Dutch 360-degree painting gets facelift
Top artists put work under hammer to help refugees
THE HAGUE, Sept 16, (AFP): Perched on a platform up in the air, two restorers are vacuuming the “sky”. A quick wipe from a sponge follows and then a touch-up with a pencil. Little by little, the enormous clouds above The Hague are returning to their original colour.
Every two decades the Panorama Mesdag, the world’s oldest panorama painting still on its original site, gets a facelift under the watchful eyes of visitors to the museum just outside the stately city centre.
Painted by the 19th-century Dutch master Hendrik Willem Mesdag from 1880 to 1881, the masterpiece gives visitors a 360-degree view of the beach at Scheveningen, a famous seaside suburb of The Hague, creating the illusion the viewer is standing right in the heart of the scene.
As in the late 1800s, sightseers today are still amazed by the three-dimensional quality of the cylindrical painting.
Visitors climb circling stairs to emerge in the centre of a purpose-built wooden rotunda, built on real sand that slopes down to the floor. Surrounded by the painting itself, the optical illusion is complete.
On the beach, flat-bottomed fishing boats are coming and going from the North Sea. Elsewhere on the sand, soldiers are riding their horses.
Impressive
Look in yet another direction, and there’s the fishing village of Scheveningen, with The Hague’s tall church towers on the horizon — as it was almost 140 years ago.
“We really believe we’re at the beach in 1880,” one Chinese visitor whispered. “It’s very impressive.”
But currently the restorers of the Mesdag are stealing the spotlight.
“Sometimes people even call out ‘hello’”, smiled Leonoor Speldekamp, as she gently wiped the dust from a church steeple gradually regaining its ochre colour.
“Some people visit the museum especially to come and look at how the work is being cleaned. When we’re absent or on a lunch break, they’re disappointed not to see us on the scaffolding,” she said.
She also took part in the previous restoration mission 20 years ago. “There were holes in the canvas. It was badly damaged because a bird had destroyed a joint in the museum’s roof, causing a leak,” the restorer said.
That was the first time the painting got such a thorough cleaning. Before then it was “cleaned and restored occasionally,” said Suzanne Veldink, a member of the Mesdag’s management team.
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes every two decades, all of the Panorama Mesdag — 14 metres (45 feet) high and 120 metres in circumference — is being carefully cleaned, starting at the top where most of the dust gathers.
“There’s no layer of varnish, which means the dirt, dust, soot and lots of things can penetrate the painting,” Speldekamp said. Time seems to stand still for the restorers as they remove dust with meticulous swipes and retouch colour with deft strokes.
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PARIS: Some of the world’s most expensive contemporary artists have donated works to be auctioned off to help refugees in Paris later this month.
Cindy Sherman, Annette Messager, Mona Hatoum, and Wolfgang Tillmans are among 25 top international artists who have donated work to go under the hammer of Christie’s boss Francois de Ricqles.
The Italian artist Rudolf Stingel, the fifth most expensive living artist after David
Hockney, has also given a painting to the sale.
The auction is part of a week of shows and events at the Palais de Tokyo art museum in Paris called “We Dream Under the Same Sky” which centre on culture and citizenship.
The artworks — which are valued between 7,000 euros and 380,000 ($8,300 and $453,000) — will go on display at the museum on Saturday.
The two with the highest estimates are a rendering of a New York Times front page by the US painter Wade Guyton and a painting by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco (250,000 euros).