It’s summer, so it’s Avignon again - the great international rendez-vous for the performing arts.  

The Flemish contribution, which has for years been the biggest after the French, will be led by the director Guy Cassiers, who recently scored high with Wagner’s Das Rheingold at La Scala in Milan.

In the Provence he is directing an ambitious theatre production of Robert Musil’s unfinished opus magnum, The Man without Qualities. 

The choreographers Alain Platel and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker will be there too. Platel is putting on Out of Context and Gardenia and De Keersmaeker the world premiere of En attendant, a dance performance to fourteenth century polyphonic music. In 1992 De Keersmaeker was still at the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais des Papes, now she’s dancing in the Cloître des Célestins with its famous centuries-old plane trees as part of the scenery.  

Meanwhile, in the Off programme, Ensemble Leporello will entertain the people in the street with their giant puppet Leporellone. The group will also perform two extra theatre productions inside. 

The Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk (picture) will be present for the first time. With the German director Falk Richter, she created Trust: her own dancers will be joined on stage by those of the Schaubühne Berlin.  

www.festival-avignon.com, until 27 July 2010.

While the cyclists in the Tour de France have left the Netherlands and Belgium behind them and cycled into the hexagon, there is an interesting exhibition to go and visit in Rotterdam on “Flandriens”, by the top Flemish photographer Stephan Vanfleteren (°1969).  

”Flandriens” are cyclists who bump their way over the hard cobbles of Flanders and Northern France, exuding the work ethic more than the technique of this sport that is so extraordinarily popular in Flanders and Belgium.  

Vanfleteren portrays not only the weather-beaten faces of several generations of cycling icons, but also shows the landscapes of the Flemish Ardennes and the Northern French cobbled roads where the epos of mythical races like the “Tour of Flanders” (Ronde van Vlaanderen) and “Paris-Roubaix” is set, the spectators along the road, the people watching on television in cafés and the signalmen. This photographer touches on the melancholy of cycling, of gains, losses and hard labour, like none other.   

With his camera Vanfleteren immortalized Eddy Merckx (photo above left), Briek Schotte (above right), Roger De Vlaeminck (below left) and Rik Van Looy (below right).

The exhibition is on till 1 August in the municipal cultural centre LP II, next to the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Admission is free of charge on presentation of a ticket for the Fotomuseum.

Friesland

Those who want to see more of Vanfleteren can carry on to Friesland after Rotterdam. Until 29 August, the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden is presenting the Flakkelân exhibition with work by Stephan Vanfleteren.  The photos are the result of a commission the Fries Museum and the newspaper, the Leeuwarder Courant, gave to Vanfleteren.  

For the commission Vanfleteren immersed himself in the role that the past plays in modern Friesland. The result is a personal story with a typical mixture of portrait and landscape.  

Photo: Wierum, 2010. 

“Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and Jan Lievens (1607-1674) share a home town, various acquaintances and patrons, and a cultural milieu of Amsterdam. The trajectories of their lives and careers converge at various points. Both were born in Leiden and trained by two foremost artists there, before studying with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. As young artists, they associated closely, and critiqued each other’s production in painting and etching. Dutch writers often considered them together, although eventually Rembrandts reputation eclipsed that of Lievens.”

So reads the beginning of an essay on Lievens and Rembrandt by Amy Golahny, due to appear in a next issue of the yearbook The Low Countries. 

It is quoted here because Sotheby auctioned a work of Lievens in Londen on the 7^th of July: A tronie: study of the head and shoulders of an old bearded man, wearing a cap (oil on oak panel, 58 by 47 cm). The painting was sold for 1,853,600 GBP. 

Old age

Long considered to be by Rembrandt, and widely published as such, this picture was first identified as the work of Jan Lievens by Abraham Bredius in 1911. It dates from around 1629, when both Rembrandt and Lievens, together in Leiden, painted numerous such studies of old men and women, of which the subject can be said to be old age itself.  

The fame of Lievens is raising ever since the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam dedicated an exhibition to him in 2008: A Dutch Master Rediscovered. 

Between 1873 and 1934 the shipping company Red Star Line carried over two million emigrants from Antwerp to New York. The port artist Eugeen van Mieghem (1875-1930) painted the penniless voyagers, who came mainly from Central Europe, waiting on the quayside.

Migrants’ stories

Three harbour sheds at the Rhine Quay (Rijnkaai) in Antwerp, in the shadow of the MAS (Museum aan de Stroom or Museum by the River, see earlier post), are the last remaining vestiges of the former shipping company. Here the emigrants underwent the first administrative and medical checks.

By 2012 these sheds are supposed to be turned into a museum and an experience centre for migration, a real “lieu de mémoire” that will bring alive migrants’ stories from the past and now.

Tower and chimney

The American architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle has been selected to supervise the renovation. The firm also renovated Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York, through which all migrants had to pass before they could set foot in the “New World”.

The historic character of the three brick buildings will be preserved as far as possible, but a tower, which will serve as a lookout point over the quays and the bend in the Scheldt, will be added. The tower is supposed to be a reference to the old chimney, the last recognisable point for the many migrants.

The new museum is a not unimportant link in the chain of projects with which the city council wants to reconnect the people of Antwerp to the river Scheldt.

The city of Antwerp, the Flemish Government and private sponsors (including the maritime group, CMB) have invested in the project. Anonymous American families have contributed 1.5 million dollars in total.

Dutch speakers of English confound native speakers by pronouncing the words that are listed below in the same way: 

knees / niece

bet / bed

bad / bat

head / hat / had

mad / mat 

snag / snack

access / excess

salary / celery

leak / league  

That is what researchers of the VU (Vrije Universiteit/Free University) in Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht have found out. 

The European Commission recently concluded that Dutch companies miss business contracts because of their faulty English. “Your Dutsj eksent is bat for your celery.” Of course, grammatical and lexical errors also play a role. The strange thing is that American and Canadian speakers of English take more offense at these mistakes than Englishmen do. 

There is hope: when Dutch students sing lyrics, they lose their Dutch accent. 

One thing is for sure: language matters. Always.

'Snag' and 'snack': entirely different things, different words as well, yet often pronounced in the same way by Dutch people who speak English.

The Mauritshuis in The Hague is to be renovated. Ambitious plans have been announced recently. Some 1.250 square meters will be added to the museum for the exposition of art, as you can see in the above picture.

The Museum will close in 2012 and will reopen in 2014. You can read more about the plans here. 

Travelling paintings

One can make a virtue of necessity, is what director Emilie Gordenker thinks: since famous paintings as the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, The Bull by Paulus Potter and The Anatomic Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt will have to leave the building anyway, they might as well travel to… Japan. 

Museums in Tokyo and Kobe will pay, of course. Some five million euros, as is heard through the grapevine. 

Fragile

This seems to be a perfect deal, but why should works of art have to travel? Are they not too fragile?

Isn't it better that they just stay where they are?

Their being there is always contingent, even arbitrary.  (Let us not digress to the ongoing discussion about the Elgin Marbles and their so called “homecoming” to Greece!) 

Effort

Shouldn't people have to do some effort in order to see art? These days, you have to go to Malibu to watch James Ensor’s The Entrance of Christ. 

Still, it is no use being frustrated about that. “Vaut le voyage”, as they say in French.

But we should be travelling then, not the work of art. 

Alex van Warmerdam (Haarlem, 1952) has won the Johannes Vermeer Prize. The director, theatre maker, visual artist, actor and writer has been awarded the prize for the high quality of his entire oeuvre.  

The Johannes Vermeer Prize, which amounts to 100,000 euros, is a Dutch state prize for the arts and honours and stimulates exceptional artistic talent. The winner can use the money to realise a special project.

This is the second time the prize has been awarded. Last year it went to the opera director Pierre Audi. Van Warmerdam will receive the prize on 29 October 2010. 

Absurdist twists

In spring 2010, new productions of film fragments by him as well as pictures from his theatre productions, posters, photos and models, paintings, drawings, graphic work, texts and murals painted on the spot were on show at the Museum of Schiedam.  

Four monumental rooms filled with grim humour and absurdist twists and turns set out the artist’s ideas.

You can read about the exhibition here (Dutch text). There is also a video of the opening

Dutch canon

Van Warmerdam made his first feature film, Abel, in 1986, followed by, amongst others, The Northerners, Grimm, Waiter and The Last Days of Emma Blank. They are films that have found a place in the Dutch film canon and the public’s collective memory.  V

an Warmerdam has received many (film) prizes both at home and abroad. Most recent were the awards he got for The Last Days of Emma Blank (2009) at the film festivals in Venice and Utrecht (Golden Calf for the best scenario).

Article in The Low Countries

An article about his film work appeared in The Low Countries Yearbook 1994: Between Theatre and Cinema. The Films of Alex van Warmerdam.  You can read it here. 

Gerbrand Bakker has been awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the second most important international literary prize after the Nobel Prize. The prize is worth 100,000 euros, 75, 000 for the author and 25,000 for the translator, David Colmer. The prize was handed over by the Mayor of Dublin on 17 June during a dinner for the nominees and their guests in Dublin.

The Twin 

The IMPAC prize has been awarded annually since 1996 for a book written or translated into English. Libraries all over the world can make a nomination; a jury makes the final decision on the winner. Previous winners include Colm Tóibin, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Orhan Pamuk, Michel Houellebecq, Herta Müller and Javier Marias. The jury selected Boven is het stil (translated into English as The Twin) over books by Christoph Hein, Zoë Heller, Joseph O’Neill and Marilynne Robinson.

Recognition

The award represents tremendous recognition for this work by Gerbrand Bakker and his translator David Colmer. Boven is het stil, by Gerbrand Bakker, became a bestseller within months of its publication in the Netherlands and was a great success for the Dutch publisher Cossee. It then made an international breakthrough too. The English and German reviews were lyrical. Meanwhile the book is being or has been translated into eight languages. David Colmer is a leading translator of work by, amongst others, Adriaan van Dis, Anna Enquist, Dimitri Verhulst and, most recently, Awater by Martinus Nijhoff.

The prize is also a great boost for the English publisher Harvill/Secker. The renowned publisher from the Random House group has already published many Dutch writers in translation, including Willem Frederik Hermans, Geert Mak and Frank Westerman. Bakker’s American publisher, Archipelago, will soon bring out a translation of Eline Vere by Couperus. The Dutch literary foundation, Nederlands Letterenfonds, sees the prize as an accolade for the work of one of its predecessors, the Nederlands Literair Productie- en Vertalingenfonds, which, after years of intensive promotional work in England is delighted to see a Dutch work rewarded.

More information

www.letterenfonds.nl
www.fondsvoordeletteren.nl
www.nlpvf.nl

You can read articles about “The Twin” by following this link and this link. 

Dutch director Willem Alkema has won the audience award at the Italian Biografilm Festival.  

His documentary Coming Back for More tells the story of Alkema’s quest for Sly Stone, the legendary soul and funk artist who came to fame in the sixties and seventies but faded away in the eighties due to drug abuse. For years now, he has been living a recluse life. 

Alkema was very surprised about winning the Italian award. “I left the festival early, because I didn’t know my documentary was racing for a prize. Now I am trying to have my film released in the United States”, he said. 

You can watch the trailer of Coming Back for More through this link. And this blog has written about the Sly Stone documentary as well. 

London’s Tate Modern museum is going to have two Belgians in house - Chris Dercon, who will be its director as of 2011, and Francis Alÿs, whose work can be seen there till 5 September. 

Dercon (°1958, Lier) is a big name in the art world. He headed the renowned art institute, Witte de With, before he became director of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in 1996. Since 2003 he has been in charge of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In New York, too, he played a key role in prominent art houses.   

Chris Dercon revealed his plans for Tate Modern in the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. He wants to “transform [the museum, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year,] into a new sort of art institution, ready for the 21st century and for the richly diverse public typical of London”. 

Francis Alÿs 

Francis Alÿs is an artist who was born in Antwerp as Francis De Smet and later emigrated to Mexico. He won fame as an artist worldwide before he was noticed in his own country. 

He is only the third Belgian to have an exhibition at the Tate, after Jan De Cock and Luc Tuymans. 

Belgian  newspaper De Standaard describes his work as “never noncommittal. With his often absurd seeming actions he denounces social wrongs”. 

Alÿs in TLC Yearbook 

Anne-Marie Poels wrote a lovely article about Alÿs’s work entitled Walking as an Art Form. It appeared in the 17^th issue of The Low Countries Yearbook.  

From the text it appears that Alÿs constantly calls into question art, the art world and the relevance of art as commentary on political matters.  

You can find the whole article here.

(Illustration: Francis Alÿs pushing an ice cube through Mexico City)