Inspirational Travel last autumn: Amsterdam, 2024

Shelley Rosenstein
Mar 25
4 min read

Updated: Mar 27

Our September visit to Amsterdam, a city of canals, bicycles, autos, trams, boats and kind people, was inspired by a visit to H'Art to view the retrospective exhibition of WASSILY KANDINSKY. The H'Art Museum was formerly The Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the city disassociated with Russian cultural affairs and renamed the museum H'Art. The exhibition originated at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and traveled to Amsterdam in the autumn of 2024. The exhibition contained an astounding breadth of artwork, historical information and a remarkable installation. AI was used to create a character that resembled Kandinsky at various stages of his life, and this character appeared on screens in numerous galleries to explain the life events, locations and inspirations surrounding the creation of his artwork.

Amsterdam is a lively place: There are wide sidewalks and paths for pedestrians but the main form of transport is bicycle and a pedestrian must look in every direction before crossing a roadway! It is also a city of canals and wonderful neighborhoods. There are cafes and beautiful shops, hotels and houseboats, bridges and trams and flowers growing everywhere in pots, boxes and lovely gardens.

We enjoyed walking everywhere to explore restaurants, the many museums, shops, gardens, parks, the Portuguese Synagogue completed in 1675, and took trams to far-off places including a day trip by train to the town of Haarlem, a 30 minute ride.

Taking the train to Haarlem was fast and easy. The train stations are new and beautiful, the trains are clean and comfortable with plenty of space for traveling bicyclists too. We visited the Frans Hals museum, looked for a neighborhood windmill that we never found , visited a large market and had a delicious lunch at a neighborhood cafe. The Frans Hals Museum was built inside a neighborhood home and filled with gorgeous paintings of Dutch people going about their daily lives as well as portraits of important and/or wealthy men of the nearby towns.

Our daily walks brought us to the glorious Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Museum Square, and to an area along a canal that housed the numerous flower bulb shops, renowned for an expansive collection of bulbs including every spring flower you can imagine and more. These rows of shops were located on barges in a canal! It was mind boggling to select several gifts from the many tulips, hyacinths, gladiolas, daffodils, iris, dahlias, calla lilies, ranunculus on display!

We took a guided tour of the Rijksmuseum because it could take 5 full days or more to see everything there: paintings, ceramics, sculpture, metalworks, glass, statuary, architectural drawings and on and on. We did manage to see Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch, 1692", an enormous painting taking up a huge wall and behind glass for protection from possible vandalism. On our tour, we were guided to the room where the collection of Vermeer's work was hung and though it was crowded with viewers, I managed to get up close to many of the exquisite paintings that are quite small in size, but glorious in the lighting and color.

I better move along to the inspiration for our trip-- the

glorious Kandinsky exhibition. As you enter the

exhibition, a visitor is greeted by a enlarged painting of the master and his name spelled out as you walk the stairs-- it's quite dramatic! After climbing the staircase you are introduced to an actor resembling Kandinsky who narrates his life events chronologically on screens in each gallery to align with the paintings displayed. I had never seen such a marvelous match of an artist that "comes alive" and tells the story of his life as you see the actual works he produced in response to these life events! You can follow his early education and his parental guidance towards a career not of his choosing, his work as he begins his career as an artist, the wars that caused such strife and many moves resulting from political conditions.

The narration was done so well and the range of his work was explored with brilliant descriptions of his "thoughts, practice, and problem solving " as he moves from realistic outdoor scenes to figurative works to abstraction and later, to geometrical shapes on abstract color fields. The exhibition provided extensive examples of all the works in between and an entire room of wall paintings recreated from an enormous project. Below is a view of the room installation from a gallery area above. I would have a detailed explanation of this room but I was so enthralled with the exhibition that when I bought the catalogue, I grabbed an edition in Dutch!

I am going to add a few more photos of Kandinsky's

brilliant paintings and from our Amsterdam wanderings.

Hope you enjoyed my sharing of our inspirational trip!