The Getz Files

The Hague ain't very big, but it's quite rich, quite old, and has some quite good art. I held off on checking it out until la mama came over, which she did last weekend, so can now give you an art report of our little town. (But first, a quote from Matthew Arnold about The Hague: "I never saw a city where the well-to-do classes seemed to have given the whole place so much of their own air of wealth, finished cleanliness and comfort. I never saw a city, either, in which my heart would so have sunk at the thought of living." And mentioning Arnold makes me go off and read Dover Beach - I recommend you take a few minutes and do the same.)

First stop was probably The Hague's most well-known museum: De Mauritshuis. This is known as one of the world's best small art museums, which is a fair characterisation. The exhibition was a fellow called Frans van Mieris, one of those pretty Dutch painters of the Golden Age - the 1600s - but the permanent collection has some special things in it. You walk into one room and there, nestled inconspicuously against a wall, is Girl with a Pearl Earring. And you can get right close to it (not like the Vermeer exhibition at the National in London a few years ago, where the crush prevented one from seeing anything properly). Then a room of Rembrandts; some great Holbein; a way cool Brueghel v. Rubens mash-up. And lots of paintings about sex, such as Spanking the Monkey, oops I mean Teasing the Pet:

The website is also superb, with descriptions of most pictures and reproductions of all of them. (My favourite small art museum is the Wallace Collection in London, which has a fine collection of Rembrandts. Actually, they have only 1 by RvR, but also 1 ascribed to him, 4 by his studio, 1 by his circle, 1 by an imitator, 2 after him, and 765 by people who weren't Rembrandt at all. It's also the place to go for The Laughing Cavalier, who isn't laughing and wasn't a cavalier. I guess the naming practice is quite cavalier.)

Then Panorama Mesdag, which has to be seen to be believed. This is the work of a baker (banker? it isn't clear)-turned-artist, who decided to do a massive indoor painting showing the panorama from a sand dune overlooking the beach at Scheveningen. Van Gogh said about it: "The Panorama Mesdag is the most beautiful sensation of my life. It has just one tiny flaw and that is its flawlessness." It is 14 metres high and 120 metres round. Thanks to a skylight, the light is ever changing. It is so realistic and yet so artificial that it gave me vertigo. It's actually worth coming to The Hague just to spend 10 minutes looking at it.

Then we moved on to some more modernity.

GEM, the museum of contemporary art (or whatever "actuele" means) is just OK - uninspiring paintings, strange "sound art". There is one upcoming exhibit which sounds interesting - The Ideal Muslim Woman- but the title could well be the most interesting part of it.

Next to it, though, is the Fotomuseum which, if you like photos, as I do, is very cool. Their exhibit is this Dutch photojournalist called Willem van de Poll, who's been around for donkey's years, and is now, as the site says, almost forgotten. Great shots of Dutch colonies, Israeli independence, the Philips factory (he got around). There's a really cool selection of his photos in the quite impressive National Archives site; or you could browse his entire oeuvre of 30,000 photos. Here's one I like:

Also, other cool contemporary photos. This one, of Pinochet and his cronies, is in another museum altogether:

Our final stop was the Gemeentemuseum, which is alternately wild and wacky and really staid. We skipped the 1,165 rooms dealing with gold and silver in The Hague, and the area on Dutch and french fashion in the 1700s, and spent about 4 minutes on their exhibit of Finnish Art around 1900 (why oh why didn't they do Finnish art around 1870? that was a true golden age). But they have the best collection of Mondrians in the world, and some freaky Francis Bacons. But the coolest things is downstairs: the Wonderkamers (wonder rooms). The room in the middle has a somewhat haphazard selection of stuff from their collection arrayed in nontraditional ways. V interesting. (The Brooklyn Museum has something similar, which they call Visible Storage - it's fascinating. I like it 'cause you can just look at the stuff without thinking to much - if you actually want to know what it is and who it's by, you have to go through quite a laborious process.) Then around that are these crazy rooms - weird tilings, form following function, guess the price of the artwork, run your own studio. You know - fun! (Unfortunately, the website is all in Dutch, so I'm still a bit in the dark, but we were all enthralled.) Also had a room designed by this top Dutch art director, who designed, among others, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover. Freaky movie and disturbing, but most rewarding. (Sample IMDB line: The dog excrement was actually chocolate mousse.) So, worth a - judicious - visit.

And I don't know about you, but I'm now exhausted. But now you know, there are many reasons to come to The Hague: it happens here™!