As the interest in conservation practice rises, a growing number of researchers are also venturing into the history of restoration. The focus may be on restoration methods, an individual or institution, or a particular conservation principle. At the same time, more and more archives accumulated by conservators are being preserved and handed over to public institutions so that they can be made accessible. The RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History) in The Hague plays a pivotal role in this process.

The RKD and the Institute of Culture and History (ICG) of the University of Amsterdam are organising a Symposium on the history of restoration and conservation in the Netherlands. The event will take place on Thursday 18 February 2010. This is an opportunity to hear a number of short talks exploring this wide-ranging subject for the first time. At the end of the Symposium there will be a chance to draw some first conclusions and to look ahead to future research in this area.

The official language of the Symposium is Dutch, but the afternoon session will include a number of talks in English.

Participation in the Symposium costs € 25 (€ 15 for students), including coffee, tea and lunch. The Department of Conservation and Restoration of the University of Amsterdam have kindly offered to host a drinks party at the end of the programme.

To register for the Symposium please send an email with your name and the name of your institution to restauratiegeschiedenis@gmail.com Students should state their student-pass number. Registration commits you to paying the participation fee. Payment will be taken on arrival; it would be helpful if you could bring the right amount. Once you have paid, you will be given information about the Symposium and a participant’s badge.

We hope to welcome you in The Hague on 18 February and look forward to a stimulating exchange of ideas.

Michiel Franken (RKD)
Frans Grijzenhout (UvA)
Mandy Prins
 

On Friday, 5 March 2010, the RKD has the pleasure of presenting the first lecture in its new series, the Hofstede de Groot Lectures. The RKD aims to spotlight art historians who have conducted pioneering research on Dutch art. The first lecture, entitled Vermeer, Lairesse and Composition, will be given by Dr Paul Taylor, deputy curator of the Photographic Collection at the Warburg Institute in London and a specialist in Dutch seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art and art theory. The text of the Hofstede de Groot Lecture will be published as the first volume in a new series of publications (Waanders Publishers).

Paul Taylor has distinguished himself with his investigation of several key Dutch painting concepts, such as ‘houding’, ‘gloed’ and ‘vlakheid’, on which he has published various scholarly articles: The Concept of 'Houding’ in Dutch Art Theory (1992); The Glow in Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Dutch Paintings (1998); Flatness in Dutch Art: Theory and Practice (2008). By thoroughly analysing these terms, searching for comparable terms in Italian and French writings, and linking them with pictorial aspects of Dutch seventeenth-century painting and drawing, he has singled out in a remarkably original fashion several pictorial qualities that are characteristic of Dutch visual art in the Golden Age.

The Hofstede de Groot Lecture is named after the art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), whose extensive art-historical documentation forms the basis of the RKD collection.

The Hofstede de Groot Lecture will be followed by a reception.

Date:          Friday, 5 March 2010

Time:         4:00 pm (you are welcome as of 3:30pm: tea and coffee will be served)

Admission: Free of charge

Location:    Auditorium of the National Library complex, 5 Prins Willem Alexanderhof,
                   The Hague

Official language: English

Registration (mandatory): activiteiten@rkd.nl
 

• Didier Martens, Du style à l’iconographie: deux fragments d’un cycle de saint Gilles peint probablement à Bruxelles vers la fin du XVème siècle
• Hans Joachim Dethlefs, Gerard de Lairesse and the Semantic Development of the Concept of Haltung in German
• Margreet van der Hut, Een manuscript van Jan van Mieris, met daarin gedichten over zijn vader Frans van Mieris I
• Suzanne Laemers, Boekbespreking van John Oliver Hand, Catherine A. Metzger, Ron Spronk, Prayers and Portraits. Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, New Haven/Londen 2006 en John Oliver Hand, Ron Spronk (red.), Essays in Context. Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, New Haven/Londen 2006

This edition is for sale at the front-desk for €15.00. It is also possible to subscribe to Oud Holland. For more information see the links below.

Oud Holland
Front-desk Sales

• J. Bruyn, Een gedachtenisvenster voor Claes van Ruyven en Geertgen tot Sint Jans’ ‘Johannespaneel’ te Wenen
• Zsuzsanna van Ruyven-Zeman, Onbekend werk van Pieter Jansz., glasschilder uit Amsterdam
• Jeroen Giltaij, Tekeningen van Jan (I) van der Meer van Haarlem
• Kerry Barrett, Mijn Heer: Letters from Pieter Soutman to Constantijn Huygens Abbie Vandivere, Changes of Identity in ‘Garland and Flowers’ by Gaspar Peeter Verbruggen the Younger.
• Quentin Buvelot, Book review of Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil, Amsterdam 2006
• Walter S. Gibson, Book review of Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue. Edited by Alejandro Vergara. Madrid (Museo Nacional del Prado) 2007

It is a double edition for sale at the front-desk for €30.00. It is also possible to subscribe to Oud Holland. For more information see the links below.

Oud Holland
Front-desk Sales

RKD launches first illustrated Iconclass Browser: new Iconclass 2100 Browser makes searching easy and more efficient.

This afternoon André van de Waal, son of Henri van de Waal, who founded Iconclass, launched the Iconclass 2100 Browser together with the new Iconclass website.

What is Iconclass?
is a hierarchically arranged, art-historical classification system which groups images together according to subject codes. Researchers in museums, universities and libraries in the Netherlands and abroad use Iconclass to search for and describe art imagery.

The RKD and Iconclass
Iconclass was first developed in the 1950s by the Leiden art historian Henri van de Waal (1910-1972). In 2006 the RKD took over responsibility for the daily management and future development of the system. Thus the browser has been adapted to reflect modern requirements: the new Iconclass 2100 Browser allows you to perform Google-like searches using multiple keywords and descriptors and also retrieves images from the RKDimages database.

More innovations at Iconclass

In order to make these new features visible, both content and appearance of the Iconclass website have also been updated. The RKD is currently investigating how to integrate Iconclass into its existing databases.

www.iconclass.nl (website)

www.iconclass.org (database)

Information

Maudy Marcus
T: 070 3339785 

E: marcus@rkd.nl
 

The author F. Bordewijk (1884-1965) and the composer Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman (1892-1971) were an exceptional couple. Their archives are kept in The Hague where they lived for most of their lives; F. Bordewijk’s papers are at the National Literary Museum while those of his wife are at the Netherlands Music Institute. Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman read her husband’s writings and he commented on her compositions. F. Bordewijk wrote texts for two of his wife’s compositions. He is an important figure in Dutch literature, whose work has been translated, adapted for film (Karakter) and recently also the stage. Although Johanna’s work was widely performed in the Netherlands in the late 1930s and in Europe and America during the 1950s, few people are aware that Bordewijk’s wife was a composer.

Through a series of short talks the symposium will focus on the couple’s relationship, Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman’s compositions, special editions of Bordewijk’s writings, and the correspondence between F. Bordewijk and Willem Frederik Hermans. The programme will also include performances of some of Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman’s choral compositions and a piano solo. Margriet de Moor will present the Bordewijk heirs with the first copy of the new edition of a score by Bordewijk-Roepman from the NMI Archive. A small exhibition showing original source material and other documentation relating to the couple’s work will be on view in the KB foyer for several weeks.

Program

• 1:30 p.m. Welcome with tea and coffee
• 2 p.m. Opening by the chair
• 2:05 p.m. Elly Kamp (Huygens Instituut - KNAW): ‘An unusually close couple’.
• 2:25 p.m. Arno Kuipers (National Literary Museum): ‘A clear affinity. On the correspondence between F. Bordewijk and Willem Frederik Hermans’.
• 2:45 p.m. Reinder Storm (National Library of the Netherlands): ‘Two rare Bordewijk editions from the National Library of the Netherlands’.
• 3:05 p.m. Margaret Krill (Netherlands Music Institute): ‘Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman, a naturally gifted person who lived for her art’.
• 3:25 p.m. Presentation by Margriet de Moor of the first copy of a new edition of a score by Bordewijk-Roepman to the Bordewijk heirs.
• 3:35 p.m. Closing remarks by the chair
• 3:40 p.m. Foyer concert with music by Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman. With the Haaglands Women’s Choir conducted by Ana Mihajlovic, and Patrick Hopper, piano.
• 4 p.m. Reception

Please book your place by contacting communicatie@kb.nl
General enquiries: 070-3140217

There are more than six hundred archives stored at the RKD and at least ten per cent of these contain records relating to the Second World War.

The war-related material in these archives can been subdivided into three categories:
1. archives assembled by individuals or societies, such as artists and art collectors;
2. archives assembled by art dealers;
3. archives assembled as memorials to the Second World War.

To mark this year’s National Archive Day, the RKD has filled its showcase in the entrance hall with a selection of documents from these three categories. The exhibition has been organised by the archivist Ramses van Bragt and Noortje van Amerongen, a trainee at the RKD and will be on display until December.

A brochure entitled ‘War Archives from the RKD’ (in Dutch) accompanies the exhibition.  This guide provides additional information about the documents on view in the showcase.

A more extensive version of the ‘RKD War Guide’, based on a recently completed inventory of all the RKD’s war-related archives and collections, will be published at the end of 2009. The publication of this inventory is to coincide with the launch of the digital Directory to Archives of the Second World War, which will provide an online portal to research into the Second World War. The digital Directory will list all Dutch institutions holding archives or collections relating to National Socialism and the Second World War in the Netherlands, the former Netherlands Indies, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles.

 

The data with images from the Portrait Iconography Collection (Iconografisch Bureau) were until recently processed in a separate database which was not linked with any of the other RKD databases, such as RKDartists& or RKDimages. The RKD had for some time wished to combine data from both collection databases and in doing so make them jointly searchable. The necessary preparations for the conversion took more than a year to complete due to the complex character of the operation: the structure of RKDimages had to be altered and expanded due to the amount of extra information regarding the portrayed individuals in RKDportraits. The final conversion was finally able to take place this past July.

The merging of data from both databases was very successful. It provided a much clearer ‘total picture’ of the creations of portraitists over the centuries. An unintended, though interesting circumstance is that the descriptions of the original photos from RKDportraits now form a perfect supplement to the data pertaining to photographers. This is particularly useful for the project on photographers in RKDartists& that the RKD is currently carrying out in collaboration with the Nederlands Fotomuseum.

As is always the case with conversions, however, many finishing touches still have to be made. For example, a large number of images have to be reconnected to the correct records. The data also has to be sorted and double records merged. This will take some time. Despite this, the data will be published online before this task is completed. We hope users are not too inconvenienced by the temporary imperfections.

Lectures
A number of lectures will be held in the auditorium as part of the collective presentation of the resident institutes of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek complex, including two lectures on behalf of the RKD. Please note that these lectures will be given in Dutch:

• 10:30 uur (RKD) Rudi Ekkart: ‘Het lot van kunstwerken tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog.’
• 11:00 uur (Huygens Instituut- KNAW) JanJaap Kelder: ‘Het antisemitisme van de schrijver Henri Bruning (1900-1983)’.
• 11:30 uur (ING) Gerrit Knaap: ‘De militaire macht van de VOC in Azië’.
• 12:00 uur (NMI) Geert van den Dungen: ‘Nederlandse componisten in de Tweede Wereldoorlog en hun nalatenschap in de archieven van het NMI.’
• 12:30 uur Lunch break concert with Marcel Worms, piano
• 13:30 uur (CBG) Ruud Straatman: ‘Oorlogsbronnen bij het CBG.’
• 14:00 uur (RKD) Anita Hopmans: ‘Een restitutieverzoek toegelicht; de schilderijen Gebed voor de maaltijd en De Theems van Jan Toorop.’
• 14:30 uur (NIMH) Rolf de Winter ‘De militaire luchtvaart en Den Haag’
• 15:00 uur (KB) Edwin Klijn ‘Kranten in oorlogstijd’

Illustration in Emporium, 22 (1905), no. 127, p. 25, with note by Jan Toorop, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

Exhibition
War-related archives will be exhibited at the RKD. Ramses van Bragt, archive keeper, will give an explanation of the exhibition throughout the day. An overview of the primary war-related archives and collection of the RKD will be available for viewing.

Evaluation hours
Are you curious about a piece of art you own? Would you like to find out more about the artist, style or art movement and the period in which it was made? Or perhaps you would like to find out more about a letter from an artist which you have in your possession? You are more than welcome to drop in to the RKD during the National Archive day with a piece of art (painting, drawing or print) for an evaluation.

Accessibility

Please note there that parking is very limited.
 

A programme was offered to participants which included lectures from leading art historians. The programme consisted additionally of receptions and excursions to museums and cities of art historical interest. There was also room to work on one’s own study.

The course was organised from 1948 till 1964 by Horst Gerson. When he left in 1965 to become a professor in Groningen the course was temporarily stopped. It was started up again in 1992, this time under the umbrella of the Amsterdam Maastricht Summer Academy and in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum.

The RKD will exhibit a selection from the RKD archive and the collection Press documentation in the document display cabinet until the 9th of October 2009.

Composition: G. Dullaart, M. Franken and R. Koot
 

Much is written on art, culture and heritage. Both amateurs and professionals - freelancers, independents and institution employees – write regularly on these subjects. Together they are responsible on an annual basis for hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, catalogues and books on the visual arts, design and architecture. However, they are not always fully aware of the rights and obligations which result from being an author.

During the congress experts will give insight into various issues which are of much interest to the authors as well as their sponsors and publishers. Problems concerning such issues as copyright, lending and reproduction rights fees, publications under personal management and subsidies will be explained by representatives from various fields.

The RKD introduces Code in July.

Code is an artist’s magazine with ten issues being published between 1983 and 1989. 250 copies of the first eight issues each contained a silk-screen print by an artist. Among the artists were distinguished names such as Rob Scholte, Frank van den Broeck, René Daniels and Jiri Georg Dokoupil. The RKD Library is in possession of a complete set of the magazine.

The artist Martin van Vreden took initiative in 1983 to setting up the magazine. He strived to produce an independent magazine with varying editors and with contributions from artists as well as theorists and writers.

Many of the artists who published in Code were, like Van Vreden, linked to the Amsterdam gallery The Living Room. The gallery was set up in the early eighties by art history student Bart van de Ven and artist Peer Veneman, and was initially housed in their own living room in East Amsterdam. The Living Room quickly achieved success with a new generation of artists on board such as Rob Scholte, Henk Visch and Fortuyn/O’Brien.

Code, first edition, November 1983
Cover by Martin van Vreden (Olst, 1953)

The magazine was never intended to be the voice of the gallery. Code was more a shared mentality and art concept and was not meant to be a manifesto. This meant that also (international) artists who were not linked to The Living Room were given ample opportunities to publish in Code. The magazine contained contributions from a wide range of disciplines, such as the visual arts, dance, film, theatre and literature. Code exuded the passionate optimism so typical of the eighties. By 1989 the drive had gone and the last issue was published. Gallery The Living Room closed its doors in 1993 (and was revived between 1997 and 2008 to operate in the artists’ circuit).

The exhibition can be seen until August 7, 2009.

• Jan Kosten, A curious letter and a Roermond collection catalogue from around 1830
• Laurien Bosch, Quarrelling in the workshop: The art gallery E.J. van Wisselingh & Co as patron of three innovative decorative artists
• Lynne van Rhijn, Three valuable archives in the RKD - An interview with Wies van Moorsel
  
• Ursula de Goede and Jan Kosten, Interview with Gerdien Verschoor, director of CODART
• The year 2008 in review
• Goos Dullaart retires
• Frits Lugt's portrait

• The RKD at The European Fine Arts Fair (TEFAF) 2009 in Maastricht
• Acquisitions

The RKD Bulletin is sent to friends, donors and benefactors of the RKD. Do you also want to receive the RKD Bulletin then sign up now as a friend using the link below.

Friends of the RKD
RKD Bulletin

Also a new edition of Oud Holland has been published with articles by:

• Marjolein Leesberg, Het 'Laatste avondmaal', het eerste bekende schilderij van Mander de Jonge
• Nicolette Sluijter-Seijffert & Margreet Wolters, Samenwerking tussen Alexander Keirincx en Cornelis van Poelenburch belicht
• Ben Broos, Gerrit van Loo, voogd van Saskia, zwager van Rembrandt

• Eric de Bruyn, Boekbespreking van Jeanne van Waadenoijen, De geheimtaal van Jheronimus Bosch. Een interpretatie van zijn werk, Hilversum 2007
• Ingid Vermeulen, Boekbespreking van R. Baarsen, R.-J. te Rijdt en F. Scholten, Nederlandse kunst in het Rijksmuseum 1700-1800, Zwolle 2006; E. Mai (ed.), Holland nach Rembrandt. Zur niederländischen Kunst zwischen 1670 und 1750, Keulen 2006; E. Mai (ed.), tent.cat. Vom Adel der Malerei. Holland um 1700, Keulen/Dordrecht/Kassel 2006 en E. Mai, S. Paarlberg en G.J.M. Weber, tent.cat. De kroon op het werk. Hollandse schilderkunst 1670-1750, Keulen/Dordrecht/Kassel 2006