A flight to the museum
Galleries that are worth the price of admission, plus airfare
I figure there are two kinds of travel: the kind that gets you away from something, and the kind that takes you to something. The combined economies of Arizona, Florida and the Caribbean depend on the former. The latter category tend to be to great cities, places we think of as exotic and, sometimes, to see wild animals. It took a trip to Amsterdam to make me realize that, though I’d treated art galleries as addenda to trips — one of the things to check out in a new city along with the parks and cafés, bars and craft shops — they can offer profound experiences and should be right up on that list, too.
It wasn’t until I walked out of the Van Gogh Museum that I got it. In the age of digital reproduction, you would be forgiven for thinking travelling thousands of kilometres to see some paintings is a waste of time and money. You can’t get a hammock on a beach on your tablet, but “Vase with Irises” looks gorgeous on that retina screen. It even looks pretty good on your phone. So, why not save your travel dollars for Bermuda?
Here’s why: When I walked out of the Van Gogh, I ran smack into the Stedelijk Museum. It’s about 20 metres away. It’s the museum where, in 1905, Johanna Van Gogh, Vincent’s sister-in-law and Theo’s widow, took the first step in her grand and at the time foolhardy plan to get the then profile-free artist a modicum of recognition. There’s a poster for that show in the Van Gogh, right at the end of the permanent exhibit, the first light to crack through the long tunnel of Vincent’s desperate, lifelong attempts to make money and get noticed. As the curatorial notes and excerpts from his letters to Theo make clear, Van Gogh was no Emily Dickinson: He wanted fame and fortune. He just couldn’t get any.
It was the Stedelijk that finally gave the Dutch artist homegrown recognition. A show at the more majestic Rijksmuseum followed soon after. By 1910 he was in London, and by 1914, New York.
You can read about the birth and evolution of Van Gogh’s posthumous fame, but seeing the lineups in front of the Van Gogh right next door to the empty lobby of the museum he couldn’t even give a canvas away to during his lifetime lets you inhabit the magnitude of what happened, and how.
I’m not doing it justice, which is my point: You have to go to Amsterdam.
Travelling exhibits can be tough to keep track of and schedule for, but there are permanent collections around the world that are worth the trip. Here are three I stumbled on before my Amsterdam revelation that are reasons to travel in and of themselves. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver I’d seen Still’s swatches of colour before, and understood that he was “important,” but he had settled down to the bottom of my well of 20th-century art, along with Barnett Newman and Jeff Koons, that I understood I wouldn’t ever understand.
Although it’s more than 100 years old, abstract art still stymies people. It’s one of the fundamental stumbling blocks between modern art and the masses. Clyfford Still (1904-1980) can help. The first paintings you see when you enter the gallery, which houses 95% of the artist’s work, is of a grain silo in Killam, Alta. (where the American artist lived in his teens and twenties). From there, you can follow Still’s work chronologically, as form begins to blur, colour takes over, until his work morphs in what now seems an entirely reasonable way into the cowhide-esque canvases he’s known for. Lenbachhaus, Munich Where the Still Museum offers a master class in abstraction over the course of an entire museum, the Lenbachhaus does it in a single room. Room 39 has 12 paintings, all hung midway between floor and ceiling, creating a ring of Wassily Kandinsky’s life’s work. Like Still, he bridges the divide between paintings of things and what early critics of abstraction called pure art. Unlike Still, the Russian Kandinsky (1866-1944) actually transformed things he used to paint figuratively, like churches on hills, into abstractions in his later work, providing people like me with anchors to understanding. The room is like a diorama, or a kaleidoscope, and being physically in the middle of it offers a perspective no book or slide show can. Mathaf, Doha When I first visited this place, it was housed in an abandoned school (from which it’s since moved), despite the wealth of its founder, a member of the Qatari royal family. There was a special exhibit from the permanent collection of Arabic Modernism, a movement centred on Jawad Selim, an Iraqi sculptor who presided over the Baghdad-based scene in the 1950s and ’ 60s when the Iraqi capital was, artistically speaking, a sort of Paris of the Middle East. I had no idea. And the work is not only remarkable, it’s like having your ex-husband described by his new boyfriend, or your mother by an old employee; people who knew them just as well as you did, but in an entirely different way. And since much of the Baghdad group’s work has been lost or destroyed by the Americans, the Mathaf is one of the only places in the world to get this good a look at it.