Amsterdam Museum Research Articles

The Polyphonic Object Genrestuk by Albert Blitz

In ‘The Polyphonic Object’ four analyses by scholars from different perspectives and academic fields show the layers of complexity a single object can hold. Through their (historical, museum studies, urban geographical, and argumentation/rhetorical) reconstructions, they uncover the different stories behind the painting Genrestuk (translation: ‘A Genre Piece' by Albert Blitz (1975) (Stichting Genootschap Amsterdam Museum, 1985). The painting was made in response to the ‘Nieuwmarkt riots’.

The Willet-Holthuysen House as a Site of Resistance

This paper examines the Willet-Holthuysen House, a canal house museum in Amsterdam, in the context of World War II. Originally bequeathed to Amsterdam by its last owner, Louisa Willet-Holthuysen, in 1895, the house has a rich history of being home to various families and institutions. While some connections between the house and World War II have been previously established through oral sources, this essay introduces additional source material to shed further light on the house as a place of resistance. The research uncovers that the Willet-Holthuysen House served not only as a location within the Council of Resistance's network but also provided shelter for a person in hiding and accommodated a family actively involved in the resistance. This reveals that the house was more than just a place for art collection and opulence; it operated as a vital node in the resistance network, offering a hiding place and serving as a meeting spot for illegal resistance activities.

The Polyphonic Object

The polyphonic object features a collection of analyses on Herman Lugt's 1914 painting 'Registration of Belgian Refugees in the Amsterdam Stock Exchange' by Jan Lucassen, Judith van Gent and Anita Böcker This contribution features three short essays by three scholars, approaching an object from the Amsterdam Museum from their different perspectives: The Registration of Belgian Refugees in the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 1914' (Herman Lugt 1881-1950)

Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen by Vincent van Gogh: a combined multi-instrumental approach to analyse the painting’s stratigraphy in support of varnish removal

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was executed in 1884 and partially repainted by the artist in 1885. The painting was restored in 1961, however, the details of this treatment were not documented. After being stolen from the museum in 2002 and finally recovered in 2016, the Church was subjected to an extensive technical examination campaign which started in 2017. The aims were to: characterise the stratigraphy of both initial and later paint layers (including identification of the painting materials used by Van Gogh), evaluate the condition of the painting and assess the feasibility of the desired restoration treatment. Portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) was performed to non-invasively identify elements related to pigments in the paint layers of the two painting campaigns. To further identify constituent materials and comprehend the painting’s complex stratigraphy, a single paint sample was collected and embedded in resin for analysis by means of Optical Microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-ray spectrometry (SEM-EDS) and Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometry - Attenuated Total Reflectance (FTIR-ATR). Additional non-invasive measurements were performed in a MOLAB campaign in 2018 by two complementary and portable analytical techniques: Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and reflection FTIR spectroscopy were used to gain further insight into the painting’s stratigraphy and identify surface layers across various regions of the painting. The presence of an original varnish under the paint from 1885 (and therefore likely applied by Van Gogh himself) was revealed by OCT. It was characterised as being protein based by FTIR-ATR and reflection FTIR spectroscopy. Based on the knowledge on the artist’s varnishing practice, it could be concluded that this most likely concerns an egg white varnish for the first time found in an early work by Van Gogh. The upper varnish layer, however, was identified as an alkyd resin applied during the aforementioned 1961 treatment. The combined use of FTIR and OCT enabled non-invasive in situ assessment of solvent cleaning procedures aimed at the selective removal of the 1961 restoration varnish with the preservation of Van Gogh’s original varnish. Specifically, OCT and FTIR analyses were carried out before, during and after each cleaning test to carefully assess the condition of the painted surface and that of the original varnish. The results of the cleaning tests aided in fine-tuning the procedure of varnish removal during the restoration process.

Trajal Harrell: The Anxiety of Autobiography

Trajal Harrell: The Anxiety of Autobiography

Creating an Online Community: Corona in the City.

We asked Amsterdam Museum curators Annemarie de Wildt and Errol Boon to reflect on the making of the virtual crowd-curated Corona in the City exhibition. The exhibit invited the public to participate in the live documentation of everyday life during the pandemic. To allow documentation of current events, curatorial authority was shared with the public. Although they see advantages in the new forms and modes of communication that the museum discovered and experimented with during the crisis, they both look forward to working with people physically in the future. They argue that while the new museum has been perhaps more responsive, the digital needs to be paired with a physical space where people meet. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. -THE EDITORS.

(Un)Curating COVID: Lessons from Corona in the City

Shortly after the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Amsterdam Museum launched the online exhibition Corona in the City. The multimedia platform, which invites inhabitants of the city of Amsterdam to contribute their own stories, aims to collect the pandemic as it is experienced. The authors look back on the trajectory of the platform during its first year and observe how, through a combination of curating and ‘uncurating’ the content, the museum demonstrates a broader change in its policy towards collecting and storytelling. We reflect on ways in which the platform has and will change according to how the pandemic unfolds, and propose that it can serve as a pilot for more democratic, co-created institutions in the future.

Microscopic Views on a Global Pandemic: Social and Cultural Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic as Documented in Two Dutch Community Archives

The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the obvious implications for public health and the economy at a global scale, has also had significant social and cultural effects: the partial or complete lockdown of public life breaks social and cultural networks and habits, and necessitates the invention of new forms of communication, contact, and inspiration. Over the course of the pandemic, various initiatives have emerged that have tried to capture this unique moment in history by collecting documentation on the social and cultural impact of the pandemic on people’s daily lives. Most of these collections were created bottom-up, either by actively approaching individuals or communities to contribute or be interviewed, or by opening platforms where citizens could directly contribute documentation. In this paper, we analyse two such citizen-generated collections of experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic: the ‘Corona in the City’ collection, assembled by the Amsterdam Museum for an online exhibition with the same title, and the ‘Dagboek Corona’ (Corona Diary) collection of diary contributions, assembled by the Dutch public historian and journalist José Boon. The paper discusses the background of these citizen-generated COVID-19 collections, assessing their scope and accessibility, and presenting a first, qualitative analysis of their content. We conclude with a reflection on the implications of the findings for people’s social life and identity, indicating how the datasets can be explored in further research and how the findings may benefit effective policy making.

Relationship value benefits of membership programs, heterogeneous stakeholders and museum impact beyond fees

AbstractIn times of decreasing public funding, cultural institutions such as museums increasingly develop new stakeholder management practices to build a different or more diversified support base. Recently, membership programs have especially been gaining popularity. In this paper, we adopt a relationship value approach to study the poorly understood behaviors of members that can benefit museums beyond membership fees. In particular, we focus on the extent to which membership level and the perceived prestige of the museum drive value co‐creation through prestige leveraging. We study this by using a sample of 430 members and non‐members of the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam. We find that membership level is positively related with cross‐buying behavior at the museum store and restaurant, and recommending the museum. In addition, these value creating behaviors are mediated by members leveraging the museum's prestige in their social environment. In contrast, we find a negative relationship between membership level and recruiting new members into the program, which could be explained by status dilution effects.

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh Christa DiMarco (bio) Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him Mariella Guzzoni University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo51205258.html224 Pages; Print, $25.00 Vincent van Gogh’s reading practice is as legendary as his paintings. While he devoted his days to his canvases, at night he would “light the lamp and go on reading.” In his letters (of which we have over 800), he devoted many passages to discussing literature from Shakespeare to popular periodicals and modern novels. Reading Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Émile Zola as well as French historical studies by Jules Michelet, cultural criticism by Thomas Carlyle, and studying printed illustrations by Frédéric Montenard, Hubert von Herkomer, and George Cruikshank laid the thematic and stylistic foundation for his art. Van Gogh, for example, noted that he sympathized with Madame François and Florent, two working-class characters who attempt to navigate bourgeois Paris in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Prints that depicted those who lived on the economic or geographic margins likewise captured his attention. In a letter to the artist Anthon van Rappard, Van Gogh shared one of his important artistic influences: The Graphic, a British illustrated publication from which he saved prints to “form a kind of Bible for an artist, in which he reads now and again to get into a mood.” Among the many prints he mentioned, Van Gogh compared George John Pinwell’s The Sisters “to the full song of the nightingale on a spring night” and regularly touted the quality and the impact of the prints he came across. Both the novels he read and the prints he cherished conveyed the dignity of a humble life amid inescapable societal difficulties, a central theme he explored in the imagery of his short, ten-year painting career. Despite the fluency between the written word and painting, we seldom recognize the literary imprint that permeates Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Even art historians pay relatively scant attention to the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of his artistic approach. Cursory references to Van Gogh’s reading habits abound in biographical accounts and exhibition catalogs, and just two scholarly explorations come to mind: Judy Sund’s 1992 True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature and Wouter van der Veen’s 2009 Vincent van Gogh: A Literary Mind. Given that Van Gogh mentioned over two-hundred authors in his letters and read in Dutch, English, French, and German, surely there is more to explore. Mariella Guzzoni’s Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him offers newfound connections between Van Gogh’s paintings and his insatiable literary curiosity that will be of interest to Van Gogh enthusiasts and bibliophiles. Finding a worthwhile approach to Van Gogh’s large body of work — over 800 paintings and 1000 works on paper — requires a method as innovative as the paintings themselves. Guzzoni uses the extensive collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as well as her own collection of the editions Van Gogh read and discussed in his letters. She leads readers chronologically through Van Gogh’s works without becoming entangled in the myriad facts of the painter’s biography, a temptation few authors navigate well. Instead, she explores specific references and stops to rest on telling exchanges between text and art that the book’s engaging layout complements. Vincent’s Books is a beautiful publication that pays homage to the art of the book. It is carefully structured, poignantly designed, and includes full-color matte reproductions of journal pages and book covers. Reproductions of the editions Van Gogh read appear throughout and Guzzoni also includes pictures of the books open to the passages she discusses so you can view the print in its original publication. These pictures appear alongside Van Gogh’s paintings, drawings, or letters and are often accompanied by germane quotations. Readers can pause on passages dedicated to reflecting on the interplay between text and image, an experience akin to spending time with a rare edition in an archive...

Parental Pre-knowledge Enhances Guidance During Inquiry-Based Family Learning in a Museum Context: An Individual Differences Perspective.

Effective interaction and inquiry are an essential source for children’s learning about science in an informal context. This study investigated the effect of parental pre-knowledge on parent–child interactions (manipulations, parent talk, and child talk) during an inquiry activity in NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. The sample included 105 parent–child dyads (mean children’s age = 10.0 years). Half of the couples were randomly assigned to the experimental group in which, without the child’s knowledge, the parent was shown the task’s solution prior to the inquiry activity. Results show that parental pre-knowledge affected the way parents interacted and inquired with their child. Compared to parents without pre-knowledge, parents with pre-knowledge inquired longer, posed more open-ended wh-questions and closed questions, and less often interpreted results. Children of parents with pre-knowledge more often described evidence and interpreted results, more often manipulated alone, and solved the task more accurately. These results indicate that parental pre-knowledge brings about parents’ scaffolding behavior. In addition, it was studied how individual differences of parents and children relate to parent–child interaction. Results show that children’s self-reported inquiry attitude was related to their conversation during inquiry, such that they asked fewer closed questions and more open-ended questions. Children’s gender affected the cooperation between parent and child, parents more often manipulated together with boys than with girls, and girls more often manipulated alone. Fathers with pre-knowledge, but not mothers, let their child manipulate more by oneself than fathers without pre-knowledge. This study shows that more knowledge about an exhibit improves a parent’s scaffolding behavior in a science museum. Results are discussed in the context of museum practice.

Mademoiselle Angélique Caroline Milliet: Did She Invent the Steel Skeleton Petticoat?

In 1856 the Frenchwoman Angélique Caroline Milliet invented the first steel skeleton petticoat or cage. She received patents in France, Belgium and England and used her patents to sue competitors for infringement. In 1861 she sold her patents for a large sum to the American brothers and skirt manufacturers W. S. & C. H. Thomson. These brothers founded big crinoline factories in New York, London, Paris, Brussels and Annaberg. The mass-produced Thomson crinolines became famous all over the world. The Dutch Amsterdam Museum owns an original skeleton petticoat designed by A. C. Milliet. It is stamped and looks exactly like the illustrations of the French and English patents. This unique design has a built-in bustle and the circumference of the hoops can be altered according to the requirements of the wearer. American hoop-skirt manufacturers, like Thomson, managed to improve the Milliet design with their patented metal fasteners to secure the horizontal hoops to the vertical tapes. During the 1860s the Thomson cages, which were manufactured by the thousands every day, conquered the fashionable world.

Methodical approaches to revitalization and renovation of historical buildings (analysis of experience)

The article discusses the terms “revitalization” and “renovation” in the context of preserving historical buildings and architectural monuments. It states that the professional standards for the terms “revitalization” and “renovation” are absent and conceptually blurred due to the uncertainty in their methodological principles. The same reasons explain the synonymous use of parallel terms (rehabilitation, regeneration, revalorization, restitution), the essence of which is vague. The reason for this phenomenon is the search of possibilities to modernize the heritage sites and adapt them to the public needs by expanding the range of professional methods which would involve applying to the degraded architectural monuments the actions of a broader range than the restoration requires, and which would form methodological approaches for such type of work. Systematic theoretical researches of this subject are absent. Separate works do not provide an answer to this question either. Therefore the article views the practical experience in the field of revitalization and renovation in Poland (Manufaktura in Łódź), France (Musée d'Orsay in Paris), Netherlands (National Museum in Amsterdam), Germany (Neues Museum in Berlin, Moritzburg Museum in Halle, diocesan museum in Cologne), Spain (CaixaForum in Madrid), which demonstrates related approaches and sometimes controversial concepts. The mentioned objects are those that were positively accepted by the society. They are united by the monofunction (museums), which allowed to apply a single conceptual principle for the revitalization (renovation) of objects. The credibility of their image is largely caused by the high quality of modern materials and the execution of work at the highest technological level. The article emphasizes the need for scientific analysis of a wider range of typologically different objects for the purpose of professional reflection, generalization of methodological approaches and development of legislative principles.

Going Digital? New Media and Digital Art at the Stedelijk

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has an extensive collection of time-based media art from the 1960s onwards, which has been expanded into the digital field in recent decades. The Stedelijk makes an interesting case study for this special issue on “Art Curation: Challenges in the Digital Age,” because it has had a reputable history of dealing with time-based art since the mid-1970s but presently faces the same challenges with regard to curating and collecting digital art as other museums of modern art. The Stedelijk’s history began in 1974, when the first curator for time-based art was hired, Dorine Mignot, a pioneer in this field. After Mignot’s retirement in 2006, the museum was closed for almost a decade, but under the leadership of Beatrix Ruf (2014–2017), an innovative agenda was set again for new media and digital art. In this paper, Sjoukje van der Meulen mobilizes the museum’s rich and varied history of new media and digital art to think through some of the issues, challenges and concerns raised by guest editor Francesca Franco for this special issue such as “What are the issues involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting artworks made in the 1960s and the 1970s?” and “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?”

Ties That Bind: Finding Meaning in the Making of Sacred Textiles

I was a novice weaver when I began constructing a Rakusua-Buddhist ceremonial garment-as an initiation into a spiritual community in my hometown. Years later, in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, I was drawn to an early 19th century Tallit Katan, a ritual silk undergarment that had been made for a Jewish poet who later converted to Christianity. I had just inherited my father-in-law’s prized collection of silk neckties. He was a troubled man who had embraced his faith late in life. Those ties became the weft for three works-a handwoven tallit, a woven timeline, and a small keepsake for his widow, which accompanied her to her grave. In that same period, at our local flea market, I noticed a small image in a book depicting an 8th century Buddhist silk Altar Valance from the Silk Road, part of the Stein Collection held by the British Museum. Its row of streamers resembled modern neckties, its precious silk scraps spoke of humility and thrift. It was a communal artifact punctuated by individual prayers. Both the Tallit Katan and the Stein Valance have been carefully researched and documented. I learned much from that material. But, for me, understanding both the making of those pieces and my own absorption inn them required a physical engagement over time. My paper describes this process.

Automatic Building Outline Extraction from ALS Point Clouds by Ordered Points Aided Hough Transform

Many urban applications require building polygons as input. However, manual extraction from point cloud data is time- and labor-intensive. Hough transform is a well-known procedure to extract line features. Unfortunately, current Hough-based approaches lack flexibility to effectively extract outlines from arbitrary buildings. We found that available point order information is actually never used. Using ordered building edge points allows us to present a novel ordered points–aided Hough Transform (OHT) for extracting high quality building outlines from an airborne LiDAR point cloud. First, a Hough accumulator matrix is constructed based on a voting scheme in parametric line space (θ, r). The variance of angles in each column is used to determine dominant building directions. We propose a hierarchical filtering and clustering approach to obtain accurate line based on detected hotspots and ordered points. An Ordered Point List matrix consisting of ordered building edge points enables the detection of line segments of arbitrary direction, resulting in high-quality building roof polygons. We tested our method on three different datasets of different characteristics: one new dataset in Makassar, Indonesia, and two benchmark datasets in Vaihingen, Germany. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first Hough method that is highly adaptable since it works for buildings with edges of different lengths and arbitrary relative orientations. The results prove that our method delivers high completeness (between 90.1% and 96.4%) and correctness percentages (all over 96%). The positional accuracy of the building corners is between 0.2–0.57 m RMSE. The quality rate (89.6%) for the Vaihingen-B benchmark outperforms all existing state of the art methods. Other solutions for the challenging Vaihingen-A dataset are not yet available, while we achieve a quality score of 93.2%. Results with arbitrary directions are demonstrated on the complex buildings around the EYE museum in Amsterdam.

The Girl with the Golden Wreath: Four Perspectives on a Mummy Portrait

A mummy portrait of a young woman with a golden wreath is part of the archaeological collection of the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. This portrait is covered by four authors, each from their separate perspective, namely provenance research, technical examination, museum presentation, and diversity education. Provenance research is significant not only for tracing the second-life biography of the panel, but also for assessing its bona fide authenticity. Non-invasive examinations can help identify possible underlayers, pigments and modern restorations. Museological aspects concern the contextualization of the portrait, not only as a funerary artefact, but also as an expression of physical appearance. Educational programs can be implemented to illustrate to museum visitors the relevance of ancient artefacts for modern society.

The Loupe: Tangible Augmented Reality for Learning to Look at Ancient Greek Art

With the advent of digital museum interactives as a widely available learning offer in all types of museums, including history of art and archaeology museums, an ongoing debate has been established: Do these - usually screen-based - museum interactives assist visitors in focusing on museum objects and artefacts? Or do they distract and take away the attention from the real museum objects on display? We present the Loupe, a tangible Augmented Reality prototype in form of a magnifying lens, which allows museum visitors to get information in context about museum artefacts. We detail the design and content creation process that was employed in order to create a thematic tour for the the Greek Gallery of Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. An evaluation study with 22 adult participants was carried out, using both qualitative and quantitative evaluation methodologies, so as to explore the utility and usability of the Loupe as well its learning and affective impact. Our findings suggest that the acceptance of the Loupe as a museum interactive and learning resource, was related both with its qualities as a tangible as well as with the structure of the content and the narratives revealed.

The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Contemplative Practice in a Time of Loss

The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Contemplative Practice in a Time of Loss Douglas E. Christie “Darkness starts inside of things But keeps on going when the things are gone.” Christian Wiman We have to look closely to see it: her name emerging from the shadows, preserved (a miracle) on microfiche. Sabina Landsberger‐Zerkowski deported to Westerbork. Then to Sobibór—10.3.43. These words are handwritten on a small card, an artifact of the Nazis’ fanatical commitment to record and document their efforts to exterminate all Jews from Europe. A tiny card. A few words only. But they contain information crucial to the quest that has brought us to this place. We now know where she was sent. We now know where she died. A terrible moment of discovery. I am standing in small room in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam with my old friend R. We have come here to discover whether we could pull back the veil that has long obscured his understanding of what become of his great‐grandmother Sabina. And now we know: the letters on the card leave no doubt. She was taken from her home in Amsterdam, held in the Dutch Theatre, then sent first to a concentration camp at Westerbork, two hours northeast of Amsterdam, and from there transported by train to the far eastern edge of Poland. To Sobibor. There she perished. The poet writes: Faith in what existsIs knowledge not faithBut faith in what does not existIs true faith. This moment contains an entire universe; but it is haunted by an absence. Only the words on the card remain. A reminder of what Edmond Jabés refers to as “God's triumph.” “All absence,” he says, “means presence to nothingness, means awakening to the void.” The void is all we have. Or so it seems to us in this moment. For R., it is space through which he now moves in the aftermath. For me also. Not in the same way. But we are in this together. My task at this moment, my only task: loving my friend and brother, accompanying him into a place of incomprehensible darkness. Love born of darkness. Or darkness suffused with love. How to enter such darkness? How to dwell there and not give into the temptation to flee? How to move through this darkness together, holding one another, beyond our capacity to say how or why? Strange questions, admittedly. But questions that increasingly occupy many of us in the present moment. Sometimes the darkness we encounter feels deeply personal, rooted in intimate experiences of loss known only to us. But often it is more widely shared, arising from the crisis of an historical trauma that that leaves almost no one untouched. There is only loss, displacement, and exile. What, if anything, can be said or done in response to such experience? How especially can one speak the enduring presence of love amidst such darkness? The title I have given to this essay comes from the work of a thirteenth century Flemish mystic named Hadewijch of Brabant. She was figure of immense intellectual and spiritual originality in the late medieval world, and her writing and thought continue to resonate in the present moment, not least because of her courage in navigating darkness. Also her honest and sensitive engagement with the reality of absence, exile, and despair, and her willingness to face and enter what she and many of her contemporaries referred to simply as “the abyss.” All seen in light of minne, or love. What she describes as “the deep, insurmountable darkness of love.” For reasons that are not easy for me to understand or explain, even now, Hadewijch and her vision of dark love became part of the journey I undertook with my friend R. to look for traces of his lost family. Two abysses somehow became connected in my own imagination and experience. This vision of dark love has also impacted my understanding contemplative practice, what it means to pay attention, to see, to become aware. What it means especially to live with awareness of all that is unknown, unknowable, sunk in darkness. What it means to acknowledge the...

‘But He Has Broken Every Jar in the Place, as He Said He Would …’: Letters of Petrie to von Bissing: A Short Contribution to the History of Egyptology

The Archives of the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam contain a stack of letters from W. M. Flinders Petrie to the German Egyptologist von Bissing, dating from between 1899 to 1911. Among other subjects, the letters refer to Petrie’s conflict with the French excavator Amélineau, his rival for the concession at Abydos, asking von Bissing to keep an eye on him. Furthermore, Petrie gives short reports about his work in Abydos, Heracleopolis, the Fayum and Memphis, sometimes with otherwise unpublished details. Personal details, complaints on the bureaucracy of the Service des Antiquités are other important subjects occurring in the letters. [Formula: see text]