Jan Dibbets, photos
at the Stedelijk
All images scanned
from the Stedelijk
Museum bulletin
Kazimir Malevich,
Suprematism 1921-27
Kurt Schwitters,
Ved Videsoeter,
1938
Marlene Dumas,
The Next Generation,
1994-95
Marien Schouten,
on the Stedelijk
Bulletin cover
Marien Schouten,
Schilderij met messing
kruis en plank, 1995
Marien Schouten,
Installation in the
Konrad Fischer Gallery,
Düsselforf 1991
Marc Mulders,
Everzwijn I,
1995
Wim Schippers
Marc Mulders,
Witte lelies, 1994
Rob Birza,
Zonder titel, 1994/95
Rob Birza,
Zonder titel, 1994/95
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letter from
the lowlands
by Abigail Esman
Few countries take to art-world controversy
like the Netherlands. In America, such
matters tend to stay within limited art
circles, but here in Holland virtually
everyone knows about the scandal
surrounding Daniel Goldreyer's disastrous
restoration of Barnett Newman's 1967 Who's
Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III,
belonging to Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.
Granted, the fact that Goldreyer demanded
some $500,000 in fees -- to be paid with
taxpayer money -- might have something to
do with the interest in the story. But
still, in the Netherlands, art speak is
something of a national pastime, second
perhaps only to soccer.
And so Goldreyer is in the news again, this
time for accepting a $100,000 settlement
from the Dutch government in place of the
$125 million he was demanding in lawsuits
against the Stedelijk itself (a government
institution) and various members of its
staff. To backtrack: In 1993, then
Stedelijk director Wim Beeren commissioned
the Brooklyn-based Goldreyer to repair the
Newman, which had been slashed by a vandal
in 1986. Goldreyer indeed repaired the
slash. He also, however, took it upon
himself to retouch the 8 x 18 ft. canvas, a
red monochrome field bracketed by a blue
"zip" on one end and a yellow "zip" on the
other. He was accused of repainting the red
section using house paint and a roller.
At first, Stedelijk officials accepted
Goldreyer's change, but on further
inspection they noticed the extent of the
restoration and began voicing their
outrage. Beeren refused to pay Goldreyer
the outstanding balance of his fee, calling
his work "a botched job." Goldreyer
responded with the lawsuit. And so it has
continued until now.
Mirjam Otten, a spokesperson for the
Amsterdam mayor's office, expressed
pleasure with the settlement. While
Goldreyer's press agent sent out releases
announcing a "victory" for the restorer,
Otten countered, "So far the city has spent
one and a half million guilders (c. $1
million) on this case.... We are just
happy that an end has finally come to all
the litigation." Meantime, the Stedelijk's
current director, Rudi Fuchs, has organized
a symposium to take place in April on "the
problem of the 20th-century monochrome
surface." The painting itself remains on
view at the museum, where it is, sadly
enough, viewed more as an historic object
these days than as the sublime modernist
masterpiece it once was.
With the Goldreyer case settled, the Dutch
have had to find new scandals to discuss.
Not to worry. Within weeks of the
settlement, Alexander Brener, a Russian
artist living in Amsterdam, attacked
another Stedelijk treasure, spray-painting
a huge green dollar sign over Kasimir
Malevich's white-on-white Suprematism 1921-
27. Although the actual damage to the
painting was quickly wiped away, the act
itself has been less easily forgotten. "I
AM AN ARTIST" proclaimed Brener in one
newspaper article, which was quickly
followed by the headline: TERRORISM IN
MODERN ART. The matter was further debated
among readers of the Amsterdam daily,Het
Parool; one letter spoke angrily of the
damage, calling it the equivalent of theft,
while another, by contrast, praised
Brener's "performance," claiming that he
had created "a new, spacious concept " for
the work, made it conceptual, developed a
dialogue by superimposing over the
universal symbol of the cross the more
contemporary universal symbol of the dollar
sign. (Perhaps this was what Gombrich had
in mind when he said that art is in the eye
of the beholder.)
More recently, a third scandal has emerged,
this time surrounding the exhibition at the
Stadsgalerij Heerlen of Kurt Schwitters'
work from the years he spent in Holland
during the 1920s (including the renowned
poster Schwitters made with Van Doesburg
for the Dada exhibition of 1922). In recent
months, Schwitters' grandson, Bengt
Schwitters, has besieged the museum with
letters threatening to disallow the
exhibition if some 20 of the pieces are not
returned to him after the exhibition's
close, instead of to their owner,
Marlborough Fine Art (which oversees the
Schwitters estate). The museum finally
capitulated to his demands.
The younger Schwitters is in the process of
suing Marlborough for the 700 Schwitters
works in its possession, following the
termination, in 1986, of the family's 1963
contract with the international art
concern. Schwitters claims that Marlborough
has essentially "kidnapped" his
grandfather's art work, whose total value
is estimated at some $50 million. In terms
reminiscent of Marlborough's infamous 1970s
skirmish with the Rothko estate, Bengt
Schwitters has declared his hope to "lift
the smokescreen" between his family, the
Marlborough conglomerate and "the facts."
In the contemporary arena, things are
especially hot. While the artist Servaas
garners press attention for his work
selling pieces of the sea (legally
recognized certificates of ownership of the
sea are available for 50 guilders
[approximately $30] per hectoliter) as part
of a project titled The Sea Cries, national
symposia, newspaper editorials and meetings
of the ministries debate "the crisis" in
Dutch contemporary art. Boldly stated, that
crisis is simply this: Dutch art is lousy
stuff. And even the Dutch know it. The only
Dutch artists who become known
internationally, and whose work rises to
international standards, are those who
leave the Lowlands: Mondrian, Van Gogh,
Appel, Van Elk, and more recently, Marlene
Dumas (who is really South African anyway),
Inez van Lamsweerde, Eliza May Post and
Pieter Laurens Mol. And these latter two
are hardly known in their homelands.
How to explain it? There are those who say
simply that there's just not a big enough
market in the Netherlands, but many
consider that naive. Actually, the Dutch
art world has two tremendous flaws, neither
of which have much to do with the
collectors: one is the subsidy system,
which is so solid as to eliminate the
necessity for artists to actually make good
art, or rather,art that is competitive
internationally. Two is the nature of the
Dutch art establishment, an inner circle of
artists, professors and museum directors
who all teach, have taught, or are friends
with those who teach or have taught at the
Ateliers 7 academy, formerly located in
Haarlem and now conveniently resettled in
Amsterdam. Professors there include Jan
Dibbets, best friend of Stedelijk director
Rudi Fuchs, and Dibbets' protege, Marien
Schouten, who had a one-man show at the
Stedelijk last fall. Schouten and his
friends are also bound together by the
shared experience nearly 20 years ago of
assisting in the installation of the Sol
LeWitt's Stedelijk wall-drawing exhibition.
Of course they hope this type of
international connection will land them
important exhibitions outside the
Netherlands. So far, it hasn't.
Indeed, of Schouten's show at the
Stedelijk, one critic was noted to quip,
"Schouten is world famous on the Paulus
Potterstraat" (the street where the museum
is located). For an artist who has no
gallery representation, Schouten's
popularity in the Dutch museum world is
difficult to comprehend. This is not to say that Schouten's work,
which is based heavily on Mondrian's legacy
towards the spiritual in art, is bad. It's
not. Rough-surfaced, bulky, abstract
plaster forms, propped like eggs atop
plaster or bronze surfaces like table-tops
and braced to the wall, are the latest
projects in his ongoing attempt to explore
ambiguity in art. They're kind of like
paintings because they're against the wall,
and they're kind of like sculptures because
they sort of sit atop a table. Get it?
Actually, Schouten's talent is evident in
the gates he designed for the Stedelijk
museum galleries, that successfully
articulated the spaces as well as the
relationships between the viewers and those
spaces and between the viewers and the
works (who was looking at whom?), while
echoing images of the cross that appear in
Schoutens early, abstract paintings.
Simultaneously, the gates refer to the
choir partitions of churches of the
Netherlands (are they politically
suggestive, as well?) and to the purist,
Constructivist esthetic that has remained
prominent in Dutch art, architecture and
design. But for all of this, it still
appears that his choice to remain in the
Netherlands, rather than to travel, to live
in a less secure society, to feel the
influences of other artists, to involve
himself in an international art dialogue,
to compete as an artist, has placed
shackles on his art. And that's a shame.
Because Schouten is one of the best that
Holland's got right now.
Not that there aren't others. Marc Mulders,
a painter from the south of Holland, was
featured a few years ago at the de Pont
Foundation, a new museum in Tilburg whose
other exhibitions have included one-person
shows by Wolfgang Laib and Anish Kapoor.
Mulders' lush, painterly surfaces, richer
with paint than van Gogh's ever were and
shining with wetness and light, tantalize
the senses. Recent works have focused on
flower images, which makes them sound
trite, but they are not. Sunflowers spread
thickly, heavily, lazily, hotly, in oil
slicks over the canvas. Heavily-impastoed
daisies crowd together in a tar-like sea of
black, and the black and the white, and the
fore- and the back-grounds, and the thick
paint and the flat canvas all struggle
against the stasis of the wall. These are
good, classic, solid paintings. You don't
see much of that anymore, not here, not, in
fact, anywhere.
Also not to be found anywhere else, though,
are works like the 16-square-meter peanut-butter
carpet by Wim Schippers, currently
on view at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.
Esthetics aside, the work is apparently
causing more than enough mayhem for the
museum; not only do viewers take nibbles
here and there, but some, apparently
presuming that a carpet is a carpet is a
carpet, walk right across it. You can
follow their peanut-butter footprints
through the halls of the museum.
Indeed, perhaps the best indication of how
bad Dutch art is right now lies in the fact
that the new, presumably avant-garde
Rotterdam Kunsthal is doing exhibitions of
Leonardo da Vinci and of early figurative
works by Mondrian.
But some artists are making it into
exhibitions abroad, notably one organized
jointly by Fuchs and his Belgian
counterpart, Jan Hoet, director of the
Museum for Contemporary Art in Gent. Titled
"Art of the 20th-century: Flemish and Dutch
Painting from Van Gogh, Ensor, Magritte and
Mondrian to the Contemporaries," the
exhibition runs Mar. 16-July 13, 1997, at
the Palazzo Grassi, Venice. (Schouten and
Dibbets, for the record, are included in
the exhibition. Mulders is not.) The show,
designed to define ties between Dutch and
Belgian art based on a common art
historical background, offers no surprises
and little challenge with works by the
likes of Karel Appel, van Gogh, Delvaux,
Van Doesberg, Van der Leck, Reitveld,
Khnopff, Ad Dekkers, Ensor, Panamarenko,
Marlene Dumas, Rene Daniels and so on. Only
two artists represent the under-40 crowd:
Jan Fabre, at 39, perhaps the Lowlands'
best known and best-loved "younger" artist;
and Holland curators' darling, the 34-year-old Rob Birza.
Not surprisingly, this exhibition by the
Lowlands' two most controversial curators
has generated no small uproar Belgium. The
emphasis on "Flemish" painting, as opposed
to "Belgian," inflames the Walloon (French-speaking) community, particularly in light
of Hoet's inclusion of artists like
Magritte, who the Walloons, in the
continuing political feud between the two
factions of the Belgian community, claim
cannot be called "Flemish." In
conversations with the two curators, Fuchs
countered that during Magritte's life, the
Flemish state didn't exist, and that makes
Magritte Belgian -- Flemish. A more furious
Hoet argued further, "Flemish art is part
of the artistic development of the low
countries. Who's ever heard of Walloon
art?"
Maybe we've been missing something.
One final note, in Komar and Melamid's
ongoing investigation of "The Most Wanted
Paintings," in which the artists determine
the motifs and composition of a painting by
polling people to discover their
preferences (see the Dia Center for the
Arts website for an example), the artists
have discovered that Holland differs from
the rest of the world in its taste. Whereas
people from other countries have shown
preference for realist work (such as a
couple in a landscape with animals and blue
sky), the Most Wanted Painting for the
Dutch is abstract and blue. Go figure (no
pun intended). The least desired painting
in Holland is an interior, like someone's
living room, with a portrait of Bill
Clinton hanging on the wall.
ABIGAIL R. ESMAN is author, with Rudy Fuchs, of a book of dialogues (in Dutch) on contemporary art and culture and is currently at work on a book about Christo and Jeanne-Claude
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