June 5, 2018
Since we started on Dutch memory lane yesterday we might as well pursue that path today. And since memory lane does not equal good memory you must forgive me if I repeat stories I have told before. Having done this for so many years now on daily basis, things do tend to blur together a bit.
That said, here is one of my earlier memories: not sure if I just came home from school or whether it was for a birthday, but suddenly the doors of my closet were plastered with black and white drawings of the Dutch masters – carefully cut out from calendars and art magazines and then laminated, by my mother. We are not just talking Rembrandt or Rubens or Bosch, but Jan Lievens, Ferdinand Bol, and one of my (now) favorites Jacob Jordaens, whose drawings were astonishingly modern. For the most part they were portraits, staring at me while I did my homework until I simply stared back. No contest – they had me outnumbered.
All of this came again back to me this week when I stumbled across the work of Maxine Helfman, specifically her series called Historical Corrections. The photographs consist of formal portraits, in the style of the old Flemish Masters, with the traditional dresses familiar from those tableaux and the quiet staring. The twist lies in those who sit for these portraits – they are all Black.
https://www.maxinehelfman.com/PORTRAIT–SERIES/HISTORICAL-CORRECTION/thumbs
Helfman’s photographs, which she calls invited realities, a term I rather like, were done in 2012, long before the cultural appropriation debate became as focussed as it is now, and I wonder what the conversations with her sitters would have been in 2018. She talks about her work as wanting to create historical documentation of a population that never was, connecting issues of race and social strata. More on her ideas can be found in the link below.
The black and white drawings of my childhood and the stark light and dark images of Helfman’s series stand, as it is, in extreme contrast to what you experience on any Dutch street now on a given day. People very much like their colors in the way they dress, the cityscapes themselves make use of saturated colors and the racial mix you encounter at least in the larger cities is comparable to any of ours’ (PDX excepted, alas.)
Unfortunately, Holland, once one of the most liberal countries in Europe, is experiencing an anti-immigrant shift that mirrors that of many other European nations.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/03/28/how-identitarian-politics-is-changing-europe
It also is moving into a Euro-sceptic direction – this February a newly formed party Forum for Democracy was polling second place in the country. Just like the other right wing party, Geert Wilder’s PVV, it campaigns agains Muslim immigrants and wants to introduce a Dutch Values Protection Act -I leave it to your imagination what that would entail. The next election will be in 2021 – let’s hope the young come to the rescue.
Photographs taken around the Rijksmuseum and little girls playing dress-up in Bergen Binnen.
And this from the BBC this very morning – the Prime Minister of Holland trying, unsuccessfully, to mop up a coffee spill. Note the racial composition of politicians vs cleaning personnel.
Martha Ullman Wesr
love what your mother did in your room with art and the photographs here. I refuse however to open any link that uses the word “identitarian.”