February 24, 2021

Van Gogh painting shown for the first time

Filed under: Art,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 4:44 pm

A never before shown work by Vincent van Gogh will be auctioned off on 25 March in Paris by Sotheby’s and Mirabaud Mercier, and is expected to fetch between 5 and 8 million euro. The owner wishes to remain anonymous.

Entitled ‘Scène de Rue à  Montmartre’ (‘A street scene in Montmartre’) painted by Van Gogh in 1887 while he was visiting his brother Theo in Paris, the painting stayed for about a century in a French family’ private collection. It depicts a man and woman strolling arm in arm past children playing, with a fence and a windmill in the background.

Auctioneers say that the painting had been seen in catalogues, but had never been on public display. It is one of the very few paintings from Van Gogh’s Montmartre period that was in private hands.

If you want to see the painting and you live in The Netherlands, you would need to make an appointment with Sotheby’s in Amsterdam on 1, 2 and 3 March because after that the painting is off to London and Paris.

(Links: nu.nl, Image: swissinfo.ch)

Tags: , , ,

October 28, 2020

Dutch student finds artwork by cubist André Lhote

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 10:23 am

A 22-year-old Dutch art student named Bob spotted a work by French cubist André Lhote on Dutch second-hand site Marktplaats. Bob figured the painting could be worth a lot, so he bought it from a family in Bloemendaal, a rather posh coastal city in the province of North Holland.

Bob then went to Paris to have the painting examined by the world’s André Lhote expert, Dominique Bermann Martin of the André Lhote Association who collects the artist’s works. Her evaluation of the painting was swift, as it was the real deal, estimated to be worth tens of thousands of euro.

The family who sold it didn’t know what the painting was worth, and according to other articles, Bob said that they couldn’t be bothered to find out. As Bob put it, they could have gone to Paris themselves to have the painting examined.

(Link and photo: rtlnieuws.nl)

Tags: , , , ,

July 2, 2020

French ban ‘fearmongering’ Dutch bicycle advert

Filed under: Bicycles,General by Orangemaster @ 2:03 pm

A television advert for Dutch VanMoof bikes has been banned from French television because it causes anxiety, which is illegal in France. In the words of VanMoof, ‘reflecting on the rat race of the past proves too controversial.’ In the words of France’s advertising watchdog it creates a ‘climate of fear’ about cars and uses non-car related elements to get its point across.

A French friend said there’s three reasons the advert was banned: Renault, Peugeot and Citroën, all three French car manufacturers. Twitter has more jokes about the banned advert as well.

Despite being aired on Dutch and German television, the Autorité de régulation professionnelle de la publicité (ARPP) said the ad for the VanMoof bike unfairly discredited the automobile industry. The advert features a shiny black car on which are reflected images of chimneys, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles and traffic jams. The vehicle melts away to transform into the Dutch company’s latest e-bike, accompanied by the tag line: “Time to ride the future”.

This comes at a time when the progressive mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo is turning big boulevards into bike paths, getting her much praise.

“Some images in the reflection of the car are, in our opinion, unbalanced and discredit the entire car sector,” the ARPP said in a letter sent to VanMoof. “The images of factories/chimneys and an accident create a climate of fear. So they will have to be adapted.”

VanMoof has accused the watchdog of wanting to protect the French car industry after sales plummeted during the health crisis. VanMoof is not going to edit the advert, and because television doesn’t have the weight it used to have, everybody is going online to view the video and find out why it was banned.

The French are saying the video is openly criticising the automobile industry which is a bad thing to do at the moment, while the Dutch are pointing out that there’s nothing wrong with encouraging cycling using imagery that implies cars as bad. Gotta love Europe.

(Link: theguardian.com)

Tags: , ,

July 13, 2018

25 years of Viktor & Rolf in Paris

Filed under: Design by Orangemaster @ 7:48 pm

Dutch design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (aka Viktor&Rolf) celebrated their 25th anniversary with a “collection of memories”, called the Immaculate Collection, an entirely white collection, adorned with Swarovski crystals, an ode to many of their iconic creations, from a reimagined Bedtime Story collection to the ‘No’ trench coat seen above.

The presentation of this collection coincides with the Viktor&Rolf Fashion Artists 25 Years exhibition running until 30 September at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam.

(Link and photo: dezeen.com)

Tags: , ,

July 8, 2018

Iris van Herpen presents bird-inspired dresses

Filed under: Animals,Design,Fashion,Photography by Orangemaster @ 5:24 pm

Amsterdam-based Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen has created a series of dresses that replicate the feathers and soundwave patterns of birds in flight, which was presented a few days ago at Le Trianon, Paris for the Paris Haute Couture fashion week.

To go along with them, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Amsterdam’s Studio Drift had an installation of moving glass tubes that also capture the motion of birds in flight. Inspired by Studio Drift, Van Herpen also used chronophotography, a Victorian photographic technique that captures movement in several frames of print.

(Link and photo: dezeen.com)

Tags: , ,

October 5, 2017

Louvre bans Dutch artwork for its sexual content

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 8:37 pm

3fc7d2c9-b9c6-4c52-b55a-c07c6c64af40-640x959

The Louvre museum in Paris France is refusing to accept an installation from the Netherlands, claiming ‘explicit or sexual’ content. It’s amusing to note that the Louvre has tons of explicit material in its museum that children have seen for years, but putting something like this from the Dutch Atelier Van Lieshout outdoors is all of a sudden a no-no.

The large-scale artwork entitled ‘Domestikator’ was set to go on display at the Tuileries garden, a children’s playground adjacent to the Louvre as part of the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) on 19 October, but the museum was reportedly worried about the sculpture being seen by children.

Most young children are not going to get the joke and those who will should be old enough to understand what they’re seeing. And there’s enough naked men and women and sex and what not in the museum already, why is this a problem? There’s enough racy advertisements in France to make this look tame.

Domestikator was the centrepiece of the grounds of Ruhrtriennale, an arts festival in Bochum, Germany, around since 2015. The Germans had no issues with it, but surprisingly the French are going to censor this. Free publicity for Atelier Van Lieshout.

UPDATE: The Centre Pompidou in Paris will show Domestikator.

(Link and photo: expressandstar.com)

Tags: , , ,

August 25, 2017

Days before the Thalys train incident of 2015

Filed under: Film by Orangemaster @ 11:12 am

Servicemen

It’s been two years since the shooting and stabbing incident that took place on board a Thalys train going from Amsterdam to Paris, where a Moroccan gunman was foiled by three Americans, two of which just happened to be off-duty US Armed Forces servicemen.

On 18 August 2015, a few days before the incident, the two servicemen were cycling around Amsterdam. They approached an Italian friend of mine and asked how to get to the Amsterdam Arena. My friend said “It’s quite a ride away”.”Not a problem, Sir!”, said one of the Americans and my friend proceeded to explain how to get there from downtown. “They thanked me profusely using the over-polite language typical of the USA military”, which is all too often the polar opposite of what one normally hears in Amsterdam.

On 22 August 2015, the morning after the incident, my Italian friend read the news that the brave guys prevented a carnage on the Amsterdam Paris train. “Two years ago I wrote the story on Facebook about giving directions to stranded American tourists who days later turned out to be heroes. My Facebook post was even picked up by local media”.

“The whole story is now being filmed by Clint Eastwood, but my bit of course not in it”, he said jokingly. And that’s too bad, it would work in the film. The funny thing is, my friend’s been in the film business for over a decade if not two in both Italy and the Netherlands, and works with major international directors. The announcement of the film was made months ago, but Facebook’s memory posts brought this all back up for him recently. And to add even more plot to the story, The Guardian wrote that one of the men who foiled the attack, Spencer Stone, needed open heart surgery after being stabbed in late 2015 in an unrelated attack.

(Link: Thalys train attack of 2015, Photo from Facebook)

Tags: , , , ,

November 20, 2015

Paris peace pianist plays in Amsterdam

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 11:14 am

Eiffel_tower2

Germany-based pianist Davide Martello who famously played John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ outdoors in Paris recently to comfort listeners travelled to Amsterdam and played next to the National Monument and the Nieuwmarkt downtown this week.

Known as Klavierkunst, Martello wants to travel to play the piano in all the capitals of the world, sometimes suggested by fans. He can now cross Amsterdam off his list. I really like the idea of a bicycle able to cart a piano around the city and calling him the ‘peace pianist’. He also played on Dutch television, which you can watch here.

Other pianists took to the free piano in Amsterdam Central Station before and after the one minute of silence held throughout the country on 16 November, playing ‘Imagine’.

Why ‘Imagine’? The slogan ‘Pray for Paris’, which was surely well meant, bothered many French people and others, such as French cartoonist Joann Sfar (some stuff is in English) – I’ll let his points speak for him. Considering the attacks were religiously motivated, ‘Imagine’ has lyrics that suggest we imagine there’s no heaven or religion, which would imply that if religion wasn’t around we would be better off, something French secular society strongly believes in.

There was once an episode of late 1970s American television show ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ where a reverend comes to the rock radio station and tries to have a bunch of songs censored, specifically ‘Imagine’:

The reverend: This is typical of the kind of secular liberal humanist point of view that gluts our airwaves.
Station manager: Yeah. But we’re not talking obscenities here anymore, we’re talking about ideas, political, the philosophical ideas. First you censor a word and then you censor the ideas.
The reverend: But the idea is man-centered, not God-centered. The Bible tells us to put our reliance in God, not in our fellow mortals. This song says there’s no heaven.
Station manager: Ah, no, it says just imagine there’s no heaven.

(Links imdb.com, www.at5)

Tags: , , , ,

July 24, 2015

Cleaning up Amsterdam is not a good thing

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 3:47 pm

oudezijds-achterburgwal-taver

A metro line that’s eight years overdue and counting, ugly late twentieth century buildings already being demolished and questionable clothing brands: downtown Amsterdam is too crowded with tourists and the prices are going up, pushing the locals out.

Urban and architectural geographer Mark Minkjan compares Haussmann’s clean up of Paris’ in the nineteenth to what is happening in Amsterdam today:

The city wants to get rid of its famous Red Light District, which lies just a few metres behind the Red Carpet [Damrak, as you step out of Central Station]; the number of coffee and tourist shops is being confined. In virtually all urban situations, temporary creative projects are parachuted-in to imperfect places to attract new audiences and new investments. It signifies the direction in which Amsterdam is going: it’s on its way to becoming an incredibly liveable, comfortable, clean and pretty city; but of course, the cost is its soul.

Grab a beverage and give the link below a read.

(Link: www.failedarchitecture.com, Photo by Flickr user Taver, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

May 26, 2015

A Dutch hit about Paris and its Grunnegs cover

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 11:47 am

Eiffel_tower2

This spring, Dutch artist Kenny B released a Dutch song entitled ‘Paris’ with interspersed French words, filmed in Paris. He meets a girl who happens to be ‘Néerlandaise’ (Dutch) and goes on to sing ‘Praat Nederlands met mij’ (‘Speak Dutch with me’), which should become the new mantra of many struggling to practice their Dutch. Kenny B often mentions in the media that he doesn’t like the qualifier ‘Surinam-born’ as he is Dutch, although he does have a characteristic pronunciation from his background, which adds to his appeal.

Then, there’s a short but sweet Groningen cover version by Michael, sung in local dialect Grunnegs. It’s going viral and we’ve jumped on the bandwagon. Yes, it needs more verses and I want more versions: Internet, do your thing!

(Link: www.gic.nl)

Tags: , , , ,