All right at the museum
Away from red lights and coffee shops, Amsterdam’s renewed galleries
Ifirst visited Amsterdam while I was a university student 13 years ago, and this lingers in my memory as a fugue of “coffee” shops, street fries dripping with mayonnaise and an unsettling nighttime walk through the seedy chaos of the red Light district.
When I visited again for business recently, I resolved to seek out a calmer, more adult Amsterdam I knew awaited me somewhere out there. That meant no stupefying, so-called “coffee” shops, no street fries and definitely no gawking at prostitutes: just quality food, drink, sightseeing — and above all, I wanted to expand my consciousness with a heavy dose of art, now that the city has seen a few of its key visual arts destinations renovated.
Chief among them is the rijksmuseum, which r eopened in April after having been closed for a decade to undergo a €375-million renovation. The job was only supposed to take about three years. Boris de Munnick, head of press and publicity for the museum, explains that Amsterdam’s love of the bicycle had a lot to do with the holdup. A compromise had to be found that preserved a shortcut that runs right through the main floor of the gallery.
The rijksmuseum now retakes its place along with the Louvre, the Prado and the uffizi on any bucket list of grand european art galleries. It’s compact enough to enjoy properly in a single day, but make sure to reserve tickets online and queue up early: The rijksmuseum’s collection of rembrandts and Vermeers draw tourists by the thousands, and even visitors who bought timed entry tickets online waited a long time to get in when I visited in early May (as many complained in the guest book). Inside, the crowds are not a real nuisance unless you’re itching to sit down at the too-small café. If you’re in desperate need of serenity, the small, white-walled Asian wing is less jammed. Look for a metre-cubed brick of pressed tea on the stairwell: It’s a 2006 work by celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
even more crowded is the Van Gogh Museum, which also reopened in April after a €20-million, half-year closure for renovations. The walls are now cleverly painted in greys and blues and yellows, which complement the colours of the tortured artist’s often sunny paintings. The museum is informative — who knew that Van Gogh’s works used to be even more colourful, before the paint faded? — though I wish it said more about Van Gogh’s mental illness. Never much of a Van Gogh fan previously, I found myself being won over, especially by his copies of Japanese paintings.
Other than the House of Bols (a fun cocktail museum of sorts that plugs the country’s biggest distilling company), the final museum in the Museumplein t ri o is the Stedelijk, a gallery of modern and contemporary art. It reopened in fall 2012 after the completion of a sleek white addition by Benthem Crouwel Architects. It overhangs the museum’s own outdoor café; locals have dubbed it “the bathtub.” The collection is split roughly evenly between homegrown and foreign artists. Highlights include the requisite Mondrians and de Koonings but it isn’ t all dead white guys: Look for work by rineke dijkstra, a contemporary photographer known for her portraits that capture the awkwardness of adolescence.
All that mature art appreciation demands mature meals. For lunch, I twice hit up The Seafood Bar, a short stroll from the Museumplein on the Van Baerlestraat shopping strip. In a country not traditionally known for its cuisine, The Seafood Bar showcases oceanic fare as a dutch strength: Fish and chips and mixed platters are generously portioned and delicious. And they feel lighter than they should, perhaps thanks to the airy vibe created by the lofty ceiling and white subway tiles.
Another break time found me far from the hazy dens of central Amsterdam. Located at the south end of the city’s tranquil Jordaan district — a flâneur’s paradise of brick buildings, canals and idiosyncratic shops and bars — The dylan is a hotel where visitors can escape from the seedy bustle of the blocks surrounding the Centraal Station. The chef and sommelier of The dylan have pioneered a new ritual that has spread to other hotels in the Netherlands: high wine, which mimics high tea in many respects but with an intoxicating twist. It’s available from 3 to 6 p.m. daily. “[Chef dennis Kuipers] saw that our guests wanted to do something in the afternoon, something not as traditional as high tea,” says the hotel’s Charlotte Wierdsma. It’s emblematic of a city whose culinary scene has gone from “soso to terrible,” in Wierdsma’s words, to the point where two Amsterdam restaurants now boast Michelin stars. (One of those is Vinkeles, the restaurant at The dylan.)
There I was, relaxing in a hidden courtyard, indulging in a more urbane means of taking the edge off than the one Amsterdam is known for. Tucking into a carpaccio of smoked albacore tuna paired with a glass of weisser burgunder, I reflected on high art, high wine and other Amsterdam highs that have nothing to do with you-know-what.