tourist trap but, my my, what art!

Why oh why do people like to stay in Bruges? I got there and was instantly stuck in tourist-trap glue and glum. It seemed unavoidable but ....

There are some really fine paintings in Bruges, especially if you are fond of the Flemish primitives (15th century). The Death of the Virgin by Hugo van der Goes is one of my favorite paintings ever and it is at the Groeningemuseum. What's that? It's your favorite painting and you were remembering her gown as red. It's blue. The red one is by Caravaggio (and not in Bruges). I don't think any of my Stendhal sighs today were audible but the St Luke Drawing the Virgin by Rogier van der Weyden brought tears to my eyes. It's in the same room as the Hugo van der Goes and the Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele by Jan van Eyck. Oh, and a Memling and a Bosch. There were quite a few people in the gallery but we were mostly respectful and gently moved around each other. When I looped around on my way out, I had the gallery to myself for a little while.

The Groeningemuseum has paintings all the way up to the 20th century. I found some more works by Gustave van de Woestyne, including a large Last Supper. The last gallery had a Magritte and a lot of Marcel Broodthaers.

Before I got to the Groeningemuseum, I stopped in at the Cathedral of Our Lady to see the Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo. If you saw the film Monuments Men or have read about the protection and movement of art works during World War II, you will remember how close this work came to disappearing. Well, it's there, it's beautiful, it's smallish but incredible.

After the Groeningemuseum, I went to the Memling Museum at Sint Janshospital where there's the incredible St John Altarpiece and several other Memlings including the St Ursula Shrine and a round Madonna and Child (the latter, courtesy of Christie's). Just wow! Upstairs, they had a Christian Boltanski installation of Les registres du Grand-Hornu, a memory-piece about the people who worked the Grand-Hornu mines. Very effective setting for an emotional piece.

On to the treasury at the Church of Our Savior (St Salvator) where they have the Martyrdom of St Hippolytus by Dirk Bouts and Hugo van der Goes. It's a gruesome scene -- St Hippolytus was stretched by horses attached to his limbs -- but a beautiful painting. I love the flattened space with the narrative circling around the saint's body almost like a zodiac. And St Hippolytus seems to be in some kind of sublime and serene ecstasy. What do you expect? He's a martyr.

After the St Salvator treasury, I went outside to sit and contemplate and see if there was anything else that needed to be done in Bruges. It was nearing 5 pm so I decided not to rush off to the Belfort tower for a 376-step climb even if the view would have been incredible. Once I'd relaxed, I could ignore the thousands of others milling about, the boats going by with a couple dozen tourists each, etc etc and just enjoy the pretty scene across the way:

Then off to the train station to come "home" to Ghent. I stopped at Hasta Mañana, hoping for a margarita but settled on a caipirinha which doesn't, alas, go too well with chips and salsa. And then back to the hotel. I didn't take many pictures today and you may have noticed that most of the works I mentioned are linked. And several of them are well enough known to even have a Wikipedia entry on the painting alone, not just as part of the artist's article.

hugo van der goes

Heidi went to Bruges on Monday so she didn't get to see "The death of the Virgin" by Hugo van der Goes. She did tell me where her photos were posted -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/vheidi -- and there's some lovely shots of Bruges as well as some mountains and streams in Ireland. While I was flickring with Heidi, I thought I'd search the tags for "hugo van der goes" and only got one hit for someone who had been to the Uffizi.

Amazing food treat the other night. After the heady Jean-Louis Cohen lecture on Tuesday night at Cooper, we officers of the SAH chapter took him to dinner at Aroma Kitchen and Winebar on East 4th Street. http://www.aromanyc.com/index.html The food was very tasty, the atmosphere was incredible. You enter the bar from the street and it's nice but not particularly unusual for the neighborhood. We had a private dining room in the basement: you go through the narrow door, down the steep stairs which are between buildings and outside, up a couple stairs, turn right through a very narrow door (aka cellar doorway), down a couple more steps, turn left into a miraculous space just the size for our party of 11. Vito suggested that they just bring us some of each of the appetizers and ... my favorite was probably the artichokes (en casserole, I guess, with cheese). I had a pasta that was heavenly: beet colored, veal infusion sauce, some cheese. What's not to like with tons of grease and carbs?

great grandpa Wyckoff

Wyckoff is one of the good old Dutch family names that I associate with New York City, especially Brooklyn. A second cousin of mine broke the interesting news a few days ago that we were seventh cousins, at two or three removes, from Georgia O'Keeffe. That was pretty exciting and then he sent a flowchart, aka family tree, with the link between our family and Georgia O'Keeffe. We both go back to Pieter Claesen Wyckoff (1620/1625-1694). According to Wikipedia, "most persons surnamed Wyckoff in North America, including many variations in spelling, can be traced to his family."

Pieter Claesen Wyckoff's granddaughter Margaret Grietje Wyckoff married Samuel Poling Sr and that's the line from which I descend. The Poling became Polan four generations later and my maternal grandfather was Herbert Lewis Polan. His mother had a great name: Frances Agzilla "Aggie" Hoult. Georgia O'Keeffe comes down through another son of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff.

I wouldn't say that I've been bitten by the genealogy bug though I was really intrigued by the connection to the Clarke House in Chicago. And now I'm enjoying this connection to Wyckoff. There's a Wyckoff Street that runs across central Brooklyn through Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill. I wonder if I could drop 9-great grandpa's name and get a discount on an apartment. More likely, they'd figure I was rich and they'd up the rent. One of the members of my bookclub when I lived in New York City lived on Wyckoff Street.

The Wikipedia article on Pieter Claesen Wyckoff also describes a fraudulent bit of genealogy that would have Wyckoff be the son of Claes Cornelissen van Schouw and Margaret van der Goes. Ah. Now we're back in familiar territory. Hermione van der Goes was the little known (you could say unknown) painter to whom my grad school chum Nancy Stowell and I credited any early Netherlandish painting of disputed attribution. Hermione was the sister or daughter of Hugo van der Goes, a painter of whom we were both fond. To the fraudulent bit of genealogy, you can add our fraudulent but innocent bit of attribution. Truth be known, we just liked saying "Hermione van der Goes."

Ghent to Brussels to Ghent to Brussels to Amsterdam to Brussels, and lovin' it

When I left the U.S., my hotel reservation for the whole time I'm in Belgium was for the Hotel Erasmus in Ghent but I decided it made sense to move my base to Brussels for the last few nights so I'd be closer to the airport for the 10 am departure on Saturday. And then last Sunday I heard from Geurt, my friend from Amsterdam, that he couldn't make it to Belgium but we could get together in Amsterdam. So it's been a bit of a week. Tuesday, I took the train from Ghent to Brussels for the day and spent most of it at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. More Flemish primitives: The Judgment of Emperor Otto by Dirk Bouts, Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch, Saint Sebastian by Hans Memling, among those that particularly grabbed me. For the Italophiles in the crowd, I saw another trio of Italian-speakers: man with presumed parents, and then I saw the same fellow I'd seen in Antwerp answering his mother's incessant "questo? questo?" The museum is pretty comprehensive in the painting universe with some fine Bruegels and Rubens. I didn't realize that the Death of Marat by J-L David was in Brussels so it was delightful to find that around the corner as I entered a French gallery.

The Royal Museums has just opened a section they call the Fin-de-Siecle Museum which has works from the 1860s into the 20th century with quite a bit of Ensor. I was especially taken by Hugo van der Goes in the Red Cloister by Emile Wauters:

Hugo van der Goes has been a favorite artist for many years (since Nancy and I teased in grad school about the unknown Netherlandish painter Hermione van der Goes to whom we attributed many works). I hadn't studied his biography however and learned during this trip that he ended his life in a monastery after his melancholy turned to madness. I also discovered that the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch is planning a big Hieronymus Bosch exhibition in 2016 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death.

Wednesday I went to the city museum in Ghent (Stadsmuseum Gent or STA.M) and wished that I'd done it early on. The displays start with a model of the city today and the floor in that room is a satellite photograph. Lots of interesting historical things and manuscripts and archives. Toward the end of the circuit, there were some models of 1970s plans for urban development. I'm glad those megastructures weren't built just outside the historic center of town. The art center at Sint-Pietersabdij had an interesting show of Turkish calligraphy and there was a sign for the show on Vivian Maier (this year's photography sensation) that had just closed. And then it was off to get my stuff and take the train to Brussels to meet the fellow whose apartment I'm staying in via misterbnb. Great price, central location.

Yesterday (Thursday), I took the Thalys fast train from Brussels to Amsterdam to spend the day with Geurt. What a fine day. We walked from Central Station over to the Museum Het Schip, a museum devoted to the Amsterdam School of expressionist architecture in the early 20th century. The museum is centered in the Eigen Haard block of apartments built by a workers' housing association. We got to tour one of the apartments and look up into the tower which is inspirational rather than functional (no problem).

 

The brick work is magnificent. This neighborhood was being developed by various groups in the 'teens and into the 'twenties and this picture is taken from the front of apartments built at the same time by a Protestant housing organization in a traditional style. Behind me is a complex built by a Philosophical group (said the guide, did he mean Theosophical?) with a bit more expressionism in its details but overall quite traditional.

After a bit of lunch, Geurt and I went to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam where Geurt treated me to a tour of the office spaces in the new wing (mostly to drop off our bags) and then a tour of the galleries and the Marlene Dumas exhibition. Geurt has worked at the Stedelijk for 32 years so it was great to see the works and spaces with him. And then it was off for a beer at a canal-side cafe and then to the Central Station to return to Brussels. It was raining lightly when I got back, the first time the whole trip. The weather has been mostly glorious and bright with temperatures in the 70s and not even chilly overnight.

... and I quote: Hermione rules!

Art history can be fun (I'm at College Art in Dallas). This morning at the Rauschenberg session, we talked about copying and it soon turned to appropriation. Yesterday or sometime, rephotography was used for Sherrie Levine-ish appropriation. I've never heard rephotography used in this way. I think of it much more for the folks who do reconstructions of the western surveys. Today in a manuscript session, we heard about quotations in subject matter or composition. And one of the papers was entitled "What's in a name?" Other papers in the manuscript session talked about workshops and inheritance or family operations, and the women usually weren't mentioned unless they happened to take over the family operations. In grad school, Nancy Stowell and I "invented" Hermione van der Goes as the unknown early Netherlandish painter. Perhaps there really was a Hermione, the widow or sister of Hugo van der Goes, who goes largely unsung because she happened to be a woman.

I found it interesting that quotation, copying, imitation, inspiration, and appropriation have all been used with varying amounts of art historical weight. In some settings, it's been considered ironic. In other, normal or ironic.

The word of the conference that I wasn't familiar with is indexical. I'm probably way behind since several people used it with ease.

separated at birth: Fyodor van der Goes

 

University of Iowa, Main Library Gallery

Hugo van der Goes in the Red Cloister

Emile Wauters

Royal Museums in Brussels

Flemish farmhand

Rose and Anna went to a thé dansant in York. Rose danced with Sam Thawley, a gardener at an estate near Downton Abbey. He was smitten with Rose. I was rather smitten with the actor that played the role, Jonathan Howard, and couldn't figure out exactly why when I watched the episode. And, then, aha. He's a candidate for a portrait by Hans Memling or Hugo van der Goes or Dirk Bouts.

The scene at the thé dansant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaowBaLkjNc
The scene in the kitchen yard, in which Sam visits Rose and she plays the maid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIiSYwJaKh4