New Version of Villa Next Door
Dear reader!
As Villa Next Door 2 has reached its maximum of 3 GB it will stop here, but i will continue in a new blog called Villa Next Door 3 (you guessed it!). Click here to go to Villa Next Door 3 (and don’t forget to renew your subscription there!!).
See you there!
Bertus Pieters
Some time ago i visited the Chabot Museum in Rotterdam to write a review about the Aad de Haas (1920-1972) retrospective show for Villa La Repubblica. Click here to read the review in VLR (in Dutch).
As I’ve written quite extensively about the exhibition in VLR, I leave you here with some impressions of the show, but not without the strong recommendation to visit it yourself.
Click here to read the review in Villa La Repubblica (in Dutch)
Now that you’ve come here, you might as well subscribe to Villa Next Door (top right of the page)!
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© Villa Next Door 2022
Contents of all photographs courtesy to the owners of the works, to the estate of Aad de Haas and to the Chabot Museum, Rotterdam
Bertus PietersVILLA NEXT DOOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ADVERTISING ON THIS PAGE!!
THIS IS PART 2 OF 2 ABOUT SIX FRISIAN MEDIEVAL CHURCHES SEEN DURING MY HOLIDAYS. CLICK HERE TO SEE PART 1
During and after the Iconoclasms of the 16th century church buildings were often kept intact, as the protestants also needed a place to worship. Quite a few of these churches in the north were built on so-called “terps”, mounds built against the unpredictable sea. Frisians eked out a living in an environment prone to floods and these terps were already built in times long gone, so to many Frisians they were a common and precious feature in their landscape. They were places of safety and salvation. Churches were built on top of them. Originally they were of course built with clay and wood.
But the local monks fostered new technologies for agriculture and for building. Around the year 1000 and afterwards many stone churches were built, like in the rest of western Europe. The international style then was the Romanesque with its sturdy, robust walls and small round-arched windows. There were of course no rocks in Friesland to hew stones from, and the technique of making bricks was lost centuries ago, so building stones had to be shipped from as far afield as the Eifel in Germany. The oldest churches still have masonry with these stones. Good examples amongst the six churches we visited are the ones in Genum/Ginnum and especially the very old one in Hogebeintum/Hegebeintum.
When brick making was reintroduced in the Low Countries at the beginning of the 13th century, the Gothic style had already replaced the Romanesque in more southern parts of Europe from the middle of the 12th century onwards. The Gothic had bigger, pointed-arched windows and more refined and elegant building techniques and as such it was more able to represent the glory of the creed (and those in power). For that last aspect there was probably not much interest amongst the Frisians in the countryside. The Gothic became only fashionable up north in the 13th century. It was used in a very practical way to allow more daylight in the church, to make some new architectural decorations and to enlarge the existing smallish and dark Romanesque buildings.
Characteristic of the village churches in the two northern provinces throughout the ages are the gable roofs (instead of pointed spires) on the bell towers. It gives them a particularly robust character that didn’t really fit in very well with the Gothic or any other later style. Of the six churches we visited, only one – St Martin’s in Hallum – has a pointed spire, which is an early 19th century replacement of a once gable-roofed bell tower. And there is of course the small church at Janum/Jannum which has no bell tower at all, but a hanging belfry with one bell. It was interesting – just as interesting as any big Gothic cathedral – to see these old structures in their modern day context; sometimes on terps and surrounded by houses and trees they stand out as landmarks in the very flat and agricultural Frisian landscape. Which makes a trip to that part of the province all the more worth it.
THIS IS WHERE PART 2 OF 2 ENDS. CLICK HERE TO SEE PART 1
Now that you’ve come here, you might as well subscribe to Villa Next Door (top right of the page)!
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© Villa Next Door 2021
Contents of all photographs courtesy to my sister and brother in law who kindly sponsored this trip
Bertus Pieters
VILLA NEXT DOOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ADVERTISING ON THIS PAGE!!
THIS IS PART 1 OF 2 ABOUT SIX FRISIAN MEDIEVAL CHURCHES SEEN DURING MY HOLIDAYS. CLICK HERE TO SEE PART 2.
As some readers may know i have a keen interest in European art and architecture made and built before 1600. Especially the so-called Middle Ages are interesting. They are dated usually from about 500 to 1500, but for the Low Countries it would be stylistically more appropriate to let the Middle Ages end in 1566 with the Iconoclasm starting that year. That definitely brought a radical end to Gothic art (which was already being replaced by the more fashionable Renaissance style in the cities). Church interiors old and new were torn down, sculptures and paintings were destroyed, frescos were covered with whitewash, and later on abbeys were confiscated and torn down, erasing a long social, aesthetic and religious history.
In fact this was the end of a long development starting with legalising Christianity and incorporating it into the Roman Empire by Constantine the Great in the 4th century. After that the Roman Catholic Church became powerful and even omnipotent in Western Europe, with the Popes in Rome becoming princes as powerful, greedy and corrupt as any other secular king. Conservatism, oppression, corruption and religious opportunism led to social and political unrest, and in the end it led to the Protestant Reformation of which the Dutch Iconoclasm was a result. In spite of that devastating Iconoclasm there are still tangible remnants of the Middle Ages in what is now called the Netherlands. The Dutch Middle Ages are of particular interest because the country as a political entity didn’t yet exist.
In medieval times the Low Countries were a collection of dukedoms, counties and bishoprics, spreading from modern day northern France to the North Sea, trading with each other as often as fighting with each other, often at war with or taken over by more powerful neighbours, but generally behaving quite independently. The present day Dutch are only interested in their Medieval heritage because it is all very old and still there, but they cannot take pride in it because there is no national Dutch heroism in it. Generally there is the idea that Medieval society was barbaric and intolerant. That ignores the fact that the Middle Ages were a long development of civilisation with both its shiny pages of enlightenment and its dark pages of barbarism, traces of which are still visible in the present. Amongst the oldest architectural remnants in the present day Netherlands are village churches in the two northern provinces Groningen and Friesland.
During the week before Christmas i was on a family visit in a village northeast of the Frisian capital Leeuwarden/Ljouwert. It was a much wished for relaxed and worry-free holiday with loved ones i only see a very few times a year (or hardly at all under corona circumstances). The new Covid lockdown barred us from any visit to a museum, but then the Frisian countryside is as much an open air museum as any place could be. It is a museum of the present, of modernism, of nature, of agriculture, of geography and….. of Medieval times. So we took the opportunity to see some of these old Medieval churches.
THIS IS WHERE PART 1 OF 2 ENDS. CLICK HERE TO SEE PART 2
Now that you’ve come here, you might as well subscribe to Villa Next Door (top right of the page)!
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(All links open in new tabs)
© Villa Next Door 2021
Contents of all photographs courtesy to my sister and brother in law, who made this trip possible
Bertus Pieters
VILLA NEXT DOOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ADVERTISING ON THIS PAGE!!
There is only one big purpose in nature: staying alive at all cost, even if the time span of life itself may vary from just a few hours to more than a millennium.
The main methods nature uses seem to be coincidence and chance. Everything around us happens to be as it is.
Mind you, if evolution had – again, by chance – taken another route, forced by circumstances, we might have looked and felt quite differently (or we might not have existed at all).
In fact nature’s toolbox gives almost infinite possibilities and variations of how we, living beings, look like and what attracts and repels us to make us mentally function in life.
As human beings we can even play a bit with that toolbox and with artificial materials. Peter Zwaan (1968) makes works that give you an idea of evolution-gone-wrong.
Paper becoming skin, beer cans growing skin with birthmarks and hair or the idea of fish fingers taken quite literally, Zwaan makes it all and shows it in a retrospective at HOK Gallery.
Especially on a hot summer day in the tiny gallery – of barely 120 square feet –, you may doubt if you smell your own sweat or that of Zwaan’s works.
Zwaan takes the fun quite seriously which makes his works both attractive and repulsive.
After seeing Zwaan’s work, drinking from a beer can won’t be the same experience anymore.
The show also proves that a retrospective doesn’t necessarily need a lot of space and hundreds of works.
Also in that respect HOK gallery and Zwaan have succeeded in making a good and imaginative show.
© Villa Next Door 2019
Content of all photograph courtesy to Peter Zwaan and HOK Gallery, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
VILLA NEXT DOOR BARES NO RESPOSIBILITY FOR ANY ADVERTISING ON THIS PAGE!
As you may have noticed, reporting in Villa Next Door has become less frequent. That has two main reasons. The first is that i’m concentrating more on writing (in Dutch) these days, as i feel not enough is written about art. Writing, to me, has proven to be a more creative process. Alternating with viewing art it deepens my understanding of what i see, and not just in art. I hope, of course, that reading will stimulate the same process with you. However, writing costs time. The second reason is that reporting by camera about exhibitions in (and sometimes outside) The Hague is one thing, but Villa Next Door is a one man’s business. I must admit it’s nice to show on a blog something of my excitement while seeing exhibitions, but processing all the pictures for Villa Next Door is, although a critical, not a very creative process, which, even so, costs a lot of time. So there will be less Villa Next Door and more Villa La Repubblica the coming time. I apologise to my non-Dutch readers for that. The good news is that Villa Next Door will be continued though less regularly and, as to the artists and gallerists, even less democratically.
© Villa Next Door 2019
Bertus Pieters
Well, there you are, another fact of life:
Twelve twelve gallery closes its doors.
It was still a young gallery and full of energy.
In spite of its small space it always featured very diverse artists, always well presented and with much dedication and devotion to both content and aesthetics and to both artists and viewers.
I’m sure i won’t be the only one who’s going to miss that.
However, Twelve twelve’s Silvia Bakker is still young and full of good ideas, so i am sure we can regard the gallery as just a stepping stone to a next level.
A big thank you to Silvia and to the artists whose work she presented in the gallery!
Hope to meet you all again soon!
© Villa Next Door 2019
Content of all photographs courtesy to all artists and Twelve twelve gallery, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
I wish you all a very happy and healthy 2019! And be nice to each other…..
© Villa Next Door 2019
Bertus Pieters
Villa Next Door 2 