I've always liked museums dedicated to one person. My favorite museum in Boston, and one of my favorites overall, is the JFK Library. I liked how going through the building mirrored going through his life. I like the idea that one person's life can fill so much--not just because he or she represents a country, a movement, or values that we value, but also because that one person's individual thoughts, feelings, and experiences are valuable.
We spent our first day in Amsterdam in two such places, first the Van Gogh Museum and then the Anne Frank House. Both are pieces of culture that I was first exposed to and loved in high school. They (Van Gogh especially) were the type of things that you first love because it's the first time you discover the ideas they represent, then distance yourself from as you find that everyone loves them too and it seems too cliche, and then return to when you get older and learn that some times are just deserving of universal love.
We waited for an hour in the cold to get into the Van Gogh museum, and even though I knew it would, it was amazing how seeing his art in person oozes warmth back into your coldness. It was surreal to see the famous Sunflowers, Yellow House, The Bedroom, and Irises in person. I especially liked seeing these in person:
The Wheat field with a Reaper:
Van Gogh painted this from the view from the asylum where he admitted himself in the last year of his life. I’ve always loved his pictures of wheat, and of yellow things in general. It was his favorite color, and I think my love of yellow originated there as well (I’m not too original). I learned in the museum that he considered it the color of love. This picture always seemed so vibrant to me, and yet of course it has such dark and bittersweet undertones.
Red Cabbages and Onions:
I hadn’t seen this painting before, and I loved the textures and colors. This doesn’t do justice to the colors, either; and the real painting has also faded from the original purple hue of the cabbages to more blue, but the contrast between the blue and yellow is still really striking.
Gauguin’s Chair:
I love this on its own, the weird and compelling mixture of colors and how he uses this object to represent his friend. I also like it as a comparison next to the painting of his own chair, which is less appealing to me as a painting and makes you think a lot about self-perception and judgment.
Seascape at Saintes-Maries:
This made me think of M. Van Gogh makes me think less of water and more of fields, so this painting was striking amidst the collection, and after my new experiences in the ocean thanks to M, I feel the waves in this more strongly. They really look how they feel.
I loved learning details of his life. I didn't realize he was so young when he died--thirty-seven. As my dad pointed out, he looks much older in his self-portraits. My favorite part was reading letters between him and Theo, his brother, and being able to see the fragile paper and handwriting in person. Sometimes, the skill with which he makes us connect to his images ironically makes him bigger than us. Learning about him as a person makes me remember that it's the expression of his feelings, not the feelings themselves, that are unique to him. And maybe the degree to which he felt things. But the base emotions--the desire to have his work be meaningful, his frustration with the struggle, his desire to host friends and be with others, the feeling of pride in certain successes--they are so accessible, palpable. As we ascended through the floors to the top floor that exhibited the work he made in his last year of his life while tucked away in an asylum, I felt so sad for his emotion and at the same time so grateful for his expression. And the latter, I think, is what he really wanted.
The Anne Frank House gave an even more visceral experience of being inside the physical place where such powerful writing happened. Similar to the Van Gogh house, we started at the base and ascended through the house, to the annex where Anne and her family were hidden for two years before they were caught and sent to concentration camps, where all but one died. I was pretty much bawling by the end of it. I read her diary in high school and identified strongly with sentiment of optimism and goodness in the face of such blackness. In the house I learned many more little details that made both her everyday humanness and her extraordinary power so poignant. I learned more about the extremes of people. The good: the four "helpers" who risked their lives every day to not only try to save their lives but to make their imprisoned lives more ordinary, devising ways to get the kids schoolbooks, and bringing them news of the outside world. The friend who tried twice to bring Anne a package to the camp. The bad: the woman who stole Anne's first package from her. Whoever it was who betrayed the family and sent them to their deaths. And how this all springs from the same roots, the same skin and bones that make all of us. Towards the end, in a display about the family's arrest, their individual portraits are posted and behind Anne's endearing face plays a small black and white film with images from Auschwitz--starved bodies died and others barely living. It is of course meant to evoke what it does, but it is also in the spirit of who she was--a bright spirit that wasn't immune to these horrors and not meant to cover it up, but to remind us of it and of what else exists.
The house remains unfurnished; it was the wish of Otto Frank, Anne's father, to remind us how empty these lives were made. The pictures that Anne pasted on her bedroom wall's remain, as do the pencil marks that track the heights of Anne and her sister while they were hidden. Also, there is the original bookcase that hid the entrance to their hiding home. I found that these inclusions were really fitting, and appreciated the amount of thought placed into what to keep, and what to remove. Anne's family didn't have that kind of freedom.
Again, I loved seeing the actual real pages of her diary. Paper can be so moving. Her handwriting was neat and in cursive. No one really writes like that anymore. I cried separate times on each floor of the house but like Anne wrote, as incredibly sad and hard and horrible it all is, the thing that remains heaviest is how much one person can affect others--"in spite of everything."
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