I’m on the other side of my time in Amsterdam and Den Haag, with one day left and it’s a work day, not a tourist day. I leave for Poland on Sunday. Mostly for family and friends who are probably wondering why I’m not posting about my trip like usual on Facebook, here’s some odds and ends.
The Rijksmuseum
This has been on my bucket list for a long time, and it didn’t disappoint. I’m loving learning to use my new camera in these inspiration spaces. The downside is that I didn’t get many usable images (better now than in Poland), and the ones I did get are a wee bit grainy.
I watched people watch The Night Watch being restored for a long time. Bringing a camera to a museum has made me change what I’m interested in looking at. I’ve somewhat shifted from trying to take a decent picture of the art I like to taking pictures of people looking at art.
The art was great (I knocked another 4 Vermeer’s off my list of the 35 currently on public display) but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the exhibit American Photography. It started me down a rabbit hole of seeing how Trump is influencing cultural expression in the Netherlands, which is really a place I didn’t want to go – but here we are. I found the last room particularly poignant. The exhibit of postings “selling America” was maybe a little too on the nose, but I could help thinking this was an early preview of what tourists will be doing 20/50/100 years from now… checking out artifacts on the decline and fall of the American republic.
Amsterdam Museum of WWII Resistance
A surprisingly great little museum that does try to unpack the fraught dynamics of collaboration, resistance, and colonialism. It’s a small space, and meant to hold attention for a limited time, so it isn’t perfect. Hannie Schaaft has a section, but the Oversteegen sisters are mentioned very briefly in the Hannie section and even the Hannie section leaves out the colourful bits about how they killed Nazis. Still, the museum is immersing, and accessible including sign language on the videos which was pretty cool.
By far, the most impactful part of the museum was the end, where visitors are invited to reflect on what they might do in a similar situation and leave a thought on a card on the wall. Many were about Trump, including one that said:
They’re coming for us. Do something.
signed, a transgender woman who lives in the USA.
I’m not posting the image here, I don’t have permission and given this world, I don’t want to put that handwriting in to the public sphere. I was choked up by that, so much so that I read through a bunch of the cards on the wall and was dismayed to find a swastika buried in one of the stacks. I pulled it out and gave it to the docent.
Instead, here’s an image I took of a resistance member’s bike on display that I kind of dug, though it’s a bit grainy.
On the block where we stayed, there was an image of JD Vance hanging from someone’s window oddly deformed, with the “grateful” quote.
There was a possible terrorist attack in a square I’d been just an hour earlier, and I didn’t even realize until I left the city. Palestinian flags were ubiquitous, and plenty of pro-Ukraine gear too. Not a single MAGA hat in sight.
Den Haag/Mauritshuis
I knocked another 3 Vermeer’s off my list, so I’ve now seen 14 of the 35 currently on public display, including the Girl with a Pearl Earring which was a stunner in person. The real star is the lesser focused on View of Delft which was remarkable. Hardly anyone stopped to look at it, so I spent a good long while examining the paint strokes up close. The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius was also a treat ignored by most visitors… I loved it.
The Mauritius had a special exhibit on the museum during WWII and I wasn’t expecting to see a contemporaneous copy of Mein Kampf, which was jarring. Apologies for the crap picture, it was behind glass.
Also, a painting that was in Hitler’s personal art collection, on loan from the German Historical Museum. I couldn’t find the original source online, so I’ve linked to a legible copy.
Lastly, here’s a picture of a wall sconce I think turned out ok, and a goose and her babies I found on the way to the museum.
