As a young woman trying to educate herself to become an artist in the 1930s and ’40s in fascist Italy, Bice Lazzari once said that the only resource she had was illegally imported art magazines. “For many, the only way to survive artistically was to establish a continuous dialogue with oneself: a challenging monologue to build one’s own art,” she wrote.
The two-month visit ended disastrously. The two artists had a blowout fight, and van Gogh sliced off his ear, suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in the hospital. Gauguin fled back to Paris.
AMSTERDAM — Edibles is the word most often used for foods that make marijuana and other hallucinogens go down easy. Think pot brownies and space cakes — not exactly famous for pleasing the palate.
AMSTERDAM — Edibles is the word most often used for foods that make marijuana and other hallucinogens go down easy. Think pot brownies and space cakes — not exactly famous for pleasing the palate.
AMSTERDAM — At an Amsterdam rehearsal studio one recent afternoon, Thomas Mann, the German author who died in 1955, was speaking with the main character of his novella, “Death in Venice.”
LONDON — We like to think of Vincent van Gogh as a creature of the elements: buffeted by the wind and rain, or going mad in the sunflower fields under the wilting Provençal sun.
AMSTERDAM — An art crimes investigator in the Netherlands said Tuesday that he had recovered Pablo Picasso’s 1938 painting “Portrait of Dora Maar,” which was stolen from the yacht of its Saudi Arabian owner in the south of France in 1999.
This month at the Palazzo Grassi, looking out over the Grand Canal in Venice, visitors will find a beautiful new floor in the atrium, made of thousands of Italian marble tiles.
AMSTERDAM — A cathedral in Germany has agreed to return a Nazi-looted painting to the heirs of Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, an Austrian Jewish couple from whom it was stolen in 1941, according to the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which has spent the last eight years negotiating the restitution.
MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — Exploring the Bonnefanten Museum’s David Lynch retrospective here, “Someone Is in My House,” one starts to conjure an image of Lynch’s hands: They must never stop moving.
MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — TEFAF, one of the world’s most opulent art fairs, held every year in the southern Netherlands town of Maastricht, offers an encyclopedic array of paintings, sculpture, antiques and antiquities, presented in custom booths designed as mini-museums. This year’s showcase takes place at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Center from Saturday to March 24, decorated, as usual, with wall-to-wall carpeting and thousands of tulips.
The brilliant palette of Hockney’s 2008 “More Felled Trees on Woldgate” looks psychedelic next to van Gogh’s subdued cobalts and azures in “The Garden of St. Paul’s Hospital (‘Leaf Fall’)” from 1889.
He was 63 at the time, but scholars say there is no record of any illness. The poets might say he died of grief, about a year after the death of his only surviving son, Titus.
Next to it, a museum visitor is invited to wear a virtual reality helmet and step inside an enlarged rendition of the same double diamond, and to stand for a moment inside its silent, glittering core.
AMSTERDAM — The Czech master of surrealist cinema, Jan Svankmajer, is revered by animators for his stop-motion movies that are by turns absurd, grotesque, erotic and horrific.
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