Travelling to Europe in winter this year was a conscious choice. For me, the cold is sweetly nostalgic by virtue of my days in the US with Deepayan. Whenever I arrive at an international airport in peak winter, a strangely familiar smell soothes my mind.
This time was no different. When we landed in Amsterdam on the last day of November, the familiar smell made me feel comfortable that I am in a distant land with my best companion to experience new things. Amsterdam’s Rembrandt Square was warmly welcoming at a sunny five degrees centigrade on the morning of our arrival. Our hotel room overlooked parts of the canal, a number of clock towers peeping through the clouds, and the square itself which was teeming with tourists hanging out at the innumerable sunlit pubs and cafes with festive christmas decorations and taking selfies with the statues recreating Rembrandt’s Night Watch.
The prettiness overwhelmed us as we strolled lazily around the bicycle-city. Flocks of people rode up and down the narrow winding lanes around the canal in colourful bikes, aimless walkers (like us) often stopped at various corners to marvel at street-side art, curio shops, modern art and sculpture galleries, or the neat and beautiful cityscape along the canals. The cheerful sounds of the city reverberated everywhere. We eventually found our way to the Museum Square through the domed gothic architectural pathway of the Rijksmuseum, where musicians were performing with guitar, harp, and violin for the passers by. The green field in front of the Rijksmuseum (which included an ice skating rink) was so green and the afternoon sky was so blue that it seemed they were freshly painted. The Van Gogh Museum, holding the largest collection of the Master in the world, stood right across. People were on the grass lazing, chatting, and beaming in the festive sun! The cafes around had palette shaped menu boards offering hotdogs and wine. I do not recollect experiencing this kind of freshness in the air and the mood in a very long time!
A day long visit to the Van Gogh Museum was one of the best and most inspiring experiences of this trip. In addition to the brilliantly curated life story and works of Van Gogh, I was lucky to be able to see a special exhibit of one of Van Gogh’s greatest inspirations, Jean-Francois Millet. His work was new to me and I was enthralled to see not only his work with oil, but especially pastels! Millet was an inspiration for many contemporary artists, especially as a pioneer of Realism in art and his depiction of scenes from the lives of peasant farmers.
Just before visiting Europe, I had accompanied a friend in Delhi to an exhibition of Upendra Maharathi, curated and hosted by the NGMA. Though he was a pioneer of art in several mediums and has had glorious contributions in paintings, architecture, furnitures, textiles and printing technology, the quality of curation and the mindless telling of his life and achievements was disheartening in comparison. It is sad how little we know and do about our own heritage.
With my interest in art, one particular reason we had for visiting Amsterdam during this period was its Light Festival, about which I had vaguely read but did not find much information anywhere. I have never quite seen anything like it before: artists used light to tell stories of the city, their heritage, history, struggles, modernity and change. It was amazing how a trail was created around the canals connecting numerous light installations that used either parts of the city architecture or the canal water! Each installation was accompanied by a board explaining its story, and a festival map led visitors to the exact location of each one. This year’s theme was ‘Disruption’, around which the stories were woven.
Just to give an idea, one of the installations, called Night Drawing, built its story around Amsterdam’s most famous bridge, The Skinny Bridge. 1800 light bulbs lit up the contours of the bridge at night in parts to depict a disruptive city image. Another installation was the Icebreaker, built around the most familiar local experience of skating on natural ice with the sounds of ice cracking under the skates and the resulting breaks in the frozen surface! With global warming, skating on frozen waters such as the Amsterdam canals is becoming less and less likely. The artwork was created with sensors in a part of the canal water so that whenever a boat passed, light shaped liked cracks in frozen ice lit up the water reminding how canals used to freeze in the past. Another superb presentation was that of the four ominously lit-up wolves at the edge of the ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo which have gathered around a group of people who are hiding in the attic of one of the wooden buildings along the water. This was a call back to the second World War, with resistance fighters trying to stay one step ahead of German soldiers. A particularly favourite one was called EUREKA which tried to show that nothing is as disruptive as science, with its search for new methods and solutions. At the end of the seventeenth century, a particular area along the canal called Plantagebuurt became difficult to sell, and it eventually became a place to recreate, and a place where science blossomed. The artwork included just a spotlight one could see on a sculpture of Mother Earth (believed to still lure students to the University) of the famous Geological Institute.
We walked along the festival route at night, accompanied by several others, unknown to us, but forming a community of art appreciators! It is striking how creativity itself is celebrated through such ideas in its full openness and sincerity. I could not help wonder that we have so much in India and yet so little in our minds and hearts to do anything genuinely worthwhile with those!
Another museum we could not miss was a private Cat museum, the KattenKabinet, which not only held old collected works of art on cats including paintings, commercial advertisement posters, sculptures, and photographs but also three real-life good looking cats, two of which also let us pet them briefly!
We landed in Brussels next, to enjoy the birthplace of the greatest comics and characters of all times and the city that hosts street art like no other. We enjoyed the Grand Place, the enormous Christmas tree, vibrant Christmas markets spread across the city selling knick-knacks, food and gluhwein (hot wine), the innumerable bakeries filled with handmade chocolates, waffles and cakes, the official and unofficial stores selling Tintin, Asterix and all other comic book figurines, books and other attractive merchandise. We even tracked down two of the three peeing statues of Brussels, the Mannekin Pis and and the Zinneke Pis. But the most fun we had was following the comic strip walk, which took us to various wall arts paying tribute to characters from various Franco-Belgian comics on the city walls. We figured out after finding a few that these graffitis are like puzzles, hidden at nooks and corners of old buildings that would loom up suddenly in front of us at one turn or the other. These wall paintings are part of a wider project of street art in Brussels, supported by the city, to help local artists celebrate and promote its heritage and humour. Again I remembered our own cities which have so much potential provided the ideas, intentions and implementation are right!
Our last destination was Paris, a city we have been to before, and feel like going back to often. This visit was made more interesting by a historic transport strike (which is still ongoing) that started the day after we arrived. Having already visited all the highlights on our previous visit, we took this inconvenience in stride.
Paris specifically attracts me not because of the Eiffel tower or the Louvre but because it is true to art. The freedom of creative expressions is immense along with conservation of their heritage in every form. The last time, I was lucky to experience a special exhibit of Kandinsky at the Pompidou Centre, and this time I got to see a special show of Toulouse-Lautrec at the Grand Palais, which fortunately for us was closed only on alternate days due to the strike. We also visited the Musée Marmottan Monet to see its private collection of Monet’s work, which though small was quite fascinating. This time, we also had an invitation to the home of a renowned artist, who was a friend of a friend, at Monmarte. He has been settled in Paris for 30 years and still considers the city unfolding on him everyday, with so much more to discover.
We mostly walked around in Paris, partly by choice and partly forced by the strike, spending a considerable amount of time in the Latin Quarter. I had decided to buy art supplies from Paris this time. Googling for stores led us to an interesting shop which apparently was chosen by many artists because of its knowledgeable and welcoming owner. We found the shop at the end of a narrow lane. It was small, and not at all designed for general buyers interested in art. There were racks of materials all closely stacked and not very well organized. It felt more like a homely space which was comfortably untidy but extremely attractive for the right visitors. The experience was like a treasure hunt to find known and unknown treasures of one’s choice. The owner did not know English but it did not matter as we could draw things we wanted. The other shoppers (most seemed like regular buyers) who came in were equally entertaining to watch!
Alongside the intellectual, artistic side of the city, there was the mundane: local residents unhappy with increasing city traffic and living costs due to influx of tourists, antisocial groups of unemployed youth, and the historic transport strike with demonstrations leading to the closing down of metro, buses and trains as well as heritage monuments such as the Eiffel Tower. People on the roads were walking or were on bikes and scooters. Due to lack of staff, many cafes, shops and museums were closed or opened on alternate days. However, there was still no dearth of tourists enjoying the cold and festive Paris and we did the same!
In all the three places the local food, beer, wine and coffee kept us warm and fulfilled. Mentionable among them were Dutch specialties Stampot and Hutspot (at a restaurant located in the house where Rembrandt used to live till he went bankrupt), Belgian waffles, special beefstew with fries, iconic fruit beer, and gluhwein, and of course crepes and coffee in various Paris cafes while contemplating life, the universe, and everything amidst the festive play of the sun and the rain, the mist and the clouds.
Sunny Side Up 