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De Hallen Haarlem Opens A Portrait of Holland: The Dutch Landscape in Art Since 1850

De Hallen Haarlem presents A Portrait of Holland: The Dutch Landscape in Art Since 1850. Exhibition on view 24.06.2011 – 11.09.2011.

More than a hundred and twenty paintings, watercolours, prints, photographs and films by Dutch artists like Anton Mauve, the Maris brothers, Piet Mondrian, Jan Toorop, Jan Sluijters, M.C. Escher, Jan Wolkers and Jan Dibbets epitomize the fascination of the Dutch landscape.

The large summer exhibition in De Hallen Haarlem reveals the way that the seemingly simple, flat Dutch landscape of polders and rivers has inspired an incredible diversity of interpretations. It examines a number of movements in Dutch painting since 1850—from the Hague School to Expressionism—and also explores the work of photographers and filmmakers.

Easels in the Polder
Around 1850 Dutch artists felt a growing need for direct contact with their own familiar Dutch surroundings. Inspired by French Realist and Impressionist examples, for the first time in history large numbers of Dutch artists set up their easels in the polders; they wanted to experience and picture in all weathers their own landscape with its meadows, mills, cows, canals, rivers, dunes and church towers. Among the artists of this period featured in the exhibition are Piet Mondrian and the Hague School painters J.H. Weissenbruch, P.J.C. Gabriel, the Maris brothers, Anton Mauve and Willem Roelofs.

New Approaches to Reality
From the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, new styles like Pointillism, Cubism and Expressionism determined the way the Dutch landscape was depicted. Dutch painters like Jan Sluijters, J.B. Jongkind and Leo Gestel experimented with new approaches to reality. Alongside works by these artists, A Portrait of Holland will also showcase more recent art by Edgar Fernhout, Eugène Brands, Jaap Hillenius, Jan Wolkers and Ben Akkerman. They expressed their personal observations of the landscape in what are by and large highly abstract works.

Manipulation
Manipulation is another aspect explored by the exhibition. There were and are artists who bend and distort the landscape to confuse and astound—like M.C. Escher with his perspectival games, like Paul de Kort and his land art, Sjoerd Buisman’s manipulation of vegetation, Jan Dibbets’s collages of landscape photographs, and the photographic works that disconcert the viewer by Barbara Visser and Gerco de Ruijter. Film images from Bert Haanstra’s Spiegel van Holland (1950) round off the exhibition.

Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue by Antoon Erftemeijer, the Curator of Modern Art at the Frans Hals Museum and De Hallen Haarlem, which focuses on views of the Dutch landscape by widely divergent artists. The catalogue (in Dutch only) costs €15 and is available from the museum shop in the Frans Hals Museum and in De Hallen Haarlem.

De Hallen Haarlem Summer Series
A Portrait of Holland – The Dutch Landscape in Art since 1850 is the fifth exhibition in De Hallen Haarlem Summer Series. Previous summer exhibitions were devoted to Isaac Israels, Anton Pieck, Romantic Landscapes and Godfried Bomans.

De Hallen Haarlem is supported by the Bank Giro Lottery; the exhibition A Portrait of Holland – The Dutch Landscape in Art since 1850 was made possible by the Dr M.J. van Toorn & L. Scholten Foundation.

Image: Jan Toorop, Low Water, Canal at Veere, 1910 Frans Hals Museum|De Hallen Haarlem

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