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In early July, the bloke & I went to Amsterdam for a couple of days for my (very) belated birthday celebrations. His parents kindly looked after the children so we could have our first holiday alone together since they were born.
One of the things we did was go to an art museum and wander around for a couple of hours. This is not a thing you can do with small children, unless you have imprisoned them in a pram, and then there would (not unreasonably) be screaming.
I’d previously been to both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. The bloke had never been to the latter, but as it was the height of summer, it was not a good time to go. The place cannot cope with the number of visitors it receives, and unless you book days in advance, you can’t get in. When you do, you still have to queue, and you end up shuffling in a slow-moving crush of people past all of the artwork. It’s not a great experience. We opted, therefore, to go to one we’d never been in: the Stedelijk Museum, which is dedicated to modern art.
I really enjoyed the collection. It was well curated and I now have a little list of new (to me) artists to keep my eyes peeled for in the London exhibitions.
Photographer Zanele Muholi takes photos of LGBTQ+ community members in Africa. I definitely want a book of her work. It was a little irritating to find, at the end of our visit, that of all the special exhibitions on display, hers was the only one without a corresponding product available in the shop. No books, no postcards, nothing. Hmph.
From her “Brave Beauties” series.
Ditto.
From a more recent project to document the everyday lives of LGBTQ+ people.
Below, some more familiar names.
Mondrian. As ever, weirdly compelling.
Cesar Domela “Relief”
Alexander Calder “Untitled”
Seth Price
Artist Edward Krasinski had an idea about a thin blue line and he ran with it.
This room full of suspended mirrors was captivating.
Here I am with a much more stylish pair of legs.
And here I am with the bloke’s legs.
Another Krasinski. I really liked this although for the life of me I can’t explain why.
This photo is more about the person looking at the art than it is about the art. One nice thing about modern art is that that doesn’t matter at all.
One of the things we did was go to an art museum and wander around for a couple of hours. This is not a thing you can do with small children, unless you have imprisoned them in a pram, and then there would (not unreasonably) be screaming.
I’d previously been to both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. The bloke had never been to the latter, but as it was the height of summer, it was not a good time to go. The place cannot cope with the number of visitors it receives, and unless you book days in advance, you can’t get in. When you do, you still have to queue, and you end up shuffling in a slow-moving crush of people past all of the artwork. It’s not a great experience. We opted, therefore, to go to one we’d never been in: the Stedelijk Museum, which is dedicated to modern art.
I really enjoyed the collection. It was well curated and I now have a little list of new (to me) artists to keep my eyes peeled for in the London exhibitions.
Photographer Zanele Muholi takes photos of LGBTQ+ community members in Africa. I definitely want a book of her work. It was a little irritating to find, at the end of our visit, that of all the special exhibitions on display, hers was the only one without a corresponding product available in the shop. No books, no postcards, nothing. Hmph.
From her “Brave Beauties” series.
Ditto.
From a more recent project to document the everyday lives of LGBTQ+ people.
Below, some more familiar names.
Mondrian. As ever, weirdly compelling.
Cesar Domela “Relief”
Alexander Calder “Untitled”
Seth Price
Artist Edward Krasinski had an idea about a thin blue line and he ran with it.
This room full of suspended mirrors was captivating.
Here I am with a much more stylish pair of legs.
And here I am with the bloke’s legs.
Another Krasinski. I really liked this although for the life of me I can’t explain why.
This photo is more about the person looking at the art than it is about the art. One nice thing about modern art is that that doesn’t matter at all.
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I'm glad the final photo resonated with you, too!
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And I am always and forever a Calder fan.
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Keiki has a Calder t-shirt, which he loves. When he went through his "I don't want to wear any of my clothes" phase, it was one of the few he'd put on without a fuss.
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I also went to a Calder exhibit in San Francisco (very near where I live) which didn't use anything like fans to move the mobiles, so I developed a rather severe and projective cough ...
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Rest of the gallery looks great too.
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It was a great collection! I'm glad we went there.