relentlessly promoted and marketed  Vincent’s work to the point that they now sell for millions even though he was very prolific.) and under the influence of the Impressionists he introduced color to his work, to Provence in southern France where he did his landscapes and finally from the insane asylum and a brief period back in northern France when he turned out almost one painting a day whose ominous subjects perhaps foretold his suicide.

The museum and resulting building were the result of the work of Theo’s son. The building is interesting and was designed by a Dutch architect.  It has a second wing which houses visiting exhibits, but that was closed when we were there.

Van Gogh’s paintings were presented in chronological order. The earliest ones seemed to be dark, somber and crude. He seemed to be obsessed with peasants. The Potato Eaters was something he put a lot of effort into, but it was poorly reviewed by his friends and peers. Skelton with Burning Cigarette is a striking picture. He seemed to do a lot of self-portraits when he was in Paris, allegedly because he could not afford models. In Provence he did lots of landscapes. Sunflowers and the Yellow House with intense light reflected his seeming obsession with yellow. During this period, he invited his good friend Paul Gaugin to visit and paint with him in the Yellow House. That did not work out well, they had many arguments and Gaugin left prematurely. Supposedly after one of these arguments he cut off his ear. Alternatively, I have seen theories that he was attacked by kids when he was painting out on the fields and they cut off his ear. In any event, shortly thereafter he committed himself to an asylum, where he continued to paint the landscapes he saw from his window. He also painted Irises (sold for $54 million) during this period. After his release and return north he painted a lot. Wheatfield with Crows is very dark. Within a year he committed suicide. His brother Theo died a year later, from syphilis.

We spent over 4 hours in the museum. For lunch we exited the museum and walked over to the edge of the Vondelpark, a long and thin park named after the Shakespeare of the Netherlands, a 17^th century poet, Joost van den Vondel.  There was an outdoor market (there are lots of them in Amsterdam) with lots of food trucks at the edge, so we ate there under a gray sky. Had Vietnamese food.

After that we went to the tram stop and took the #2, got off at Spui and after a short walk got on the #9 tram to go to the Verzetemuseum, the National Resistance Museum. The exhibits starkly show how difficult it is to resist a ruthless adversary when you cannot trust others and when the penalty for resistance is often death. However, it also showed that many did resist and in 1941 rebelled at the treatment of the Jews. However, that rebellion was crushed. It was interesting to see the evolution of the attitude of the Germans to the Dutch, who were surprised that they were invaded, and how that attitude changed from a hands-off occupation, with many Dutch accepting or even cooperating with the Germans, to resistance and the Germans sizing men and woman in the hundreds of thousands to be shipped off to work camps in Germany as the war progressed and German needs for manpower got more acute. The Netherlands were not liberated until May of 1945, by Canadians, and there was a lot of starvation during the last 6 months of the war. I purchased an Anne Applebaum book there on the Russian Gulag. Had to leave at the 5:30 closing before I was finished.

We then took the tram further east to the Brouwerij”t IJ. This is a large, organic microbrewery and taste room that sits in the shadow of a 1725 windmill. It offered lots of beers on tap, some with alcohol content exceeding 10%, and some food. The tasting room, crowded and noisy had an amazing collection of beer bottles lining the wall. We ate and drank on the outdoor plaza where we met another participant at the conference my spouse went to.

We took the tram back to the hotel area intending to eat at an Italian restaurant near it. However, that was closed. Since it was raining we went back to the hotel and ate at the adjacent restaurant. Pretty good Dutch food and I got an orange for next days breakfast.  

Skelton with Burning Cigarette