High Art and A New Neighborhood

 Goededag!

I’m nicely settled in my new studio apartment in my new Amsterdam neighborhood in a district called Oud Zuid or old south just beyond the inner ring of canals.  The place is smaller but still has a lot of light and is on a quiet canal.  If you want to find me the best thing to do is find the Rijksmuseum.  Then there’s a big canal, and I’m on the smaller one behind the big one, and I’m pretty much opposite the museum.  It is by no means impossible to get lost in Amsterdam, but in the center of the city, one can always just follow a canal and get to where one is going with less confusion than Paris or London.

So this morning I packed up and set out for my new neighborhood.  I walked along Princesgracht and turned south down Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, crossed the canal and visited the Rijksmuseum.  It’s currently undergoing renovation so only a fraction of the collection is on display, but oh what a fraction!
They presented a brilliant exhibition of Dutch Golden Age artists, lesser known but remarkable flowering comparable to the Italian Renaissance.  You know—or you had jolly well better know if you were ever one of my students!—such luminous names as Rembrandt and Vermeer, but dozens of other brilliant artists also painted wonderful works.  I especially like Judith Leyster, whose work has a humor and liveliness reminiscent of Frans Hals.  But when one views the works side by side, it’s easy to understand why the rest are overshadowed by Rembrandt.  His works have subtle light and modeling although he could glitter when he was in the mood, but there’s more to him than technique.  All the artists possessed supreme technical skills, but while most portraits look a bit wooden for all their naturalism, Rembrandt reveals the inner life of his figures so gently, so compellingly. None of them postures or indulges in the dramatic gesture.  It’s all in the tilt of a head or a furrow of the brow or even a slight smile.  Rembrandt’s subtlety extends to earthy colors and dim light, but he makes you look.

I contemplated the poor saps waiting in line at the Van Gogh Museum as I breezed past then brandishing my Museum Karte.  In three days it’s paid for itself, but then I am a pretty determined museum goer.

Vincent would have been most gratified to know how popular his work and how crowded the museum is.  Rembrandt whispers to us. Van Gogh shoves color and emotion into our faces.  His pigments are glaring and often clashing yet at other times surprisingly harmonious.  Van Gogh’s purpose was to express the feeling inherent in the objects and nature he saw and portrayed, and Rembrandt's was the same.  Both succeeded brilliantly, and both ended tragically.  If there's a lesson in that, I don't know what it is.

Don’t call them “French” fries.  Call them frites or chips. Fried potatoes were invented in Belgium and heartily embraced by the Dutch who call them Vlammese Frites or Flemish fries.  As a part of my cultural research—not to mention my obligations to my readers to try things, I had a cone of these for lunch.  The young man made them fresh for me, salted them up, heaped them in the paper cone and squirted globs of mayonnaise on them.
Stop that gagging!  Whimps can ask for catsup or other sauces, but mayo is the way they do them in the Low Countries.  Good, you ask?  Oooooh.  Best frites I ever had.  So hot, so crisp and yet with a meaty potato substance.  And the unctuous richness of the mayonnaise was perfect with them.  Even despite all the walking I did today, I’m still not hungry after that, but never fear, I am thirsty and I have some Belgian “white beer.”

What’s white beer, Pil? Is it the same as blond?

I have no idea.  It’s something I pulled off the shelf in a supermarket.  It’s very light—too light for me today and lacks that bitter-sweet grain-hop taste I seem to like.  Second sip is better.  Now I can taste more subtle complex flavors.  It’s fine.  I just like the darker ones better.

Dag!