Amsterdam Maritime Museum

TToured the Amsterdam Maritime Museum today; a museum  I'd missed on previous visits. An engaging, lively collection, including an evocative array of navigation instruments, and an assortment of Dutch maritime paintings, with a mystic moonlight boat scene (& a sailing ship docked outside).

Stedelijk Museum and Heineken Experience, Amsterdam

I was able to visit these two attractions, which I missed on my first visit to Amsterdam. I spent about three hours absorbing the collection and exhibitions at the Stedelijk art museum. The Rijksmuseum's gables floating in argent mist as night falls. The Stedelijk possesses a gamut of artists, including modernists such as Piet Mondrian, from Amersfoort, to conceptual artists, and pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. The special show on the museum and the Second World War possessed some illuminating and sobering documents and artwork, with a creepy film loop of Anton Mussert, the Dutch Nazi party leader, examining a show at the Stedelijk.

The Heineken Experience was an entertaining trip through the brewing and marketing process, including a walk through titanic old brewing tanks and pipes with stained glass behind, while music soared like something from a Wagner opera, smell like the streets by Henry Weinhard's brewery in Portland in the 1980s.

Part of the Stedelijk (the actual museum is on the right of the photo), with the Concertgebouw in the distance.

 Heineken Experience

Dutch Resistance Museum

I located and went into the Dutch Resistance Museum, the third such resistance museum I have attended. The others were in Trondheim and Copenhagen, on previous trips. I barely made it in the collection at Copenhagen before closing and dashed through, taking note, among other things, of Himmler's eye patch, worn as a disguise toward his end. The Dutch Resistance Museum enthralls with its sobering galleries of items including a poem written in prison with blood, depictions of the different strata of Dutch society prewar, microfilm which at one time nestled hidden inside a safety razor handle, a real jail cell door, unsettling posters from the Dutch Nazi Party and leaders, and a beaten-up statuary head of Hitler, 

Street stickers, Amsterdam

Statue garden by the Resistance Museum

Rembrandt House

Visited the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, peering at its paintings, etchings, "art cabinet" with curiosities such as a large snake skin, a dried lizard, pelts; high ceilings, and cabinet beds. Left as the northern sun dwindled over the spire of the Zuiderkerk. Negotiated my way, for once using one of those annoying explanatory headsets, weaving past other customers, looking at sheep entrails in a painting, ascending narrow stairs. As in Rembrandt's time, street life shot past the door, on the ground floor. Ate duck and rice at a Chinese restaurant, accompanied by a shot of oude jenever (Dutch gin).

Amsterdam Part Two

Picture of me with Lovecraftian podcaster and illustrator Axel Weiß in Amsterdam, on the 78th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft's death.

A few weird things I saw around Amsterdam

Anne Frank House

 

Today I toured the Anne Frank Museum -- photo represents the view out of the lower part of the building with the hidden rooms.

Rijksmuseum

Obligatory shot.  Today paid a visit to the Rijksmuseum.  Some Dutch guy started talking to me about a 17th century domestic painting, insisting I explain why "I liked it." He went on to say, "I'm from here, and this is my first visit (to the museum)... shame on me."

Amsterdam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.