I got to see the red light district and all of the infamous coffee shops whose menus boast more than just coffee. While there I also toured the Van Gogh museum. I saw many of his famous works, but there were a few that stood out to me that were not famous at all. One was the painting seen above with the same title as this post. This one really drew me into the world of art in a way that I had not been drawn in before. Van Gogh painted this on the beach and the weather was rather windy as you can see in the painting itself. It was so windy that the fresh paint was catching sand and some of it can still be seen in the painting. As Firecracker said in another post below, it was like having communion with the artist. This drew me into the world of art in a special way.
It obviously drew someone else in a special way. It turns out that someone had stolen this painting from the museum about a year after I had been there. (Before anyone gets any crazy ideas, I have only been to Europe once.) I feel special for having been able to see it before it was stolen. And while it is a shame that others will not get to see the painting because it is still missing, I feel even more special for having liked a painting that was stolen. Somebody else must have liked it as much as me - actually much more than me - because to steal it from the museum probably took a high tech career criminal.
Or so one would think. It turns out that as I have been writing this post I decided to do a little more research, and all it took was two guys and a ladder. How boring is that? Well, not as boring as one would think if it makes the FBI's top ten art crimes list.
Monday, May 7, 2007
View of the Sea at Scheveningen
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3 comments:
This one really drew me into the world of art in a way that I had not been drawn in before.
So is the pun intended in this one or not? I mean, you said it twice. :D
I'm wondering if there was more to the robbery after the guys climbed up the ladder to the roof. It was probably some elaborate Mission: Impossible/Thomas Crown Affair/Entrapment/Ocean's Eleven scheme after that involving cables, lasers, some duct tape, and Chinese acrobats that the FBI didn't want to divulge for fear that some other team of thieves would use the same techniques.
I vaguely remember going to Amsterdam with my folks back in high school. Imagine being a teenager and running through the Red Light District. My mother's cousin lives in Amsterdam, and showed us around, including a trip to the infamous district. Needless to say my mother wasn't too happy with her cousin for bringing me there, and tried her best to pull me through quickly before I actually saw anything too risque. Of course, a week later, they took me to the Moulin Rouge in Paris to see the topless can-can dancers. Go figure.
Unfortunately, I never got to see the Van Gogh Museum. I think we only had time to see the Rijks Museum and the Rembrandt paintings in there.
Something I clearly remember, though, was that everyone was wearing bell-bottom jeans in Holland. I kind of thought that was dorky back then, but of course as everything else that is fashionable in Europe, the trend traveled over the ocean to the U.S., and we're still using those flared or boot-cut jeans today.
I wish I could claim that I was on top of it this morning, but the pun was not intended.
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