Beyond TEFAF Maastricht and its vast array of treasures, there are intriguing exhibitions and tours just a few hours away by car or train: in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam, and in the Belgian capital, Brussels. Here is a selection.
Yellow (Amsterdam)
If in Amsterdam, drop by the Van Gogh Museum, whose collections include some of the finest masterpieces by the Dutch prodigy.
You can see quite a few in a new exhibition — “Yellow: Beyond Van Gogh’s Colour” (through May 17) — which explores what the color yellow meant to van Gogh and other artists living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an excuse to see a selection of very attractive works.
As a color, yellow was not always popular; it was long associated with treachery and prostitution. It made a major comeback in the mid-19th century, when artists started working outdoors with ready-to-use paint tubes and made abundant use of yellow, a primary color. The book world joined the craze, too: A famous series of contemporary French novels were released in bright yellow paperback editions.
Van Gogh loved yellow, and it pervaded his later works. “Sunflowers” (1889, the show’s opener) was painted almost entirely in three shades of chrome yellow. Then there is “The Yellow House” (1888, also in the show), his famous temporary residence in the south of France.
Van Gogh was also an avid reader of those yellow paperbacks. You can see a few of his personal copies on display, and also see stacks of them on a tabletop in his painting “Piles of French Novels” (1887).
The novels were considered risqué and inappropriate reading for women. That did not stop the two who are pictured (with their yellow books) in striking portraits by Ramon Casas and Vittorio Matteo Corcos in the exhibition.
Other works to look out for: Manet’s still life of a lemon on a tray, and Chagall’s “The Yellow Room” (1911), an interior with figures and a rickety table.
Tramhuis (Rotterdam)
If you prefer to explore a city by foot, head to Rotterdam and make your way to the Tramhuis. Built in 1914 as an Art Nouveau waiting room for tram passengers, it is now a freshly restored kiosk that serves as a starting and ending point for organized Rotterdam walks.
The steel and glass tram shelter, with its light roof and canopy, miraculously survived World War II bombings and was relocated many times during the port city’s reconstruction. From the 1970s, it had a variety of anomalous uses: It became a night cafe, and later a kebab shop.
Right before the pandemic, the Tramhuis was bought by the Droom en Daad foundation — established in 2016 to develop Rotterdam’s arts and culture scene, and led by Wim Pijbes, the former general director of the Rijksmuseum. The Tramhuis was removed, and its cast-iron structure restored; a 1931 photograph in the Rotterdam City Archive served as a reference.
Today, the Tramhuis, which has a dedicated app, offers tours designed for individuals or groups, with or without an accompanying guide. One two-hour English-language tour, titled “In Love with the Unique City,” will take you “through old and new, past war and reconstruction, grand plans and human stories.” If you would rather walk on your own, the “City of Food and Cultures” itinerary takes you on a culinary journey through a port city that is defined by its migrant communities.
Birds (The Hague)
“The Goldfinch,” a small 17th-century painting by Carel Fabritius, became an international sensation when Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name came out in 2013. Visitors swarmed the Mauritshuis in The Hague to see the little bird, perched on its feeder with a chain around one foot.
As it turns out, there are plenty of other birds in the Mauritshuis’ art collections. So the museum asked the prominent British historian and art historian Simon Schama to make “The Goldfinch” the centerpiece of an exhibition titled “Birds.”
Expect to see paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Holbein, Rembrandt and Picasso, but also listen to bird sounds; gaze at feathered headdresses, masks and fans; and see the taxidermy Domino Sparrow.
The house sparrow became famous in 2005 when it flew into a Dutch exhibition hall and knocked down 23,000 dominoes that were part of Domino Day — a televised Dutch event in which millions of dominoes were stacked up in an effort to break the world record for domino toppling.
An animal expert was called in to catch the bird but was unsuccessful, and the creature was shot. It is now something of a national treasure, usually on display at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam.
Metamorphoses (Amsterdam)
If you visit the Louvre and its collections of Roman statuary, you are bound to notice “Sleeping Hermaphroditus,” a 2nd-century marble figure that the 17th-century Italian sculptor Bernini elegantly positioned on a marble mattress and pillow.
That masterpiece is on display at the Rijskmuseum in Amsterdam until late May as part of “Metamorphoses,” an exhibition of more than 80 works inspired by Ovid’s epic Latin poem of that name.
Written more than 2,000 years ago, the narrative poem contains more than 250 Greek and Roman myths on the theme of transformation and metamorphosis, including the story of Hermaphroditus, whose body merges with that of a nymph and becomes half man, half woman. In June, the exhibition will travel to the Galleria Borghese in Rome.
Other major loans include Titian’s “Danaë,” from Apsley House in the United Kingdom, and Rodin’s “Pygmalion and Galatea,” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There are modern and contemporary works, too, such as the towering bronze “Spider Couple” sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, which recalls the myth of the weaver Arachne who is turned into a spider, and Polaroid self-portraits taken in the early 1970s by the German performance artist Ulay in which he presented himself as half man, half woman.
Beauty and Ugliness (Brussels)
What is beautiful, and what is not? The answer to those questions has shifted over the ages, and continues to: The canons of beauty keep evolving.
A new exhibition at the Bozar Center for Fine Arts in Brussels shows how beauty and ugliness were represented by Renaissance artists in Italy and Northern Europe.
“Bellezza e Bruttezza: Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance” showcases works by powerful names in art history: da Vinci, Botticelli, Titian, Tintoretto, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach, and Quinten and Jan Massys.
During the Renaissance, physical beauty was idealized to the extreme. New publications gave women plenty of beauty and cosmetics tips, and legendary beauties were sought after as artists’ models. At the same time, people with unconventional looks were also an object of fascination. Dwarves, jesters and human “curiosities” were hosted at courts and portrayed by artists.
The exhibition illustrates both categories. On the one hand, there is Botticelli’s “Allegorical Portrait of a Woman” (1475-90), believed to be inspired by Simonetta Vespucci, whose golden locks ripple around her face.
On the other, there is Giovan Paolo Lomazzo’s “Grotesque: Right-Facing Head of a Woman” (c. 1560), the portrait of a woman with thinning hair and a heavily protruding jaw.
A parallel exhibition titled “Picture Perfect” revisits the theme from a contemporary angle, and explores present-day definitions of physical beauty through photographs and videos from the 1960s to today. There are works by dozens of artists including Ana Mendieta, Sylvie Fleury, Cindy Sherman and Hank Willis Thomas.
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