April 12, 2010

I arrived on Monday (more or less, you never know with jet lag, it was about 10:00 AM local time). The flight was into the Schipol airport just south of Amsterdam. I arranged my flight so that I’d have about a day and a half before the conference begins on Wednesday, to get used to the time change, find my way around, and in case the flight had some complication. (The only one was that the flight was about half an hour late getting to Amsterdam, presumably because of a head wind.) So, I had a few hours to spend exploring Amsterdam. The city is famous for its red light district, and I’ve heard jokes about how much I’m going to enjoy Amsterdam “wink wink” from several people before my trip. That’s not really my kind of entertainment. Neither is the recreational drug use that is so popular here—I’ve smelled many strange cigarettes since I’ve been here.

So, I decided to go the Van Gogh museum in the museum quarter, which of course has a huge collection of paintings (as in the original paintings!) by Vincent himself. Getting there was a tad crazy. I took a train from the airport to Amsterdam Central Station, which was just a bit difficult because the ticket machine wouldn’t let me use my ATM card in the obvious way, would not take cash, and it insisted that I use a credit card with a PIN. None of my credit cards use a PIN. Credit cards in the US never use a PIN unless you want a cash advance from an ATM, which I never do, so I never got any PINs. But over here, and in Australia, they prefer credit cards with PINs to signatures. Note to self: Next time, get the credit card company to give me a PIN. I think I could have used my ATM card, which of course does have a PIN, as a Visa check card, but by the time it occurred to me to try that I was already in line at the ticket counter, which took any form of payment. After figuring that out, it was a short trip by train to Central Station, although I never figured out what to do with the ticket. I never had to put it into a turnstile, no one checked it as I boarded, and no one on the train asked to check it. I guess it’s all on the honor system. Once there, I asked for directions for the luggage locker, found one big enough for my giant suitcase, and stashed it. There was an X-ray machine at the luggage lockers, like they use at security checkpoints at the airport, but it was off to the side, shut down, and marked with yellow tape. I had planned to handle my suitcase this way, so that I could leave my luggage somewhere safe and not have to go to the hotel in Utrect, then come all the way back to Amsterdam, etc, but after someone pointed out that security concerns might have forced them to close the luggage lockers, I was a little worried. However, the airport and the train station both had extensive luggage lockers, as do most of the museums, and all signs of security and paranoia around them were fading or gone. Having stowed my giant suitcase, I wandered onto a trolley going the right route, and found myself in the Museum Quarter.

I grabbed a sandwich, sat down briefly to eat it, and of course something ridiculous happened to me, as it always does: Half way through the sandwich I saw a little boy wandering around saying “Mama? Mama?” And I figured he was lost, and no one else seemed to be helping him. Here I was, a strange bearded man, dressed in mostly black, speaking almost no Dutch, and I figured that if I approached him, I might scare him, and he’d run away and really be in trouble. So I followed him from a distance, looking for a policeman, or someone looking for him, and no one showed up. Finally, I approached a woman washing a window at her shop, and asked her if she could help. She couldn’t really get him to take her hand, but she kept close to him and in a moment or two, his mother found him. This area is a park, so this sort of thing must happen all the time.

The museum itself was amazing! You can buy an audio tour in many languages, and the player also shows images on the screen, like scans of Vincent’s hand-written letters, and paintings related to the ones there that are in other museums. The originals oil paintings are very shiny, and you can see the sculpted texture of each stroke. You can’t see that in a book or print. They show how he started out with something more like the traditional dark Dutch style in “The Potato Eaters,” but once he went to France, he went more abstract, almost pointilist, and much more colorful. Having seen some more traditional paintings on Tuesday in the Utrecht Centraal Museum, I think I understand Vincent better. The old tradition was to spend a very long time creating photorealistic oil paintings that couldn’t possibly represent anything real. No one could sit still for the time it took to paint a portrait, no flowers could stay fresh long enough for the painter to finish a still-life, and no scenery stayed in the same light long enough for anyone to finish a landscape. So artists did strange things like paint flowers that bloomed in different seasons in the same still life, and fill the open areas around portraits with random bits of landscapes at all different scales. They also preferred to paint wealthy people, characters from classical myths, and scenes from the Bible. So, Vincent’s reaction was to paint rapidly, impressionistically, capturing one moment as it happened, and making it a snapshot of something genuinely found in reality. He painted light as it came, using colors he saw right there. He painted a tree that really looks brown until you look closely and realize that the paint is actually purple. He painted blue seas with green paint. He painted farmers and peasants and ordinary people. I’ve often thought of Asian art as being grounded in how we see, rather than what reality exactly looks like, so the perspective is off, each flower is represented by a stylized flourish of the brush, and if you look too closely it looks very sketchy. About the time I remembered this and thought to apply the idea to Vincent, the audio tour started talking about how Vincent admired Japanese art, and even copied some of their works with his own interpretations, and right there on the next wall was one of them. I never knew this, but it makes perfect sense in hindsight. Vincent made stylized strokes for petals and seeds in his sunflowers in sort of the way a Japanese painter might paint each blossom on a cherry tree.

The same museum had a lot of works by others, including a watercolor club, and some of their pictures were outstanding. It happened to have an extensive Gaugin exhibit. I decided very quickly that I don’t like Gaugin. Partly, Vincent tried to work with him, but they got into a fight, and that’s the infamous incident where Vincent cut off part of his own ear. Gaugin supposedly despised pointilism, which no doubt caused friction between the two. So he loses some points for that. Furthermore, I think that out of all the dozens of works by Gaugin on display, I maybe liked one of them. The rest seemed bitter and poorly conceived. According to the notes, Gaugin was also trying to incorporate Asian style. But where Asian outlines and flat areas of color are generally alive and give a startling illusion of depth and dimension, I found Gaugin’s work to be profoundly flat despite certain bits of shading, full of unbalanced outlines (as in, strokes of varying weight with no rhyme or reason), and frankly the bathing women and laundry scenes that he seemed obsessed with came out just dull. In contrast, Vincent could paint ordinary trees such that you could see the wind blowing the leaves around.

I had enough time to maybe see something else, so I started to go to the Rijksmuseum, which is just across the park. But, it was under re-construction, the line to get in was long, they made you go through a metal detector right away and there was no place for you to leave a bookbag beforehand, and really I was worn out. If that museum had been easy to visit, I’d have done it, but it looked anything but easy. So I caught the trolley, rescued my suitcase, and took a train to Utrect.

Once there, I figured out that Utrecht Central Station is basically part of a shopping mall, and I could walk through it to get to my hotel, the Apollo. I checked in, had dinner at an Indian restaurant, and crashed with an awful jet-lag headache.