Marble shirt

An object of the exhibition "The American Dream" in The Drenthe Museum in Assen I visited last month. It is called HOLOS and made out of marble by Jud Nelson (1943). 

Here the explanation: 

" Everyone is familiar with the impressive marble statues of ancient gods and emperors. Using the same material the artist Jud Nelson here made a deceptively real replica of an ordinary white shirt. In executing such a banal object in costly Carrara marble. Nelson casts a wry wink to antiquity and high art"

The Largest Doll's House

The Doll's House in yesterday's post was inspired by this house from the 18th century part of the Drenthe Museum in Assen. They call it the "Largest Doll's House in the Netherlands" as you can imagine you walk through the Doll House yourself. Here the entrance with the hall.

It is all decorated in its original state, with the beautiful dining room for special diners.

The living room with the bedstead with shutters in the back.

It was the only room with a stove to keep the residents warm.

Here they slept in the living room with two in the bedstead and closed the shutters to keep warm.

The kitchen in the cellar.

The sidetable in the livingroom with "fake" pastries that looked really tasty.

Doll House

A doll house in the Drenthe museum in Assen. It dates from 1777 and belonged to Rolina van Lier. She was the wife of the highest boss of the taxes in the Province Drenthe.

Bartje

The little white boy in the window is Bartje Bartels, the main figure in some books of  Dutch writer Anne de Vries ( 1904-1964). The book dates from 1932 and describes a young boy who grows up in a poor Drenthe farm workers family. He doesn't want to abide by his fate and when his mother serves baked kidney beans and his father calls for prayer he says the famous sentence : I do not pray for brune beans"! (Ik bid nie veur bruune boonen"). This has become a famous exclamation in our country and can be used for everything you don't want to do.

Linking to "signs, signs2"

Monday Mural

A mural at the parking of the Drenthe Museum in Assen. Students of the Classical Academy of  Fine Arts Groningen have brightened up a dull corner at the parking.

The mural consists of two Greek goddesses guarding a city gate. It is five by five meters.

Linking to "Monday Mural"

Monday Mural

The Drenthe Museum in Assen has an old and modern part. This is a tile tableau in the basement of the old part. I don't know exactly how old it is, but the text is in old Dutch language.

I will try to translate, it is an expression of the farmer how happy he is living here with his land and his cattle and to live here the life just as his father Jacob did.

Linking to "Monday Mural"

Drenthe peat

At the Drenthe Museum I had this delicious piece of turf ("peat"). The province of Drenthe is well known for its former peat-cutting so the restaurant serves a typically "Drents turfje" a well-filled herb cake with wallnuts, raisins and herbs.

Linking to "Weekend Reflections"

American Realism

At last I payed a visit at this exhibition I very much wanted to see. A two hour drive by car to the Drents Museum in the north kept us this cold winter from it. 

It is all about American Realism 1945-1965. Some paintings even look like pictures as this one by Stone Roberts, "The Lake in Central Park: A Late Afternoon in Early June.

Woman Reading by Will Barnet  from 1965.

I always liked the funny paintings by Norman Rockwell.

Some icons of the sixties.

Skywatch Friday

A view from the Drents Museum in Assen. Sometimes the sky looks like Italy here on a sunny cold day.

See for more Skywatches here

Spring?

Spring is really trying to chase away the cold winter. Last Sunday we had our first tea and a lemon meringue cake on a terrace, admittedly still with our coat on.

With a nice view at the spring crocus field at the Brink in Assen.

Lenin

As an addition to the exhibition about the Soviet Union in yesterdays post, the city Assen has placed temporary this huge statue of Lenin. It is 10 meters high and has a weight of 17.000 kilo!

The story of this statue is rather special. Henk Koop the founder of a construction firm in the province Groningen bought the statue in 1997 in Eastern Germany and had it put in front of his firm in Tjuchem, I don't know why, maybe he was a communist.

In 2009 is was transported to Enschede for an exhibition but afterwards tranported to Nieuweschans and placed near a hot spring accommodation. When it came at last to Assen it had to be transported by the Royal Army. The local councel protested against the transportation of a mass murderer by our Army. 

Well, a lot of fuss in a  little city.

I don't know where he is going after this exhibition, but he travels a lot.

The Soviet Myth

In the "Drents Museum Assen" I saw a great exhibition of Socialistic Realism 1932-1960 from the Soviet Union during the Stalin dictatorship. The exhibition contains about 70 paintings idealising the Soviet society.

Some of the paintings were huge as this one in which Stalin is adorated by his people.

 The sculptures had also to be realistic, men and woman fighting for a better society.

But the title of the exhibition is the "Soviet Myth" and there was a second exhibition "Together and Alone" which showed the daily life in Russia from 1900 untill now. People didn't have such a good life as the rulers tried them to believe. This was a photobook of a Russian family, on the right side you see three photos of aunt Fania who studied medicins in Berlin in 1911. The second photo shows her with her husband in the thirtees, both of them were send to the Goelag, a detention camp, where her husband died. The third photo shows her in 1949 when she returned from the camp. She had never come over it and died short after Stalin died. She had a miserable life.

Pattern

I liked  the nice pattern of this carpet on the stairs in the Museum in Assen I visited a while ago.

Advertising Posters

In the "Drents Museum" in Assen we visited last weekend, was a nice exhibition about advertising posters from the twenties. This one is clear about a cycle brand, it looks the designer has used the Museum-square in Amsterdam as inspiration.

And this one about a motorcycle, I hope the white clouds are not ment to be smoke from the engine.

The left one is about an Argentine dansgroup, the next is clear about a movie with Marlene Dietrich.

The right one is about a benefit-evening for the Jewish refugies in 1933 in a theather in Amsterdam.

Contrasts

This is the "Drents Museum Assen" an old building in the north part of our country. They have often interesting exhibitions as a few of the Chinese soldiers of the famous Terracotta Army we have seen there. The entrance used to be behind the brown doors.

Inside the building are beautiful decorated ceilings.

We had read that the museum had a huge new expansion underground next to the old building of 1.000/m2. We were stunned to enter the museum this way now in a white futuristic environment.

The old and the new part are connected underground and you walk from the the past in the future. It is weird you don't see anything of it on the outside. But the exhibitions are still great, we saw "the Vikings" with lots of silver jewellery and information about the way they lived.