October 4, 2020

Dutch designer Jan des Bouvrie dies, aged 78

Filed under: Design by Orangemaster @ 9:03 pm

Famous Dutch designer Jan des Bouvrie has passed away at age 78 after a battle with prostate cancer.

As an interior and product designer, he was probably best known for his 1969 ‘kubusbank sofa’, easily considered a design classic and still being sold today. In fact, it is said that his sofa is a symbol of modern Dutch interior design and can be found in the collections of both the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. As well, the Jan des Bouvrie Academy in Deventer, Overijssel was named after him. Last year, he celebrated his 50th anniversary as a designer at his studio Het Arsenaal in Naarden.

We wrote about him quite a while back: Des Bouvrie designs a mobile chalet.

(Link: parool.nl, Photo of Jan des Bouvrie by Erwin Olaf Springveld, some rights reserved)

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March 19, 2015

Stedelijk Museum bans man threatening to pee on art

Filed under: Art,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:10 am

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Not only has a man threatened to pee on art from South African artist Marlene Dumas at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, but he is also a known Dutch artist, Rob van Koningsbruggen, giving this story a hint of sour grapes. In 2012 the Stedelijk Museum had banned Van Koningsbruggen based on an email threat to pee all over the work ‘Osama Bin Laden’ by Dumas, saying that his stream of urine would greatly improve the painting.

The sad thing is, Van Koningsbruggen had a name for himself in the art world until about 2000 and after that he’s been mostly known for his criminal record. Van Koningsbruggen was found guilty of arson in 2007 and got banned from the Stedelijk, where he once had a major solo exhibition back when disco was still a thing.

Van Koningsbruggen went to court over the ban to have it overturned, but it will remain in effect. There was talk of having it overturned recently, which is why Van Koningsbruggen was back in the news.

If you like pee art, there’s always Theo from Eindhoven who makes pee eagles.

(Link: www.kunstbeeld.nl, Photo of Stedelijk Museum by chrissam42, some rights reserved)

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September 26, 2014

Shia LaBeouf runs around Stedelijk Museum

Filed under: Art,Sports by Orangemaster @ 10:03 am

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Nobody said you couldn’t run a marathon around a building. American actor Shia LaBeouf ran 144 times around Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum yesterday as part of an art performance called ‘Metamodernism’. Last night’s international metamodernism symposium at the Stedelijk also featured Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Icelandic politician and activist known for collaborating with Julian Assange on WikiLeaks. By the way, Jónsdóttir was played by Dutch actress Carice van Houten in the 2013 film The Fifth Estate about Assange.

A few weeks ago, LaBeouf began posting cryptic Nike Plus tweets in which his runs spelled out letters of a rapidly-forming word, which ended up being ‘metamarathon’, the name of the running art performance. LaBeouf is doing this in honour of the museum’s Metamodernism day, which its website defines as an “international symposium [that] seeks to draw a cognitive map of our present in order to grasp the changing contours of our everyday lives, towards a paradigmatic shift lived by a generation born in the 1980s and after.”

The video features people running along aside LaBeouf while holding a relay baton.

(Link: thedailyedge.thejournal.ie, Photo: designboom.com)

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October 29, 2013

Dutch museums own some 139 contentious artworks

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 1:57 pm

According to years of research carried out by the Netherlands Museums Association on the origins of artworks, some 139 pieces of art acquired by Dutch museums between 1933 and 1945 (during the Nazi regime) are suspected of being stolen, confiscated or were sold to them by force. Some 41 museums have such artworks in their collections, many of which were owned by Jews.

The research, started in 2009, had as a goal of establishing what the extent was of the possession of contentious paintings after the end of WWII. Some 162 Dutch museums collaborated with researchers in order to help return artworks to their rightful owners and/or their heirs. A special website will go live at 4 pm has now gone live on Tuesday, 29 October (CET) for everyone to peruse and maybe even help.

The museum with the most ‘stolen’ artworks is the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague Municipal Museum), followed by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Museum and Stedelijk Museum.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl, www.museumvereniging.nl, (Illustration: Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet. Source: politie.nl)

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December 19, 2012

Many Amsterdam museums open on 1 January 2013

Filed under: Art,Film,Photography by Orangemaster @ 11:32 am

Everybody has some sort of party on New Year’s Eve, but what to do on New Year’s Day when you live in the capital and the town gets too quiet? Make going to a museum with friends and family a New Year’s resolution. Or there’s also the zoo, catching a film and some other tourist attractions.

The year 2013 will be a special year for Amsterdam as the city celebrates several milestones. The refurbished Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum will reopen, the Artis Royal Zoo will celebrate its 175th anniversary and the Amsterdam Canal Ring will celebrate its 400th jubilee.

Rijksmuseum (11 am – 5 pm)
Hermitage Amsterdam (including Van Gogh Museum exhibition) (11 am – 5 pm)
Foam (noon – 6 pm)
Stedelijk Museum (11 am – 5 pm)
Museum of the Canals (10 am – 5 pm)
Anne Frank House (noon – 7 pm)
Jewish Historical Museum (opens at noon)
EYE Film Institute Netherlands (opens at 1 pm)
Artis Royal Zoo (10 am – 8 pm)
Madame Tussauds (opens at noon)

(Link: www.dutchdailynews.com, Illustration: the Van Gogh that was ‘discovered’ last year)

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September 12, 2012

Osama bin Laden to adorn Amsterdam museum

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 3:44 pm

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has recently purchased a painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas featuring deceased al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. This ‘major work’ can soon be admired at the long-awaited reopening of the museum on 23 September in a room entirely dedicated to Dumas where 35 of her works will be exhibited.

Marlene Dumas works and lives in Amsterdam. How many clams the museum handed over for the painting is unknown. Osama will be sharing wall space with Young Men (not the women in the picture), the name of a series of drawings that was started in 2001. Dumas has drawn portraits of ‘young men with an Arabic look, from terrorists to innocent men in Amsterdam’.

(Link: binnenland.nieuws.nl, Photo of Paintings by Marlene Dumas by pavement-hopscotch, some rights reserved)

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July 2, 2009

Stedelijk Museum gets American woman as director

Filed under: Art,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 9:22 am
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Only because the word ‘director’ doesn’t cover gender in English, did I use the word ‘woman’. In Dutch, ‘directrice’ (female director) is seen as a lesser choice of ‘directeur’ (male director) and not appreciated, while the French ‘directrice’, where the Dutch word comes from, is perfectly fine. And now, the news.

Ann Goldstein, an American, will be the first foreigner and first woman to head the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in its 114 year history when it will reopen in the spring of 2010. Goldstein is currently the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCa) in Los Angeles where she has worked for 25 years.

Gys van Tuyl, the current artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum says that the MoCa is a model institute that feels closer to the Stedelijk than the MoMA in New York. He also mentions that the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has shown many of Goldstein’s touring exhibitions, which “says a lot, because the MoMA basically doesn’t take shows from others.”

Read more about all the bits of the Stedelijk Museum being exhibited throughout the city in the meantime.

(Link: rnw.nl, Photo: designboom.com)

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September 24, 2007

Defaced religious art on display in Amsterdam

Filed under: Art,Religion by Branko Collin @ 7:17 pm
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Illustration: fragments of the Gregorsmesse painting.

Photos of defaced Catholic icons are on display at the Stedelijk Museum (Municipal Museum) in Amsterdam until November 11. They cover the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe during the 16th century, when part of taking back the church by the people consisted of doing away with what the people considered false doctrines and malpractices, as Wikipedia calls it.

The exhibit by Gert Jan Kocken explores the choices people made in their haste of getting rid of false icons. For instance, in a painting called Gregorsmesse, which shows local dignitaries together with Jesus Christ, the faces of everyone except that of Jesus have been defaced, suggesting that either the new protestants were still a bit afraid to damage the portrait of their most important hero, or that the reformation was as much a protest against church hierarchy as it was against church malpractices.

The iconoclastic purges of the Reformation (the Beeldenstorm, attack on images) were an important step towards the revolution and ultimately independence of the Netherlands, because the Catholic Spanish ruler tried to stamp out such practices.

(Via Sudsandsoda (Dutch).)

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