Results for “”

A brief historical survey of Flemish tapestry: from about 1300 to the Royal Gaspard de Wit Factory.

The notion of the Netherlands as the pivot for ideas from other countries was largely an illusion of early 20th-century Dutch historians. But instances can be found in history where the Low Countries did indeed fulfil such a function. One s...

A personal account of Christopher Brown's dealings with Dutch art as an admirer and scholar. In his opinion the essence of Dutch art resides in its truthfulness both about the world itself and the individuals who inhabit it.

The study of the culture of the Low Countries cannot be reduced to the Dutch language, but cannot do without it either. That is why, for Dutch culture as well as for Dutch Studies abroad, a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach is both ...

The emblem literature of the Low Countries has become a paradigm in the discourse on European cultural history. But what actually are emblems? Why are they now so widely studied? What is so special about Dutch and Flemish emblem books?

By the time New Amsterdam became New York, the city already had a rich and exciting past. A story about Dutchmen, Walloons, native Americans and the English threat.

The empty interior of a stripped and whitewashed Gothic church. Diminutive figures, doing not much of anything. Lovers of Rembrandt may like it hot, but Saenredam enthusiasts like it cold. Walk to the coolest spot of Dutch arts and you will...

A take on the work of A.F.Th. van der Heijden, the author of a sequence of novels entitled 'Toothless Time', a saga dealing with time and memory that takes an advance on the future.

Dutch cabaret is unique in the world. That at least is what Dutch people believe. In a country that has always been a melting pot of cultures and influences owing its existence to its neighbours, this cannot be true. An overview of the genr...

A short essay about Paul van Ostaijen, the poet who opened the way for a new form of poetry in Flanders in which the sonority of the simplest words and their magical and ludic power of suggestion were all important.

To many people Gerrit Rietveld is known only as the architect of De Stijl. This one-sided picture was in need of correction and led to an oeuvre catalogue and an exhibition in the Utrecht Central Museum in 1993 which showed Rietveld's versa...

The Belgian architect Henry van de Velde occupies a special place in the development of 20th-century architecture and design. He is a man whose failures have turned out to be more than significant.

Review of 'Antwerp Cathedral' (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1993), a large volume commemorating the restoration of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp.

In 1980 the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium signed a treaty which officially recognised that Dutch was the common language of the Dutch and the Flemish. This treaty also provided for the founding of a body to develop t...

'To conduct scientific investigations with the aim of producing a coherent description of social and cultural well-being in the Netherlands'. This is in a nutshell the objective of the Social and Cultural Planning Office in Rijswijk.

At the beginning of the 1990s Dutch literature started getting some relative success abroad. This was obviously due primarily to the quality of the books. But we can also state that the policies promoting translations in the Netherlands and...

Hosting a Dutch writer in residence at a Dutch programme offered at a US university is a bittersweet experience, as the author explains from personal experience in this piece.

The Department of International Relations of the Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs in the Netherlands has published a series of booklets in English called 'Dutch Arts'. The aim of these publications is to give foreign readers...

The 35th 'Frankfurter Buchmesse' took place in October 1993, with teh Netherlands and Flanders as the joint focus of attention, the 'Schwerpunkt'.

A brief look at the programme of Antwerp 1993.

About the remarkable and dialectic combination of controversy and success in Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's career.

This piece is both a socio-political portrait of the priest Adolf Daens and a short review of Stijn Coninx' film about this Flemish champion of the working man.

Review of 'The Flemish Movement' (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), a study and reader documenting the process of federalisation in Belgium.

Bruges reflects the European past as a whole, as we can see in the review of 'Bruges and Europe' (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1993)

The story of the 'Van Dale', the most authoritative general dictionary of Dutch.

A considerable number of learners of Dutch take part in the examinations for the Certificate of Dutch as a Foreign Language, so as to have an official proof of their proficiency in this language. In this article we take a look at the proced...

The significance and the scope of Mulisch's subjects certainly entitle this author to a readership beyond his own borders. 'Last Call', 'The Assault' and 'The Discovery of Heaven' are all novels that are extremely readable and at the same t...

Poetry International started out in 1970 as a small ambitious festival in Rotterdam, gradually turning the city on the Maas into a free-port for poetry from the whole world and in every language.

A review of the Flemish travel writer Lieve Joris' novel 'Back to the Congo' (London: Macmillan, 1992): a compelling, moving, and detailed portrait of a country struggling with both its colonial past and a present ruled in the same dictator...

In this review of J. Bernlef's 'Driftwood House' (Francestown: Typographeum, 1992) Yann Lovelock points out that the artist cannot afford to stand still, but should run to keep up with what has inspired his/her vision. And that is exactly w...

A review of Elsschot's tragi-comic novel of manners 'Villa des Roses', now included in translation in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series

A review of Frits van Oostrom's 'Court and Culture' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), an elegantly written panoramic book which focuses on very particular detail.

In 1992 Christine D'haen, a relatively obscure Flemish poet with a consciously anti-fashionable and complex oeuvre, was presented the prestigious Prize for Dutch literature.

A piece about the importance of the Gaudeamus foundation for contemporary music in the Netherlands.

The Flemish philosopher Leo Apostel is a typical representative of an intellectual culture open to enrichment by international influences in his attempt to create a contemporary form for the ideals of the enlightenment.

Portrait of a Dutch philosopher with a care for man's well-being: war and peace, education, practical ethics, suffering, life and death - in short, the philosophy of everyday life.

Researchers at the Free University of Brussels recently succeeded in fertilising an ovum using a single activated sperm cell. This represents an important step forward in assisted fertilisation.

About the merger of both companies on 1 January 1993. The combination of Elsevier and Reed brings together a number of disparate elements.

Flanders and the Netherlands have played an important role in both the personal and professional life of Sir Michael Jenkins, who looks back on his boyhood in French Flanders, his work on the European Commission in Brussels and his time as ...

In November 1992, the Dutch feminist monthly 'Opzij' celebrated its 20th anniversary. No other journal in the Low Countries writes in the same way about feminism and the women's movement.

Is the exclusively male priesthood staying enshrined in the Netherlands, especially after the decision in November 1992 by the Church of England to allow women to be ordained into the priesthood?

Trouw is a newspaper with an individual and widely respected voice among the Dutch media; the ego of a principled resistance, with its roots in World War Two, was and is still there between the lines, however 'law-abiding' the paper may be.

Radio Netherlands World Service is upholding the ancient Dutch tradition of tolerant and free distribution of information, using the most modern mass-media.

About some of the major differences in publishing, book retailing, readership and government initiative in Flanders and the Netherlands.

Peter van Straaten's cartoons display an immense technical mastery; they give us the impression that he can tell every story, express every emotion with his pen.

From 1993 on, Rudi Fuchs, the new curator of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, will be able to throw himself to his heart's content into Amsterdam's collection of 19th and 20th-century art.

The large international exhibition Documenta was held in Kassel for the ninth time in 1992. This time the Fleming Jan Hoet was its Director and he proved that great achievements can also come from a small country.

Paleis Lange Voorhout, Princess Juliana's former winter residence in The Hague, has been turned into an annex to the Gemeentemuseum. It has become an 'interior', a house of memories.

Review of 'Panamarenko. A Book by Hans Theys' (Tervuren, 1992), about quite possibly the most spectacular figure in the story of Flemish art in the second half of the 20th century.

Piet Boyens has rewritten the entire, fascinating history of artistic life in the artists' village of Sint-Martens-Latem between 1900 and 1930 in his book 'Flemish Art. Symbolism to Expressionism' (Tielt, 1992).

Anyon who wants to know about the image of the Old Masters from the Low Countries in the USA cannot do without the two volumes reviewed here: 'Great Dutch Paintings from America' (Ben Broos, Zwolle, 1990) and 'Flemish Paintings in America' ...

Jan Dibbets is a contemporary Dutch artist who continues the tradition of concentrating on the changeability of light in space, as can be seen in Rudi Fuchs & Gloria Moure's 'Jan Dibbets. Interior Light-Works on Architecture 1969-1990' ...

About a major Cambridge exhibition and catalogue of late medieval Flemish art in the summer of 1993 (Alain Arnould & J-M. Massing, 'Splendours of Flanders. Late Medieval Art in Cambridge'. Cambridge/Brussels, 1993).

The situation's potential for universal recognition is often great in the work of the internationally recognised Flemish cartoonist Benoît, and precisely this 'irritating' little feature turns his cartoons into so many small, but real maste...

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Brussels is a textbook example of a twenty-first century city: its inhabitants have blown in from all the winds, and it has experience in accomodating minorities and having many different cultures living together. If the techocratic violenc...

The writer Annie M.G. Schmidt is often affectionately called the Grandmother of the Netherlands; or, if it doesn't sound too solemn, the Mother of the Fatherland. She owes this title to a combination of talents which it would be hard to fin...

It is inevitable — a language-area such as the Low Countries famous above all for its painters is bound also to produce a good many poets who allow themselves to be inspired by paintings. And it does. (with translated poems by E. du Perron,...

Coming from the world of the theatre, the young Alex van Warmerdam occupies a special place in the still not fully developed field of the Dutch feature film. To date he has made only two features, Abel (1986) and The Northerners (De Noorder...

The reader of Leonard Nolens' poems is soon struck by the monomaniacal, quasi-obsessional nature of the work. His work is perhaps best read as the monumental symbolisation of an autobiography. A life which obsessively writes and rewrites it...

One of the most important propositions in Spinoza's Ethics is this: ‘In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.' You do...

The principle of euthanasia analysed with the Dutch situation as a guideline. According to the author respect for the patient is quintessential. Almost no one wants to die sooner than is necessary. Life is surely our most precious possessio...

Both in Europe and America, choreographers these days seem to trust dancing less and less. Some of them, whose complex political or dramatic narratives demand the spoken word, have demoted choreography to an often inchoate emotional subtext...

The spring of 1993, almost three years after his death, saw the publication of the ‘Collected Poems' of Hans Faverey (1933-1990): just over five hundred poems in one sober volume on india paper, in an almost classical format. Although the b...

The literature of the Middle Ages is a truly European literature, probably much more so than the literature of today. Paradoxically, the main reason for this was the omnipresence of a language and a literature which were not a natural envir...

Five hundred years ago the painter Hans Memling was buried in Bruges. The notary of the St Donaas Church noted in his diary that ‘the finest painter in the whole Christian world' had died that day. Of the painters known collectively as the ...

René Daniëls introduced an entirely different way of painting. His fiercely painted canvasses at first resembled eruptions of punk-like violence. But Daniëls' great merit lies in the combination of the conceptual or fundamental tradition in...

The Bijlmermeer is new. That in itself is enough to put many people off. Anything new is bound to be hated by an Amsterdammer. How often has the author, who lives in the Bijlmermeer, had to listen to the argument: ‘That sort of place is art...

The intention of this article is not to distill into one dense survey a comprehensive assessment of the Netherlands' human geography. Instead, an overriding aim is to expose levels of complexity and diversity that are commonly overlooked by...

After years of comparative peace and quiet there is once again a threat to the environment of the Wadden Sea. In December 1993 the Dutch cabinet decided that, after a ten-year moratorium, from 1994 onwards it is permissible to drill for gas...

The English influence is enormous in the Netherlands when it comes to gardening. In the Netherlands, just as in England, gardening is becoming ever more popular; also, as in England, it is English gardening, taken over bodily, that is popul...

In 1950 the then burgomaster of Antwerp, Lode Craeybeckx, taking advantage of the keen interest aroused by the much publicised open-air exhibitions in Battersea Park in London and in the Sonsbeek Park in Arnhem in the Netherlands, had sculp...

A portrait of the eighteenth-century Dutch-woman who has in recent years been the subject of two biographies, one in Dutch and one in English, as well as studies and dissertations in America and Europe, and about whom there have been plays ...

About the work of Flemish writer Monika van Paemel, for whom writing is first and foremost the secret weapon with which she tries to free herself from her origins. Writing remains for the rest of her life the perfect tool for giving express...

About 18th-century Dutch robinsonades. The story of this genre is not yet complete: we lack a comprehensive bibliography and a clear picture of authors and reading public. However, it demonstrates that the presence of Dutchmen in colonial c...

In Belgium, the flowering of symbolism coincided with the rise of avant-garde art in the final years of the nineteenth century, a period which produced an amalgamation of artists and art forms such as had never been seen before (nor has eve...

James Ensor (1860-1949), the Ostend ‘prince of painters', was a European painter of considerable stature and along with Gauguin, Van Gogh and Munch a pioneer of modern European art. He left behind an oeuvre of paintings, drawings and etchin...

Marten Toonder is an extremely popular author in the Netherlands. He owes this popularity primarily to the 177 adventures of Tom Puss and Mr Bumble, in form a series of comic strips but in content much closer to illustrated short stories, w...

A ‘Vermeer', like a ‘Rembrandt' or a ‘Van Gogh', is something more than a painting. A ‘Vermeer', whether it be a painting of a young girl in a turban, a woman with a watering can, a lady with a balance, or a music lesson, will bring associa...

Panamarenko made aeroplanes. Or are they works of art as well? If you asked him this question, he gave various answers or, probably, no answer at all. Being an artist meant nothing to him.

The ‘Final Solution' hit Jews in the Netherlands particularly hard: 100,000 of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands were murdered. Expressed as a percentage, over 70% became victims of the German extermination machine. The percentage ...

The Second World War and the Holocaust are important themes in postwar Dutch literature, and form the main themes in the work of one particular group of writers. Interest in the theme of the Second World War has not diminished; literary wor...

Harry Mulisch is emphatically un-Dutch, not only as a person, but also in his work. He frequently uses a form of irony which is used seldom by the average Dutchman: self-irony, often in the form of hyperbole. Furthermore, and more significa...

During the last few decades musicologists have abandoned the general philosophical approach in favour of more scientific investigations. Research into archive material has been undertaken on a large scale. As well as the works of important ...

The Dutch artist Ger van Elk has frequently assigns himself a particular role in his work. In his latest works Van Elk is more present than ever. It can no longer be maintained, as he himself has done in various interviews, that he presents...

Rem Koolhaas, the Netherlands' most celebrated and most articulate architect, has a complex relationship to his native country. While his fame is widespread there — to the point where even TV satirists have poked fun at his celebrity — and ...

A brief history of the Flemish newspaper press, leading the author to the conclusion that above all it is time for a serious press policy in Flanders. Flemish newspapers are having a hard time indeed.

The Plantin-Moretus Museum is not a museum where you just drop in casually on your way through the busy port city of Antwerp. Its exceptionally well-preserved interior and enviable typographical and art collections make it a place worth see...

In his standard work, ‘The World of Van de Velde' (De wereld van Van de Velde), written in 1967, A.M. Hammacher advances the view that the term ‘Art Nouveau' ought to be suppressed as far as possible in writing about the Belgian master-of-a...

Dutch-language literature in the former colonial territories of the Netherlands Antilles, a group of islands in the Caribbean, did not flourish fully until 300 years after the Dutch West India Company first established itself on the islands...

Research carried out in recent years has shown that in the Middle Ages a considerable amount of glass was already being produced in the Low Countries, particularly in the southern, more wealthy part which today is Belgium. This article prov...

29 October 1993 saw the opening in Rotterdam of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, designed by Jo Coenen. The Institute's principal activities are collecting and making the collection available to the public, and the mounting of exhibi...

About three majorly restorated buildings in Flanders: The Bourla Theatre (Antwerp), the Ghent Opera and the Royal Dutch Theatre (Ghent)

For six weeks J. Bernlef was ‘writer in residence' at University College London. But what has a writer to do with a university?

An English publisher about ‘his' Dutch-language authors. His publishing house is THEIR house, and they must all be at home in it.

About two groups of Americans interested in the culture of the Low Countries: the ‘immigrants' in several Dutch and Flemish clubs, and the dozens of American academics who have chosen the history, culture and language of the Low Countries a...

For a number of years now the Council of Europe in Strasbourg has conducted a programme for the evaluation of the national cultural policies of its member states. In 1993 it was the Netherlands' turn to be assessed (review of ‘Cultural Poli...

A short history of the Flemish Kaaitheater in Brussels (on the occasion of the publication of ‘HUMUS. Vijftien jaar Kaaitheater'. Bruges/Brussels, 1993)

About Dogtroep's unique total theatre which transcends ordinary theatrical limitations. The Dogtroep nomads' wild, visual and musical theatre has developed into an important Dutch cultural export item.

An assessment of how Josse de Pauw's highly original talent, both as actor and as author, has come of age.

The main problem with the film ‘Oeroeg', based on Hella S. Haase's autobiographical novel, is the rather simplistic approach to the so-called (post-)colonial Dutch-East Indian trauma

Eighty years after World War I, the survivors have been reduced to a mere handful and all that can still be seen in the landscape of Flanders Fields is the cemeteries and the monuments. They are now your best guides to understanding what ha...

In Edgar Goedleven's book ‘The Grand' Place in Brussels. Centre of 500 Years of History' (Tielt, 1993) random pictures are used to provide an undoubtedly incomplete but always fascinating account of the historical significance of the Brusse...

The image of the world that the Flemish cartographer Mercator, whose death was commemorated in 1994, created with his work was not improved upon until the 18th century.

Review of ‘Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis. 16th-17th Century' (Antwerp, 1993), a handsome book that attempts to take on board the ideological basis to the evaluation of an era and the creation of an exhibition.

About the long, rich and continuing history of the Dutch Reformed Church at Austin Friars in the City of London. After 444 years it is alive and well – a corner of a foreign field that is forever Holland.

Review of David Nicholas' ‘Medieval Flanders' (London/New York, 1992). There's a clear emphasis on landscape, agriculture and socio-economic aspects in this book, but less so for culture, religion and politics.

In September 1994 the Battle of Arnhem was commemorated on a large scale. The author looks back at this battle and the long cold winter which followed in the Netherlands in 1944.

About the still controversial language issue within the European Union, based on reading Werner Duthoy's ‘Het Nederlands in de instellingen van de Europese Gemeenschap (The Hague, 1993, 2nd. ed.).

About the WNT or Dictionary of the Dutch Language, the largest dictionary in the world, which will be finished in 1998. It is an impressive cultural monument, the fruit of 150 years of co-operation between Flanders and the Netherlands.

A survey of a number of possibilities in the Netherlands and Flanders for non-Dutch speakers to study Dutch during the summer months.

Review of ‘Dutch Masters and Their Era. English Language Studies by the Dutch, from the last century into the Present' (ed. F. Stuurman; Amsterdam, 1993).

About the history of this museum, a place to where readers can come and look – before returning to their reading.

Review of ‘The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy' (ed. Richard Huijing; Sawtry, 1993), a collection that functions as a peep show of the Dutch literary imagination.

Manfred Wolf writes about his stay in the Translators' House in Amsterdam in 1993: an opportunity for him to be Dutch, an occasion to merge into a neighborhood and become part of a setting which ever since his childhood as the son of refuge...

About the novels of Marcel Möring, books full of ethical and social commitment.

The Alamire Foundation's aim is to encourage scholarly research into the music in the Low Countries from the Middle Ages until the end of the Ancien Régime, with the main emphasis on the Golden Age of polyphony in the 15th and 16th centurie...

A portrait of Dutch composer Otto Ketting, who experiments with tradition rather than listening habits. Ketting sometimes compares composing with the work of a director recording instructions so that the notes find their place.

in 1974 the Netherlands Foundation for Jazz and Improvised Music opened the BIMhuis, its own concert venue in Amsterdam, but also a centre for international cooperation in the field of this music.

About the NIAS. Each year this Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences invites 40 carefully selected research fellows, both from within and outside the Netherlands, to work on their research projects u...

The Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp was founded in 1931 as a private institution. Nowadays it is linked with the University Hospital of Antwerp. It plays a vital role as a link between the populations in developing countries on on...

The English author of this piece reflects on the mushrooming international and multicultural festivals in Flanders in recent years. She sees Flanders as a place with a climate in which creativity can flourish even when funds are in lamentab...

As an officially recognised bilingual province Friesland has a special place in the Netherlands. Yet the Friesian is too level-headed to make his individuality absolute.

1954 was the year in which De Nederlandse Courant – Canada's oldest Dutch-language newspaper – was first published in Toronto. With effective marketing it still continues to grow and manages to also meet the interest of the younger generati...

About the International Information and Archive for the Women's Movement, that has been housed in the Gerardus Majella Church in Amsterdam East since December 1993.

About the exhibition ‘Dawn of the Golden Age' held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and its catalogue: it gave an overview of Dutch art between 1580 and 1620, the period which led up to the Golden Age itself. (‘Dawn of the Golden Age. North...

By 1993 the Brussels metro still had 55 stations which had been ‘humanised' by artists. We might say that the function of wall paintings in caves and later in catacombs has now been taken over by art in the metro.

It is the artists, rather than the works of art, that are central to ‘Dutch Art and Character' (Amsterdam/Lisse, 1993). It is they who are on the couch, according to the reviewer of this collection of essays.

To Bart van der Leck the painter and the architect complemented each other. That was not a popular view, and, moreover, the architects with whom he worked often gave him only a subordinate role. An exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum in...

The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem commemorated the 400th anniversary of the tulip in the Netherlands with an indoor and outdoor exhibition in 1994. The author also gives a short history of the tulip in Holland.

In the autumn of 1994 the skyline of the Dutch provincial capital of Groningen was dramatically transformed by the building of the Groninger Museum. This striking construction, which houses a highly diverse collection of art both ancient an...

About the Kattenbroek district in Amersfoort, where the development plan of Ashok Bhalotra has broken the mould of planological thinking, so that since 1990 the urban landscape in the Netherlands has been acquiring a slightly different aspe...

In the field of Gothic artistic expression a remarkable interplay appears to have existed between England and Flanders. This interplay was a leitmotif for the special exhibition The Gothic Revival in Belgium held in the Bijloke Museum in Gh...

About Radio Vlaanderen Internationaal, which makes contact with fellow countrymen abroad and also makes the world more familiar with Flanders.

1994 marked a milestone in Dutch Studies in the United Kingdom: it was precisely 75 years since the foundation of the chairs in Dutch Language and Literature and in Dutch History at the University of London.

On 1 July 1995 the last of the 21 Dutch national museums were freed from their state ties and began a new, more independent existence. The path towards privatisation has led to considerable changes in the museums involved. Eventually it sho...

About the Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and the role of body language in his work.

The 50-year-old tradition of the open-air theatre in Diever may confidently said to be unique, because these Dutch amateurs consistently play the work of a single author - Shakespeare, whose most popular plays seem to lend themselves except...

Dominique Deruddere has made three full-length feature films up to now, and all three have been closely tied to English-language culture: 'Crazy Love' (1987), 'Wait until Spring, Bandini' (1989) and Suite 16 (1994).

Like every other self-respecting country, the Netherlands has its own national film museum. This institution, located in Amsterdam, combines the tasks of maintaining an archive with conservation and educational activities, and its film libr...

In recent years Dutch authors and illustrators have become firmly established figures in the international literary trade. In the words of the travel guides, the modem Dutch children's book is ‘different, witty, innovative, courageous and a...

About the long history of the Jews in Antwerp, a story of tolerance, but also of intolerance and persecution. The author believes that, despite popular belief, history never repeats itself; so the next wave of anti-Jewish intolerance will m...

The first test of the new 'purple' coalition's popularity in the Netherlands came with the provincial elections in March 1995. They turned out very badly for the CDA and PVDA.To everyones surprise it was the VVD, which had taken such risks ...

‘What's the price of “Dark Maroc” and how much is Superskunk” ?‘ The Netherlands is the only country where hashish and marijuana are on the menu and where questions like this are perfectly normal. It has been going on for almost twenty-five...

Flanders' most popular comic strip characters, Bob and Bobette (in Dutch: 'Suske en Wiske'), are already fifty years old; but in all that time they have not aged a day. Several generations of children have grown up with their adventures. Th...

About the state of the animation film in Flanders, including a survey of the most important filmmakers. Unfortunately, neither the national radio and television station BRTN nor the commercial TV station VTM have shown any interest either i...

From close up, Marc Mulders' paintings look like tanned hides covered in scars, or the gnarled bark of a tree. The canvas is covered in scratches and scoring, traces of the knife that appears to have tattooed the paint into it. The likeness...

The 'evergreens' of Flemish and Dutch poetry. The Dutch and Flemings, like other people, have poems which everybody knows, or ought to know. Poems which are in every anthology and from which everybody can quote at least one line — usually t...

Professor Jan Tinbergen, who was bom in 1903 and died on 9 June 1994, was in some respects an extraordinary man and in others quite the reverse. His ideas and theories bore witness to exceptional gifts and very high moral standards. In his ...

Leo Vroman's collected poems (Collected Poems 1946-1984 — Gedichten 1946-1984), published in one volume in 1985, amount to over 1 ,000 pages; but the collection is far removed from any notion of an ornate tombstone on a productive life. Vro...

The editorial board of The Low Countries invited Leo Vroman to write about his position as a Dutch-bom poet / writer / biologist living in the United States. This is the text he sent them on 16 July 1994.

Rik Wouters (1882-1916) died of cancer at the age of thirty-four. Though the pain of his tumour sometimes drove this Flemish painter/sculptor to the edge of insanity, his suffering is scarcely noticeable in his mostly cheerful work. The bri...

It is the presence of all kinds of borders, and the tendency to cross and re-cross them, from which the constant tensions of cultural identity and place in Dutch and Flemish theatre arise. Identities are anything but constant or pre-given: ...

If there was ever an artist who entered the performing arts in an unorthodox way, that artist is Jan Fabre. A native of Antwerp, Fabre had no theatrical training, but studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the Municipal Institute for De...

In 1959 business manager Carel Birnie, ballet master Benjamin Harkarvy and fourteen prominent dancers of what was then the Nederlands Ballet decided to leave and set up their own company: the Nederlands Dans Theater. There were no prospects...

The history of today's contemporary music in the Netherlands has its roots in the sixties, that turbulent decade which disposed of so many outdated standards and values. This fresh start was not unique to the Netherlands, nor to the world o...

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from the Netherlands is unique, in that few if any comparable orchestras in the international music world so excel in the performance both of music by Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss, composers...

The debut of the Flemish poet Charles Ducal, ‘The Marriage' (Het huwelijk, 1987), created quite a stir in poetry-reading circles, first and foremost because of its themes and the way they were treated. The cohabitation of man and woman in m...

Precisely because he has always resisted originality, Bob van Reeth is one of today' s most original architects. He does not fit into any school or movement, not even that of the traditionalists who reject all schools and trends. He was lik...

A survey of Dutch colonial architecture. It is of immense significance that, although the buildings concerned are of colonial origin, the local people and governments are prepared to regard them as being part and parcel of their own history...

The founding in 1621 of a West India Company enabled the Dutch to attack increasing numbers of Spanish and Portuguese ships in the Atlantic, and in 1628 Piet Hein captured the Spanish silver fleet. The proceeds of this exploit financed a se...

In 1648 the Dutch Republic signed the Peace of Munster with Spain. Within thirty years of the signing of the Treaty, the United Provinces had fought three wars with England: from 1652 to 1654, between 1665 and 1667 and between 1672 and 1674...

England has from the beginning been a nation of writers but it is only from the early eighteenth century that the English can claim to have produced a body of native painters, responsible for providing the lion's share of the nation's pictu...

From July till October 1994 a special exhibition was on show at the Tate Gallery, London, entitled ‘Turner's Holland'. As such, it filled a gap in Turner studies. For J.M.W. Turner was not only Britain's greatest landscape and marine artist...

In a relatively short time Kristien Hemmerechts has become one of the most prominent of her generation of authors, a large group who are innovative in different fields. In the second half of the eighties, that group brought a long period of...

Margriet de Moor suddenly emerged as a writer at the age of forty-six. In the course of a few years she has become one of the best-loved Dutch novelists. De Moor's career is all the more remarkable because she makes hardly any concessions t...

Flanders remained a strong and homogeneous Roman Catholic area shortly after the Second World War. Today the Church in Flanders is not longer as strong as it used to be, but in a whole new phase. The change is gathering momentum. It is impo...

‘Reynard the Fox' (Van den Vos reynaerde) was written around 1260 by a certain Willem, part of it being an extremely free version of a French tale. Even if Reynard the Fox is portrayed as a ruthless villain, it is actually inconceivable tha...

In 1479 the King of England, Edward IV, paid a merchant called Philip Maisertuell ‘for certaine boks by the said Philip to be provided to the kyngs use in the partees beyond the see'. The King' s commission had been for the purchase of manu...

The South African poet and artist Breyten Breytenbach once said that he wrote in a ‘bastard language', Afrikaans.Nowadays he publishes mostly in English, having turned his back on the Afrikaans literary establishment which once showered him...

The Flemish sculptor Roel D'Haese casts bronze sculptures using the ‘lost wax' process. This technique was developed more than four thousand years ago in order to make durable bronze casts from fragile, complex three-dimensional models. D' ...

Review of 'Women of the Golden Age. An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England and Italy' (ed. Els Kloek et al., Hilversum, 1994). The book's interdisciplinarity offers a prismatic view of gender in the Golden ...

The Atlas Van Stolk collection, housed in the Shielandshuis in Rotterdam, is a unique assemblage of drawings, prints, photos and posters. From 4 February to 28 May 1995, fifty of the prints from this collection were exhibited under the titl...

Jonathan Israel's 'Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall' (Oxford, 1995) is an immensely stimulating book, a thoughtful synthesis that is scholarly, intelligently argued and elegantly written. It is indispensable for anyone intereste...

Voice and speech technology, when properly applied, has the potential to propel people of all nations, at all stages of development, into a much broader use of the latest available technology, boosting their productivity level to unknown he...

About efforts and initiatives in the field of Frisian cultural and linguistic policy and the production of new and succesful works of art and imagination in Frisian which enhance the quality and diversity of Frisian cultural life.

Review of 'New Flemish Fiction' (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol xiv, no. 2, Summer 1994). Apart from some hiccups in this special issue, the final impression one gains of Flemish writing is of strength, not simply of the writing bu...

Review of the translation of Renate Dorrestein's psychological thriller 'Unnatural Mothers' (Seattle, 1994).

Self-portrait of the translator as an actor. James Brockway finds himself asking himself more and more: 'Why do you sit translating?' What are the deeper-lying, the ultimate reasons for it?

A portrait of the AMVC as a contemporary documentation centre. It is a unique institution, which helps ensure that authentic source material, on which all scholarly research must be based, is preserved and made accessible;: from death masks...

British film-maker Peter Greenaway regards himelf as 'almost, in some senses, an honorary Dutchman'. No wonder, then, that he chose Amsterdam for his debut in a new perfomance art form, opera. Rosa: A Horse Drama (music by Louis Andriessen)...

Review of Ignace Bossuyt's 'De Vlaamse polyfonie' (Leuven, 1994, with 10 CDs), a brilliant synthesis of the evolution of Flemish polyphonic music over two centuries.

Is Willem Breuker the biggest comic turn in Dutch jazz, or just the worst-dressed jazz musician in the Netherlands? Turns out he is both!

The MIAT, of which the new complex opened its doors in 1994, has an extensive and varied collection but is also a convincing combination of economics, politics, society and culture.

About the 18th-century planetarium of Eise Eisinga, fixed to the living-room ceiling of his house by the canal in Franeker and still one of the most unusual places of interest in the Netherlands.

The Flemish mathematician Jean Bourgain works in the field of functional analysis. His work earned him the Fields Medal in 1994.

The threat of danger by water had always come from the sea. Few people realised that the same water could also creep up on the Dutch from behind. Yet that is what happened at the beginning of February 1995.

Review of Allison Blakeley's 'Blacks in the Dutch World. The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society' (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1994)

Review of Renée C. Fox's 'In the Belgian Château. The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change' (Chicago, 1994)

A portrait and short history of this festival, an event in The Hague which has its origins in the former Dutch East Indies and to which Indonesia makes a worthwhile contribution.

The evolution of Emiel Veranneman's work, in which pieces of furniture increasingly emerge as works of art, is not unconnected with his continued interest in the visual arts.

Review of Karel van Mander's 'The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters' (1603-1604)

About the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam and the Rotterdam art institute Witte de With, where art is in a state of continual flux.

Review of Michael Palmer's 'From Ensor to Magritte. Belgian Art 1880-1940 (Brussels, 1994).

A personal appreciation of the famous 17th-century Dutch Master, whose art is both specific and general: historical and transcending history. His paintings take up the challenge to determine themselves.

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Review of Geert Bekaert's 'Contemporary Architecture in Belgium' (Tielt, 1995)

In January 1996 the ALCS was officially founded during a two-day meeting in Cambridge. The Association for Low Countries Studies aims to combine the forces of all people from the English-speaking academic community in Europe with a common s...

About the state of affairs of Dutch Studies in the 'new' South Africa. So long as Afrikaans contniues to survive, there will continue to be an interest in Dutch.

Review of Frances Gouda's 'Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies' 1900-1942' (Amsterdam, 1995)

In the Low Countries, a hard-fought battle has been raging around the fixed book price for years.

In the last week of January and the first week of February 1995, during an exceptionally high flood in the Maas (or Meuse) and Rhine rivers, there were large-scale evacuations of people and livestock from the embanked flood plains where the...

‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink' is not a lament you are likely to hear from anyone faced with making a selection from the vast quantity of ‘watery' poetry produced in the Low Countries by the Sea. A selection of translate...

Ostend is a phoenix. Every town has periods of prosperity and decay in its history, but the history of this Flemish coastal town is indisputably a remarkable story, with many ups and downs. This portrait of past and present shows that conte...

At the end of the twentieth century, Brussels, in spite of its prominence as the administrative nerve-centre of Europe, boasts little or no good recent architecture. There seems to be an utter lack of ambition to express its European dimens...

The Low Countries provide a colourful meeting place for exciting pop styles that draw large audiences. The hugely broad spectrum offered by pop music not only provides each new generation with its first acquaintanc with culture, but also mo...

There was a time when Flemish composers dominated and dictated international musical life. During the Renaissance, musicians from the Low Countries were invited to every corner of Europe, and to Italy in particular to introduce their ‘new m...

The Netherlands has an extremely liberal image abroad. For centuries, its almost proverbial tolerance created a climate in which people of other beliefs and ways of life were only too glad to seek refuge when in need of shelter from persecu...

The position of women in Flanders and the Netherlands in the year 1996 is fundamentally different from what it was during the period between the wars and before. Not only has the situation changed, but it has changed in just those areas in ...

If Dame Ninette de Valois was the driving force behind the creation of the Royal Ballet in England, then the Royal Flanders Ballet owes its existence to Jeanne Brabants, ‘the woman who taught Flanders to dance professionally'. Under the lea...

Multatuli's position as the most important, most up-to-date and most widely read author to come out of the Low Countries in the nineteenth century is beyond dispute. But in all other respects, Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887), who at thirty...

The debate about Dutch colonialism and the history of the decolonisation of Indonesia has proved to be far from merely academic. The deserter Poncke Princen and the date of 17 August 1945 were important symbols of conflict. On the one side ...

The Dutch writer Jeroen Brouwers (1940-) spent only seven years in various parts of the Indonesian archipelago which broke away from the Netherlands in 1945. He has never been back since 1948, the year in which his parents decided to return...

In her career as a historical novelist, Hella S. Haasse (1918-) undertook a journey to find new ways of bringing the past to life. In Haasse's later work there is a growing awareness of the tension between historical fact and the need to co...

Thoughts on film and media provoked by three apparently unconnected film and television experiences from the Netherlands which, however obliquely, responded to the question the author poses himself about the place of the media at the end of...

The Flemish painter Raoul de Keyser was bom in Deinze in 1930; despite his comparative age, however, he belongs to the younger generation of his country's artists. The reason behind this seeming anomaly is that this is an artist who has con...

Jan Vercruysse's work is regarded by some art critics as the textbook example of what a certain type of contemporary art is currently producing: elitist, hermetic work, estranged from the public and intended for a small in-crowd of experts,...

Leo Pleysier is, in some sense, a writer of small literature. His gaze is not fixed on literary history, nor on the all-embracing and universal, the themes not tied to time and place in which ‘the Great' seem to feel so at home. He has stri...

The Dutch cow has come a long way. Though most Americans are apt to think of Rembrandt when they think of Dutch art it is instructive to realise that one of the first Dutch images to serve as a prototype for American artists was the anonymo...

Reckoned by the number of people who speak it, Dutch is the third Germanic language. Compared with most of the world's languages the history of Dutch is very well documented, and for this reason it gained attention very early on in internat...

Flemish Nationalism is a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of the Low Countries. It had its origin, as a by-product of Belgian politics, in the decade after the First World War and evolved, in various forms, into a factor that coloure...

When the statue of James van Artevelde was unveiled in the Friday Market in Ghent in 1863, the burgomaster pronounced the following: ‘He thought of the Belgian nation and gave his life to realise his dream.' Many peculiar things are said on...

Maria Sibylla Merian, who was born in 1647 in Frankfurt am Main and died in 1717 in Amsterdam, is among the most famous women in European history. Her interest to scholars and scientists is threefold, for the history of science as an entomo...

During the antipodean summer of 1642, New Zealand almost became a Dutch colony. A brief but bloody encounter with the local Maori population however, changed the course of history. 19 December 1642 was not a happy day in the seafaring annal...

In the work of the last few years the painter's palette has assumed the function of the lid, and this attribute floats like a cloud of inspiration in space searching for the Mystery of the Milky Way. With this colourful and flowing symbol B...

In the work of the last few years the painter's palette has assumed the function of the lid, and this attribute floats like a cloud of inspiration in space searching for the Mystery of the Milky Way. With this colourful and flowing symbol B...

Martinus Nijhoff (1894- 1953) belongs among the most important poets to have emerged from the Dutch-speaking countries in the twentieth century. He has always striven to make his poetry as timeless as possible and, given that he is still on...

The poet and painter Lucebert (ps. of Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, 1924- 1994) has an uncontested place in Dutch literature as the ‘Emperor' of the new post-war poets. The impression of wonderment and, sometimes, of foolishness which Lucebe...

When asked in an interview: ‘You are a poet, a writer of prose, and an essayist, which one are you the most of, which one would you rather be, or which one are you really?' Maurice Gilliams (1900-1982) replied with a quote from a study he h...

The Dutch painter Jan Theodoor Toorop (1858-1928) enjoyed considerable fame throughout much of Europe at the turn of the century, but it seems that now he is only studied in the Netherlands. While most general books on art contain his Symbo...

In July 1995, the foundation stone for the new building for the General Au ditor's Office was laid in The Hague. This official event was of special significance to the architect Aldo van Eyck (1918-). In a practice spanning more than 40 yea...

Herman Schillebeeckx's humanism is grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation, which forms the basis of his entire theology, and on the illuminating example of the historical Jesus, confessed as the liberating Christ. The focus is on an...

A portrait of the man 'of Rotterdam'. Erasmus died in Basel on 12 July 1536, leaving all his personal wealth to create a substantial charitable foundation whose beneficiaries were to be the poor, the disabled, the aged, girls with no dowrie...

About the movies of Marleen Gorris. The author concludes that however effective her oeuvre may have been to date, the time now seems ripe for a more subtle approach than the habitual feminist fundamentalism that tolerates no contradiction, ...

In 1995 the Plateau awards, the most important of the Belgian film awards, went almost without exception to the Flemish film 'Manneken Pis' by Frank van Passel. Although it is a promising debut, it is nonetheless not a truly great film.

In September 1995 a new school of contemporary dance was opened in Brussels: P.A.R.T.S., Performing Arts Research and Training Studios. The school is led by famous choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.

In 1996 and 1997 a number of events and exhibitions were being held to commemorate the fact that 300 years ago the Russian Tsar Peter the Great visited the Dutch Republic.

Review of Caroline Barron & Nigel Saul's 'England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages' (Stroud/New York, 1995)

Geert Mak's 'A Concise History of Amsterdam' (1994) is not an academic history, it is a general interest history; it is not a reference book, it is a personal document; it is not a short history, it is a small history.

Review of 'The First Modern Economy. Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economic Performance' (Cambridge, 1996) by Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude.

Language databases demand a level of investment beyond the means of individuals, universities and medium-sized and small businesses, particularly where a minor language such as Dutch is concerned. Fort This reason the Dutch Language Union h...

About the stay of James Boswell in Holland and his opinions about the Dutch language, which he tried to learn in vain and with reluctance.

Review of L. Gilbert & G. Quist's 'Teach Yourself Dutch' (London, 1994).

A short essay about the many grotesque novellas that Paul van Ostaijen wrote.

Willem Frederik Hermans, who died in 1995, crafted his stories with great skill, style and attention to detail. His commitment to the message of meaninglessness is perfectly balanced by his mastery of form.

Review of 'Turning Tides' (Brownsville, 1994) and 'Singers behind Glass' (Lincoln, 1995).

A translator's thoughts and opinions on translating from the Dutch

About the internationalism in the books of young people's author Anne Provoost.

Review of E.M. Beekman's 'Troubled Pleasures. Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600-1950' (Oxford, 1996).

Portrait of the famous Belgian jazz musician, who needs just one note to create a whole new world and let it blossom.

About jazz and independent labels in the Netherlands.

With the recent revival of folk music in Britain the happiness of the oldest and largest folk festival in the Low Countries is complete.

In December 1995 the Dutchman Paul J. Crutzen shared a Nobel Prize with two other chemists: it was awarded for their pioneering research in the field of atmospheric chemistry, and ozone chemistry in particular.

A portrait of Louis Dupré, the well-known and internationally renowned Flemish philopher of religion, who has spent decades working in the USA.

On 21 May 1995 the Flemish Parliament became a directly elected body for the first time, adding a fresh dynamic to an institution which is still at the genning of its life.

Review of Han van der Horst's 'The Low Sky. Understanding the Dutch' (Schiedam/The Hague, 1996).

The Dutch artist Peter Vos rightly considers himself a member of the time-honoured family of European draughtsmen.

Rubens' House in Antwerp first opened its doors to the public as a museum on 21 July 1946, fifty years ago in 1996.

A portrait of the painter Jan Steen, on the occasion of an exhibition that took place in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1996.

Review of 'Johannes Vermeer' (ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.; Zwolle, 1995).

In 1996 the Kunsthal in Rotterdam mounted a large-scale Han van Meegeren retrospective, showing his much-discussed forgeries in the style of Vermeer and Frans Hals, and also over 200 works from his regular oeuvre.

A portrait of the European Ceramics Work Centre, a private foundation which is subsidised by the Dutch government.

About the etcher Jules de Bruycker, on the occasion of a retrospective of his work held in his home town Ghent in 1995.

Review of 'Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts 1475-1550' (ed. Maurits Smeyers & Jan van der Stock; Ghent, 1996).

Edited by Dutch-Language Books in Translation, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague)

Antwerp now and then. According to the author it is still a European metropolis with much to offer in terms of national and international culture. But in the long term, spontaneous ‘ghettoising' such as is happening now is of little good to...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569) is beyond doubt the best-known Flemish painter of the sixteenth century. Little is known about his life, but from signatures and dates it is to some extent possible to survey his extensive oeuvre of pa...

The Dutch have long been convinced that their society displays the virtue of tolerance. For centuries they have cherished tolerance as a priceless heritage. Even today, when tolerance has come to be regarded as the hall-mark of a decent soc...

The Kingdom of Belgium will never be the same again after the extraordinary summer and autumn of 1996. The arrest of Marc Dutroux and the subsequent shocking discovery of the bodies of children who had been abducted, sexually assaulted and ...

We have known for a long time what happens when one colonises a country. But what happens when one wants to get rid of the ex-colony, but can't, and yet wishes to deal with it in a proper manner? Post-colonialism is a thing of the past, you...

Cees Nooteboom is a pioneer of Dutch travel writing who breathed new life into the genre in the 1980s. He opened the way for a flood of Dutch travel writing. Serious anthropologists, well-read mountaineers, inspired journalists, seasoned me...

Long before the advent of mass-tourism, the British were already the most numerous foreign travellers in the Low Countries. This article tells the story of writers, painters and other remarkable and unremarkable Englishmen who travelled to ...

Mankind has been making maps since prehistoric times. Unfortunately, most of them were on wood. bark, skins, or some other material which disappeared over the years, so we have no record of them. Only a few, those carved in stone or metal, ...

When Baudouin, King of the Belgians died suddenly on 31 July 1993, the media released a deluge of mournful prose, much of it maudlin kitsch, on their shattered readers. The writer Walter van den Broeck also reached for his pen, for if so mu...

This essay deals with the various trends and currents in contemporary Dutch and Flemish prose, from postmodernist prose to a return to the tradition of autobiographical writing. (with translated extracts by Connie Palmen, Arnon Grunberg, Er...

About the Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger and the tenacity with which he explores the architectonic possibilities of a limited number of themes.

Review of Derek Blyth's 'Flemish Cities Explored. Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Mechelen, Brussels & Louvain' (London, 1996)

About Dutch and Flemish books in a number of London collections, constituting a cultural capital waiting to be discovered and explored.

A portrait of the Dutch feature-film director whose work is imbued with the love of his life: the theatre and its actors.

About the restyling and renovation of the Netherlands Theatre Institute in 1997.

Review of 'Dance in Flanders' (Bruges, 1997)

A portrait of Flemish stage director Ivo van Hove, who in 1997 headed the Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven. He brings life to a sort of theatre that is considered by many as outmoded and old-fashioned.

About St Anan's Chapel, one of the few small chapels to have survived in Antwerp. In 1995 the magnificent restoration won an important prize.

Review of E. Kooper's 'Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context' (Cambridge, 1994).

The Catherijne Convent Convent in Utrecht mounted a special exhibition of the manuscript of the Utrecht Psalter (820_835) in Autumn 1996.

Review of 'The Drama of the Low Countries. Twenty Centuries of Civilization between Seine and Rhine' (Antwerp, 1996).

About the language politics of Europe, and more specifically the efforts of the Dutch Language Union for the position of the Dutch language.

About the Dutch Studies Department at Leiden University

A portrait of this Dutch writer, on the occasion of the publication of his collected works in 1996.

Review of 'Vantage Points. Festschrift for Johan P. Snapper' (Lanham, MD, 1996)

About the international success of this novel, originally published in Dutch in 1992, and now available in English as 'The Discovery of Heaven' (New York, 1996).

Review of Dick van Galen Last & Rolf Wolfswinkel's 'Anne Frank and After: Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective' (Amsterdam, 1996)

1996 saw the launch of a new translation prize in England: the Vondel Prize for translations of work originally written in Dutch. It was awarded to Stacey Knecht's translation of Marcel Möring's 'The Great Longing'.

About the 'Jef Denyn' Royal Carillon School in Mechelen.

About Gert-Jan Blom's Beau Hunks, who perform forgotten oddities of American music.

17 August 1996 saw the passing of the internationally renowned theologian and cultural philosopher Max Wildiers, for decades one of the most influential champions of culture in the Low Countries.

Review of 'Aletta Jacobs, Memories. My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace' (New York, 1996)

Review of 'Dutch American Voices. Letters from the United States, 1850-1930' (ed. Herbert J. Brinks, Ithaca/London, 1995)

About the history of this museum

About this remarkable Dutch Golden Age Painter, whose 400th anniversary was marked in London with a special exhibition in the gallery of Richard Green.

From 16 October 1996 to 19 January 1997 the National Gallery in London held the exhibition 'Rubens' Landscapes', presenting a rare overview of this lesser-known segment of the oeuvre of this famous painter.

About the life and work of this Frisian painter, who died in London, where he was fêted and knighted in his lifetime.

A portrait of a photographer who is constantly looking for the perfect balance between composition and content.

About this mega-painting in The Hague, 120 m in length, and 14 m high. In Autumn 1996 Museum Mesdag reopened, to great interest from the international press.

Review of A.L. Dierick's 'The Ghent Altarpiece' (Ghent, 1996)

Review of Sheila D. Muller's 'Dutch Art. An Encyclopedia' (New York/London, 1997)

Edited by Dutch Books in Translation, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague)

Translated poems by Henk van der Waal, Marc Reugebrink, Peter van Lier, René Huigen, Peter Verhelst, Bernard Dewulf, Rogi Wieg, Peter Ghyssaert, Jo Govaerts and Mustafa Stitou

Between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, hundreds of millions of majolica wall tiles were produced in the Netherlands. Tiles were the first items to be mass-produced for a growing Dutch middle class. Th...

Guido Geelen work inspires the viewer with a deep sense of liberation. He has accomplished that which others, given the practical obstacles, can only dream of; he has wrested objects from their fixed forms. He uses actual objects as moulds ...

Great Britain is regarded internationally as the Mecca of ceramic art. Albion has a long tradition in this genre; there exist full courses of study and the artistic climate is extremely favourable to this art form. The specific attention de...

A survey of the subject matter. Through all the setbacks and obstacles, Flanders continues to produce films, driven by the praiseworthy determination of the filmmakers who develop their talent in spite of the limited production and distribu...

In order to attract viewers, one of the seven Dutch public-service broadcasting organisations uses the phrase ‘It's theprogrammes that do it'. However encouraging this may sound, it is rarely true in reality. In the Low Countries today, tel...

What's that ? Flemish fashion ? Is there such a thing ? And is it up with the big boys ? About a decade ago it would indeed have been inconceivable, but today there is no doubt about it. Flemish fashion does exist. Though it took some time ...

Amsterdam-based designer Shigeru Watano once remarked: ‘Analytical and rational design principles govern Dutch design.' He was right. Dutch graphic design has emerged from an essentially typographic tradition, and this analytical background...

With the opening of its new wing in 1996, visitors to the Teyler Museum in Haarlem are now better able than ever before to enjoy the treasures of this oldest (1784) public museum in the Netherlands. For more than two centuries art and scien...

The Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century was a period which saw a quite extraordinary convergence of talent, not just in society as a whole, but also within the confines of a single family. There is no doubt that on the international...

The Flemish painter and sculptor Constant Permeke (1886-1952) sought in his work to represent everyday reality. His subjects usually related to the geographical area in which he found himself at a given moment; he feltit personally drawn to...

Herman de Coninck was a literary editor and an essayist who wrote infectiously about poetry. But first and foremost he was the most popular poet in Flanders. He wrote about subjects close to home, in a simple and accessible language of rare...

The Flemish architecture Stéphane Beel wants to liberate architecture from its cultural isolation and make it an enrichment of everyday life in a very concrete fashion.

The Vanitas piece as an individual genre is an integral part of the richness and variety of Low Countries art. But while isolated works are much admired, the genre as a whole has attracted relatively little attention. There has been no exh...

Johannes Vermeer painted the essence of his subjects with such fidelity that three hundred years later we are convinced that this is what Dutch interiors were like in Delft in the Golden Age. Even when conscientious scholars prove the reve...

The Flandriens: the forced-labourers of road-racing, members of that breed of racing cyclists who, particularly during the period between the wars, fired the imagination of the ordinary Fleming. The author of this piece seeks out the origi...

The poetic oeuvre of M. Vasalis is admittedly modest in size (only around 100 poems in total, spread over three collections), but her poetry has nonetheless acquired a position all of its own in Dutch-language literature of the twentieth c...

The Magic Realists opted for realistic depiction, but that did not mean that their subjects were also strictly realistic. They gave an unusual twist to their representation of reality. However, Dutch painters such as Carel Willink and Pyke...

Each painting is a portrait of the memory to Jeroen Henneman. He draws and paints objects which take on a life of their own. It is an upside-down world: objects, not people, are the victors in the struggle.

There are few places in the world where the comic strip is so closely interwoven with daily life as it is in Flanders. Most of these comic books are however tailored to a juvenile readership. Adult comics are still in their infancy in Flan...

There was a time when the man who called himself 'The Schoolmaster' was honoured as the colossus of Dutch popular verse. It was Gerrit van de Linde, born in 1808 in Rotterdam, and the headmaster-proprietor of a London boarding school in da...

The young architecture office MVRDV of Rotterdam has been enormously successful at home and abroad with idiosyncratic and deceptively simple work that is full of original touches.

About the Dutch and Flemish collections at Harvard, spread over more than 90 libraries.

The Flemish author Tom Lanoye and producer Luk Perceval adapted Shakespeare's eight 'kings' plays to make a 'serial drama' of almost 12 hours duration, entitled 'To War' and performed by Blauwe Maandag company.

About Jan Decleir, undoubtedly the best known and most highly acclaimed actor in Flanders.

About the NIAf, and how it makes an indispensable contribution to the continuation and development of a typical Dutch animated film culture.

Review of Marijke Spies' 'Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands: Olivier Brunel and the Passage to China and Cathay in the Sixteenth Century' (1msterdam, 1997)

On 30 January 1648, representatives of Spain and the United Provinces signed a peace treaty at Münster. The cornerstone of the agreement was Spain's juridical recognition of the independence and soverignty of the United Provinces.

About Talbot House in Poperinghe, a 'Home from Home' during World War I, a place where soldiers could step out of the war's madness into a friendly world.

Review of Bob Moore's 'Victims and Survivors. The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945' (London, 1997)

About this museum in Amsterdam, aiming to show the place of Jewish religion, history and culture within Dutch cultural history.

In its 100 years of history this museum has developed from a typical colonial institute into a museum and study centre where people from all over the world carry out research.

Review of Earle H. Waugh's 'Dissonant Worlds. Roger Vandesteene among the Cree' (Waterloo, ON, 1996)

About the Standard Grammar of the Dutch Language (ANS).

About the scholar Jozef IJsewijn, Professor at Leuven University, and his magnum opus, the 'Companion to Neo-Latin Studies'

Review of Remco Campert's 'THis Happened Everywhere' (San Francisco, 1997).

Review of 'Outside the Lines: New Dutch and Flemish Writing' (Madison, NJ, 1997)

Review of 'Dutch Poetry in Translation: Kaleidoscope. From Medieval Times to the Present' (Wilmette, IL, 1998) and 'Modern Poetry in Translation: Dutch and Flemish Issue' (London, 1998)

About 'Low Leans the Sky', a book published to mark the 5th anniversary of the yearbook 'The Low Countries'. It contains the text of a literary reading given at the National Gallery in London and the City Chambers in Edinburgh in March 1998...

As from the start of the 1998-1999 academic year, an Extraordinary Professor of Pop Music teaches at the University of Amsterdam.

About the Flemish composer who has gone down in the history of music as having initiated serial and electronic music in Flanders.

On the occasion of the retirement of Professor Etienne Vermeersch, Professor at Ghent University and an uncompromising and militant thinker who stubbornly resists the increasing lure of the new irrationalism.

On the retirement of Samuel IJsseling, Professor of Contemporary Philosopy at Leuven University, above all known for his insightful interpretations of modern French philosophy.

Review of Abraham Pais' autobiography 'A Tale of Two Continents. A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World' (Oxford, 199è)

The Dutch psychologist Piet Vroon passed away on 13 January 1998. His work was focused on on the knowledge of the processes behind human behaviour.

Review of William Z. Shetter's 'The Netherlands in Perspective. The Dutch Way of Organizing a Society and its Setting' (Utrecht, 1997)

Review of Ernst van de Wetering's 'Rembrandt. the Painter at Work' (Amsterdam, 1997) and Albert Blankert's 'Rembrandt: A Genius and his Impact' (Zwolle/Melbourne/Sydney, 1997)

Review of J.F. Heijbroek and Margaret F. Mac Donald's 'Whistler and Holland' (Zwolle/Amsterdam, 1997)

Review of'Jan Vercruysse. Portraits of the Artist' (Brussels/Ghent, 1997)

About Flemish designer Siegfried de Buck, under whose hands jewellery becomes much more tactile and recognisbale. It loses its demands for elegance and its cool unapproachability.

Edited by Dutch Book in Translation (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague)

Van Dyck' s influence on painting not only in England but also in Italy and the Low Countries was profound and long-lasting. He transformed portrait painting in the three cities in which he worked. In Genoa his style was imitated by a whole...

Marijke van Warmerdam (1959-) is a sculptor with fairly flexible views about sculpture. She has made an international name for herself with several unforgettable film loops.

The Dutch ‘polder model' for running the national economy appears to attracting a sizeable following. Some people even talk of a ‘Dutch miracle'. This article explores whether ‘economic model' and ‘miracle' are the appropriate terms here, o...

Belgian welfare policy is responding to a variety of problems and pursuing several objectives: The author distinguishes four agendas for welfare policy. Two agendas are already old; one is new. Alas, none can be abandoned for the others. Bu...

Just as Rembrandt will always be associated with ‘The Night Watch', so the name of Hendrik Petrus Berlage ( 1856- 1934) is inextricably linked to the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam. This internationally renowned building is usually seen as the...

The English have always been at home in Bruges. From the tenth century on they crossed the channel for commercial reasons, and thus, in the centuries that followed, England emerged as one of the most important merchant states in the Hanseat...

The soldier-poets who died, and those who survived the First World War, shared a range of emotions; fear, anger, despair, fatigue, boredom, humour, homesickness, compassion and grief generated by the cruel and extraordinary conditions under...

The Belgian monarchy was very popular at the time this article was written. Be that as it may, since 1993 the position of the King has not been what it was under Baudouin. The constitutional reform of that year which sought to combat politi...

Until the emergence of the Republican Society in 1996, the anti-monarchist movement in the Netherlands had for generations kept a very low profile. Under the present system, no minister holds political responsibility for the actions of the ...

A visitor to The Hague at the beginning of the nineteenth century would have found that the town offered many attractions. The fact that The Hague has the image of a ‘green town' and a ‘special town'is all due to the fact that for 750 years...

Louis Couperus' prolific talent as a storyteller, virtually unrivalled among his contemporaries, won him many admiring readers in English translation at the turn of the twentieth century, and provoked favourable comparisons with both Galswo...

The Dutch essayist Rudy Kousbroek once wrote of The Hague that some parts of the post-war city evoked images of half-eaten plates of food piled one on top of the other. Certainly, no other city in the Netherlands has undergone as much recon...

In 1873 the French critic René Ménard praised a new development in Dutch painting and applauded the newcomers' unidealised vision: ‘The small group of painters emerging on the coast of Holland possesses a candour that should give us pause.'...

Nine translated city poems by Hanny Michaelis, Georgine Sanders, Hugo Claus, Richard Minne , J.A. Deelder, Anton Korteweg, Adriaan de Roover, Hans van de Waarsenburg and Willem M. Roggeman

‘Unexpectedly beautiful and special. A wondrous city, destined for great wonders. ‘ This was how Frederik van Eeden (1860-1932), the well-known Dutch writer, psychiatrist and social reformer, enthusiastically wrote about New York on 29 Febr...

‘I loved whatever was good and good people too and I was respected: I have applied myself to learning, in particular to wisdom,' These are the words used by the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) to describe himself in his autobiog...

The only place where you can do anything is inside your own head: that is Thierry de Cordier's artistic creed. This sculptor-thinker wants to lead a cerebral, vegetative existence, with his feet planted in the earth like a tree or a bush, o...

A short history of the Jews in the Netherlands. All in all, the author concludes there is plenty of reason to assert that Jewish life in the Netherlands at this point in time is functioning, and full of variety and interesting possibilities...

With his first novel, ‘Mendel's Legacy', Marcel Möring was at once hailed by Dutch critics as a major author, one who dared to raise wide-ranging problems. They liked the way he did not go for ironic solutions but rather remained weighty an...

As a poet, prose writer, critic, essayist and playwright, Stefan Hertmans is probably one of the most multifaceted Flemish writers of his generation. And although his writing originally came up against a certain amount of resistance from li...

Charlotte Mutsaers is not one of those writers whose goal is a revolutionary new form at all costs, nor is her aim that of for instance Italo Calvino, to write a totally different book that bears no relation to previous books each time. On ...

The author paid wondered in one of his earlier lectures why more outsiders did not take advantage of Dutch intellectual hospitality. In this piece he recounts his own experience of this phenomenon.

The Belgian judicial system is failing. This is not a conclusion which has been reached recently, following the failure of judicial bodies in a number of cases involving missing children and the consequent mass protests. The maladies of the...

The poet Elisabeth Eybers is an unusual figure in contemporary Dutch liter ature. In the first place, of course, she owes this to the power and the originality of her talent, which makes her one of the most important poets in the Dutch-spea...

From his celebrated self-portraits to dreamlike scenes of the North Sea coast, a major exhibition in London will introduce UK audiences to the visionary work of Flemish artist Léon Spilliaert.

The mathematician Brouwer's heritage is nowadays well-recognised. In a number of areas in mathematics and computer science, his methods and ideas are accepted as exactly right. Topology has undergone a metamorphosis after Brouwer left the a...

Rik Poot is a hardworking and skilful artist, a true craftsman who never allowed himself to be influenced by trends, fashions or schools. He has had no part in the peripheral phenomena of the art world, nor has he tried to find favour with ...

In her thirty-five-year career, Judith Herzberg ( 1934-) has rarely diverged from the casual manner. And like her fellow poets, she often dwells on the ordinary things in ordinary life. What stands out in her work is the way she turns the o...

‘If you really want to get to know a group of people, look at the way they deal with the youngsters they were given and listen to the stories they tell them,' says an African proverb. A look at the literature for young readers of a particul...

However many cinéma vérité elements his documentaries contain, Johan van der Keuken has never made a secret of the fact that the ‘truth' of his films is not the universal truth, but quite emphatically his own. Wether in his early portraits ...

If what Jan van Vlijmen said in mid-1997 is true, namely that the number of genuine devotees of classical music is no more than five hundred, then it must be seen as remarkable that his name is certainly known to more than that number. It i...

Like a sober, brick-built castle, the Ir. D.F. Wouda pumping station (1920) stands proud on the IJsselmeer dike near the Friesian town of Lemmer. The largest and oldest steam-driven pumping station in the Netherlands (and still in use!) now...

The Netherlands has a great deal to offer the United States in a number of fields. Design, architecture, contemporary music and fine art are disciplines in which the Netherlands play a leading international role and for which there are good...

In 1998 the Royal Library in The Hague celebrated its 200th anniversary. It links, in exemplary fashion, the past and the present, tradition and progress, the paper heritage and technological innovation.

When Patrice Toye began to produce her first short films in the late eighties and early nineties and was busily making all sorts of documentaries, it was quickly realised that she was a very promising film maker. 'Rosie' is not only Toye's ...

Trust has developed from a small, unsubsidised group of like-minded theatre-makers, into a company that can bear comparison with the large ensembles in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. It is a company that wants to mirror a new era, a ti...

The year 2000 sees the commemoration of an illustrious birth in a number of places, throughout Flanders. A short portrait of the Emperor of a 'realm on which the sun never set'.

Flanders and the Netherlands both bear the marks and scars of the past. Landscape is more than a historical and cultural creation: we form the landscape every day, and try to mould it to our own requirements in the eternal struggle between ...

Landscape painting, and especially the realistic rendering of the physical landscape we see around us, is a speciality that has always thrived particularly well in the Low Countries. In this article we get all the classics (Bruegel, Jan van...

Geometry won't get you far in Flanders. There the horizon is closer, the roads are not as straight and the water is not such an overwhelming presence. Here everything is on a smaller scale and more cluttered than in the Netherlands. Messier...

Nature development has been going on in the Netherlands for several decades now. It has become the second track of the country's environmental policy, running alongside the so-called ‘classical' conservation of nature. The author gives info...

Every nation gets the landscape it deserves. The Low Countries: affluent and very densely populated, having increasingly to contend with the tension and perhaps discrepancy between prosperity and well-being, between working and living, betw...

A portfolio of landscape photos by Stephan Vanfleteren

Ever since Belgium came into existence its end has regularly been predicted, mostly by foreign observers. On June 13 1999, after the elections, with the fragmentation of the political landscape and the continuing success of the far right, d...

Dutch animation has a particular reputation for individualism. Over the last twenty years, Dutch animators, working in a spectrum of personal styles and techniques a million miles removed from Disney bluebirds and the mass children's market...

Among collectors, it is the Americans and Germans especially who show a keen interest in paintings by Luc Tuymans, an artist from Antwerp who, as Adrian Searle once wrote, ‘examines the malaise of European culture'. But to Tuymans himself t...

Right from the beginning Armando's work was no imaginary depiction of an internalised experience. This Dutch writer and artist presents reality in the raw, without comment or interpretation, mercilessly. His work is always focused, and with...

With his ‘The Bureau' novel series J.J. Voskuil, a writer at his own expense with a small circle of readers, has grown to become a writer read by tens of thousands and even a public phenomenon. (with translated extracts from ‘The Office' )

As a poet, Guido Gezelle is as much a seeker as a finder. Whatever he touches with his words rediscovers the purity of the first day. This makes him unique. It also explains why those who sought to imitate him always fell short of him. In h...

The feast of Saint Nicholas (more popularly known as ‘Sinterklaas') was originally a feast for children. That's how it began during the Middle Ages, and that's how it's still regarded in Flanders. In the Netherlands, however, the adults hav...

Art-lovers who visit Flanders now have a new five-star attraction: the gothic church of St Peter in Leuven, where ‘The Last Supper' painted by Dirk Bouts hangs. Both church and painting have been completely restored. This was celebrated in ...

An international outlook is a constant component in the ongoing definition of Dutch identity and character. Rembrandt's interest in visual culture beyond the Netherlands is one measure of his own Dutchness, and his practice of assimilating ...

At the turn of the millennium it was 400 years since the first direct contact between Holland and Japan was established. This was commemorated with a wide range of economic, cultural and scientific activities in both countries under the slo...

There are few artists in whose life and work Japonism played such an important role as in that of Vincent van Gogh. In the latter half of the 19th century Japonism was what we would nowadays call a ‘hype', a craze that left its marks on the...

From the first consignment of Chinese porcelain on the Dutch market (1602) to the decline of oriental-influenced ‘Delftware' in the 18th century. But even today, Oriental porcelain is still a distinctive part of Dutch culture and life.

Review of a 'A Financial History of the Netherlands' (1997), a book that attempts to describe the main features of almost five centuries of development in the relationship between banking, currency and public finance in the Netherlands.

The 'In Flanders Fields' museum is not a traditional museum. It's a 'layered' museum, a museum you can put together yourself, and so it's eclectic and postmodern in the sense that the big stories are replaced by the countless small ones.

In 'Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture' Annette Stott discusses a range of aspects and manifestations of the Holland Mania which possessed the US between 1880 and about 1920. She also mentions some Dutch inf...

Review of Kees Groeneboer's 'Gateway to the West. The Dutch Language in Colonial Indonesia 1600-1950'. This book is not only a history of the subject, but also vividly demonstrates why for the foreseeable future Dutch will remain an indispe...

With 'Bare Hands' (tr. David Colmer), the Flemish writer Bart Moeyaert has become the writer he always wanted to be: one who writes from the depths of his soul.

A personal account of the co-operation between the poet and her English translator.

Review of guest editor Hilda van Neck-Yoder's issue of Callaloo devoted to 'Caribbean Literature from Surinam, the Netherlands antilles, Aruba and the Netherlands'.

Miriam Van hee's poetry plays with a number of central concepts or constants, which change their meaning in ever changing contexts. Her verse is in this way both familiar and always different.

Review of 'The Defiant Muse. Dutch and Flemish Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present.' (ed. Maaike Meijer), an anthology of 'woman-identified works'.

Review of 'The Captain of the Butterflies', an anthology of translated poems written by Cees Nooteboom.

From 21 to 27 March 1999 eighteen Dutch-language writers were guests at the London Festival of Literature. The 'Stichting Frankfurter Buchmesse '93' supported this event with an impressive promotional campaign.

A portrait of the Brussels Ictus Ensemble, whose mission it is to present contemporary music in all its stylistic variations to audiences at home and abroad.

Short biography of the Amsterdam botanist Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), whose ideas about saltatory evolution were also enthusiastically received in far-off America. De Vries also travelled widely across the United States.

Review of Francisca de Haan's 'Gender and the Politics of Office Work. The Netherlands 1860-1940', which provides an insight into the difficult struggle facing women in a country which is so hostile to female labour, and where so many thing...

The 1960s saw radical social and cultural changes, and the Dutch government felt obliged to respond to them. The Social and Cultural Planning Office was set up in 1973 to do just that, a means to achieving a policy of social equality and 'l...

A personal view on Dutch contemporary art by Janet Koplos, senior editor of 'Art in America'. In 1992 she visited the Netherlands for the first time and was fascinated by the ways in which that art differed from New York art. She considers ...

From late September 1998 to early January 1999, for the first time in its history, the Metropolitan Museum in New York exhibited its own rich collection of 'Early Netherlandish Painting' - paintings produced in the Northern and especially t...

Review of 'Piet Mondrian. Catalogue Raisonné'. An impressive work at almost 7 kilos for 2 volumes, it also advances research on the painter and his work enormously.

Review of Michael North's 'Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age', a readable and comprehensive survey of Dutch seventeenth-century art from an economic and social-historical viewpoint.

Rogiers is one of the great talents of contemporary Belgian sculpture. His work displays an unbelievably powerful urge to challenge the established traditions of art. His work has also been linked to Mannerism, seeking to draw attention to ...

In March 2000 there was an overview of Theo van Doesburg's work in the Centraal Museum (Utrecht) and the Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo). It showed his talents as painter, poet, essayist, designer, typographer and architect.

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

This brief survey shows how for more than 700 years Flemish people, most of them missionaries, have contributed within the context of their own 'mission' to a better understanding of Chinese people, and how substantial their contribution of...

The poet and prose writer J. Slauerhoff is one of the most important authors in Dutch literature. Critical views on his work have nevertheless always been mixed. This article paints a portrait of this 'Frisian Rimbaud', a late romantic whos...

Christine D'haen has proved to be one of the greatest poets to emerge since the Second World War. She introduced new themes into Dutch literature: that of house and garden, children's games and games of love; and she did it from a feminine ...

Godfried Vervisch has been painting almost nothing other but human figures for at least 30 years. In these pictures one can often recognise features of the painter. They also frequently depict women offering themselves in full-frontal naked...

The clear, powerful paintings of Robert Zandvliet demonstrate the zest for life of the art of painting. He shows that the white canvas still holds a promise and hides a world of boundless possibilities. He is not encumbered by the ballast o...

No one in the Low Countries can claim NEVER to have seen any of Dick Bruna's pictures. Child or grownup, everyone in the Netherlands and Flanders is acquainted with his work. Despite the fact that for some reason or other his cartoon charac...

In the late nineties, theatre audiences in the Low Countries were treated to a series of remarkable Shakespeare productions, the chief event being the production of Tom Lanoye and Luk Perceval's 'To War', a startling production of Shakespea...

An essay about Frank Martinus Arion's novels, accentuating his central theme: a critical plea for the retention of all that is 'one's own'. (with a translated extract from ‘Double Play' )

The Dutch have good reason to consider themselves a 'Guide Land', even today. Nor is the myth of their progressiveness merely built on empty self-image - the Dutch really are so, in fruitful, appealing ways. But all nations are prone to hub...

Apart from the technical mastery and the constantly surprising flights of imagination, the finest woodcuts of Masereel are particularly impressive for their accessibility to the many and for their poignancy, which has, in no small way, to d...

Edgar Tytgat was a child who was born old and did not get any older. Time had a special relationship with this man who had wanted to be a clockmaker. Critics did not really know what to make of him. But he became an exceptional painter. Tha...

The composer Peter Vermeersch is especially concerned to evoke images in his listeners' minds. Given the choice, he'll call himself a notemonger - someone who doesn't sit around waiting for inspiration, but is concerned with discipline, wit...

Inez van Lamsweerde created an international furore in the 1990s with her appealing but slightly unsettling photos. The interest in this Dutch artist's work derives from the technical perfection it displays as well as, most certainly, the u...

Hadewijch's entire work, but especially the 'Poems in Stanzas', expresses in a way unique in her time (the Middle Ages) the condition of man confronted with the riddle of the absolute, the transcendent, whatever you want to call it - that s...

Hugo de Groot, better known as Grotius, will always be regarded as 'the father of international law'. To many, the Dutch is a visionary thinker, in politics as well as in religion, to others a utopian; his learning never disputed, his passi...

The author tells of the yearning for death in the Middle Ages and the associated distaste for bodily things. Later this attitude gradually changed; enjoying life was no longer regarded as sinful and the human soul became more than an exile ...

About birth in Flanders. These days birth is no longer a mysterious female event, but a medical one: the ancient rituals have been replaced by the consultant gynaecologist, advanced equipment, painless childbirth and Caesarean section. The ...

In the Netherlands the birth of a child is inseparable from buttered rusk with muisjes. This piece tells the story of these coloured aniseed comfits and then goes on to describe the living-room culture prevailing in the Netherlands. Natural...

In the year 2000 the sight of the dying and the dead is no longer part of daily life in Flanders. Here too the medical world has taken over; nowadays most Flemings die in the seclusion of a hospital ward, while laying out a corpse at home h...

A description of the old rituals in the Netherlands designed to allow people to cope with the confusion and grief attendant on a death. As in Flanders, more and more Dutch people are opting for cremation. Here too we see death leaving the r...

An essay which asserts that in the 1960s the Low Countries entered on a ‘second demographic transition'. The number of divorces rose, the birth rate fell and cohabitation increased. And today we see a rapid rise in the number of one-person ...

Poems by Jan Moritoen (?), Multatuli, Jan Hendrik Leopold, Willem Elsschot, J.C. Bloem, Gerrit Achterberg, M. Vasalis, Christine D'haen, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Hugo Claus, Luuk Gruwez, Esther Jansma and Menno Wigman (in Dutch and English)

The author recounts the history of anatomical studies in the Low Countries. This article discusses both the radical scientific approach of Andreas Vesalius and the seventeenth-century anatomical pieces of Rembrandt and others.

In the field of abortion the Netherlands and Belgium are exceptional: the figures there are the lowest in the world, despite the liberal legislation on the subject. Consequently, the prevention of abortion seems to be a matter more of effic...

The story of capital punishment in Belgium. Though it was not officially removed from the statute book until 1991, in practice sentence of death was automatically commuted to penal servitude with hard labour for life from as early as 1863.

In the Netherlands the death penalty was abolished in 1870. In 1998 over half of the Dutch people questioned seemed to favour its reintroduction; but these figures are highly relative and are often governed by emotional factors such as an i...

A journey through the First World War cemeteries of West Flanders and Northern France. These ‘lieux de mémoire' speak of a war whose last eye-witnesses are fast vanishing from the scene. And so the Great War will finally become part of `gre...

Bachrach charts the Dutch influences on the work of Joseph Conrad. We see Conrad signing on on the Highland Forest in Amsterdam. Later he dines in Borneo with the Dutch colonial trader Olmeyer, who would provide the model for the protagonis...

John Leighton, British director of the Van Gogh Museum, tells in A Brit Takes On Van Gogh not only about his renovated museum, but also about the differences between the museum scene in Britain and the Netherlands.

‘One-Third Land and Two-Thirds Sky' – that is how the film director Peter Greenaway saw, and sees, the Netherlands. He works regularly in that country, and in his account he tells what fascinates him in Dutch society, from the landscape pai...

The author writes on aspects of the work of the painter Hans Broek: the influence of the Californian landscape, the house motif and the absence of man from the landscape.

A description of Antwerp's Zurenborgwijk as a miniature city of illusion. The diversity of building style in the houses, which date roughly from the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth century, make of the area a permanent architectural exhibi...

Vincent speculates about the international renown which Flemish author Willem Elsschot might have achieved if efforts to publish his work in English had been more successful. However, he does not seek to portray Elsschot as a misunderstood ...

A survey of the work of Dutch and Flemish jewellery designers. The author describes the differences between them, but also comments on the increasing cooperation between designers from the two regions.

A discussion of the work of the Dutch poet Gerrit Kouwenaar, who in his verses faces up to life's complexity with courage and impressive honesty. With five poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar in English translation

An introduction to the `almost-art' of the Fleming Wim Delvoye. His work is based on the principle of duality, in which images are confronted with the identity of their material support; for instance, in his ironing boards adorned with hera...

His inventive use of the printing-press has assured Hendrik N. Werkman of a unique place in Dutch art history. This essay offers an overview of the work of this master-printer, whose social conscience and Resistance activities cost him his ...

Millions of people have read Anne Frank's diary, but Ton Broos investigates what books Anne herself read. The result is a more balanced picture of a girl too often portrayed as a semi-saint or a `cute Shirley Temple in wartime'.

This article surveys the extensive oeuvre of Gerard Reve and discusses the author's controversial attitudes to sex, death and religion. With four extracts by Gerard Reve in English translation.

A look at the work of the Flemish painter Emile Claus in its European perspective. Claus was influenced by the French impressionists, but the reception of his work in Belgium was rather lukewarm. Progressive foreign critics, by contrast, pr...

The author recounts the history of socialism in Belgium. He begins with the founding in 1885 of the Belgian Workers' Party, which in 1945 became the Belgian Socialist Party. In 1978 the unitary Belgian party split into separate Flemish and ...

Daniël Vanacker outlines the history of Ghent. He tells of the Flemish city's prosperity in the Middle Ages, its difficult relations with Emperor Charles V, its development as an industrial centre in the nineteenth century and the cultural ...

Flemish writer Stefan Hertmans' personal account of Ghent. He says that he can't write about his city. But of course he does, and then maintains that he has said nothing at all; at most he has captured something fleeting.

About the life and work of Janus Secundus and his two brothers. The emphasis here is not on Janus Secundus' brilliant Latin poetry (represented by a translated fragment) but rather on the brothers' position as officials at the Burgundian co...

Youth theatre in the Low Countries is the subject of this article. Nijhof's survey shows that the social commitment and educational ideals of the sixties and seventies have given way to a theatre in which experience, imagination and the pla...

Salverda discusses the multilingualism of Dutch society as the consequence of continuing migration. The strong, open economy attracts people to the Netherlands from a multitude of countries, so that today over a hundred languages are spoken...

About the work of Paul de Wispelaere. This Flemish writer cultivates ambivalence and contradiction, both in his essays on literature and in his own creative work. In his view, uncertainty and doubt are the great themes that gnaw at the hear...

The ‘Orpheus' here is Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, who left his mark on the musical life of the Northern Netherlands in the second half of the sixteenth century. He was the last major representative of the Dutch and Flemish polyphony which do...

Van Egeraat, who has had his own firm of architects since the mid-nineties, began his career as one of the founders of Mecanoo. But he has made a start on developing his own oeuvre, claiming that architecture ‘must be fashionable'.

The British Library is justifiably renowned for its holdings of early printed (pre-1850) material from the Low Countries. And it's still trying hard to expand the collection and make additions where necessary.

The joint Flemish / Dutch satellite TV-station BVN-TV seeks to provide viewers abroad with information about Flanders and the Netherlands. On 1 September 1999 the reception area of BVN-TV was extended substantially. BVN can now also be rece...

Oerol – a ten-day, international summer festival of theatre which includes music and dance, and also a wide variety of visual arts. The first festival, in the summer of 1982, did little more than blaze the trail. Now each year the whole isl...

Ivens was born in 1898: the same year as Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler. And there are a number of striking parallels in their development. All three began their careers in the front line of the avant-garde movement. Their concerns were ini...

According to Flemish filmmaker Storck, two taboos distinguish the documentary from the feature film. A true documentary maker will never violate human suffering, grief and death, nor the intimate act of lovemaking, whereas there is scarcely...

Few makers of theatre in the Low Countries today explore the limits of their medium as intensively as the Fleming Jan Lauwers. What he tries to achieve in his productions is to make speech, text, movement and form rub up against and merge i...

When, in 1164, Archbishop Thomas Becket opposed the arrogations the English king, Henry II of the Plantagenets, placed on the English church, he incurred the wrath of both the royal court and the English clergy. Was Thomas Becket also known...

A century ago, the whole world was following events in South Africa with intense interest. Two small Afrikaner Boer republics were fighting there for freedom and justice against the British Empire. How does the new South Africa of today rem...

No act of war was more portentous, in the early days of World War I, than Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium. The country found itself suddenly elevated into a symbol of the conflict's higher meaning: Belgium as a martyr for the higher c...

Dutch is by no means dead in the United States, but its existence is somewhat akin to freemasonry. One has to know where to find its practitioners and approach them in the right way. In the meantime, the majority of Americans carry on using...

The Flemish Poet Guido Gezelle (1830-1899) has become, a century after his death, something of a national institution in Belgium. His centenary did not go unmarked in England either. The Centre for Dutch and Flemish Culture hosted an event ...

A review of ‘The Masterpiece'. In this novel, Enquist challenges readers to look down at the dark ice rapidly speeding by them as they race on their mental skates across the beautiful, haunting world she creates. It is a world in which the ...

In the Middle Ages, in the borderland where Romance and Germanic languages meet – Picardy, Flanders and Alsace – a new literary genre emerged: beast epic. This piece is about the place of the Dutch-language Reynaert tradition in English fox...

From Gerlach's debut No More Hurt (1979) to her most recently published collections, her poetry clearly sets out to give an adequate description of reality, as represented in the mind.

In voluminous The Flemish Folk-Song in Europe (Het Vlaamse volkslied in Europa) the Flemish Jesuit Albert Boone covers the most important themes from the European folk-song tradition and examines the extent to which Flemish / Dutch folk-son...

These days, the cluttered years of the Dutch National Jazz Archives are in the past. Now they are the Dutch Jazz Archives (Nederlands Jazz Archief; NJA) and it has space, new furniture, a group of industrious volunteers and paid staff. Ever...

Dirk Brossé (1960-) is a Flemish all-round musician who over the last ten years has acquired international renown as a conductor and composer. As a composer, too, he is very versatile: he writes film music and concert music for various type...

At the close of the twentieth century, the Nobel Prize for Physics again went to the Netherlands, to Martinus Veltman and his former student Gerard 't Hooft. The award provides a welcome boost for physics in the Netherlands at a time when t...

A high-tech valley is growing up more and more round the Catholic University of Leuven, on the analogy of the famous Silicon Valley to the south of San Francisco, the Mecca of the computer industry. The showpiece of the ‘Leuven valley' is I...

It is arguable that Spinoza, second only to Rembrandt, is today the most famous of all Dutchmen. It is therefore a thoroughly welcome event, as well as a remarkable coincidence, that after many years in which the reading public has lacked a...

Georg Rumphius' The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, originally published in 1705, has been translated into English and published in a beautiful scholarly edition by E.M. Beekman. It is a book about the shells of the Moluccas.The translation is ...

Beer drinking in Flanders goes back a long way. The rich heritage of Flemish beer used to be a well-kept secret, but the efforts of café owners and writers have helped to promote the image of Flemish ales. As word gets around, the names of ...

Not surprisingly it was men who, at the beginning of this century, introduced the ban on brothels in the Netherlands, a fine example of hypocritical legislation. Actually, the ban on brothels had been a dead letter for a long time. It came ...

Each year numerous new publications about Rembrandt come onto the market and 1999 was no exception. It was a good Rembrandt year, particularly since two Rembrandt exhibitions were mounted in the Netherlands: one at the Mauritshuis in The Ha...

Little is known about the majority of Flemish primitives. Although the names of so many painters have been preserved in archives, there are few works which can be attributed with certainty. But no one painter gives rise to more discussion t...

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

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About the theme of this yearbook: ‘Low Countries, Host Countries?' or: hospitality and immigration

A historical account of the Low Countries as a refuge for philosophers, artists, writers etc. The reader meets René Descartes in his Amsterdam study, Charlotte and Emily Brontë in a Brussels boarding school, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth on ...

About writers from the second generation of immigrants, uniting two cultures in their books, but also about ‘exiled authors' who are trying to find a new home in the Dutch language. They revitalise the Dutch language, see Dutch customs and ...

Kader Abdolah, an Iranian physcist and writer living in the Netherlands since 1988, contributes a couple of texts on his experiences with the Dutch: about a sad Dutch woman, about a big long wooden ladder and about the feeling of having no...

Having been born and brought up in Berlin, then living successively in Leipzig, Rostock, Cologne and the Flemish city of Leuven, the philosopher Rudolf Boehm has now dwelt for over thirty years in Ghent, in the heart of Flanders. A personal...

A story by Anil Ramdas, born in Surinam and living in the Netherlands, about one's ‘assimilation trajectory'. One remains burdened by the restlessness of the traveller, never becoming a full resident. And thus the enigma of arrival is like ...

Born in Uganda, Moses Isegawa has been living in Beverwijk (The Netherlands) since 1990. He writes in English, but his books are published in Dutch first. Isegawa thinks that home is everywhere and nowhere: it's where he can work and achiev...

Large-scale migrations have always been a feature of the Low Countries, with Belgium and the Netherlands in turn receiving and sending out various groups of migrants. Hooghe takes a look at decolonisation, employment-driven migration, and t...

Pieter de Hooch's paintings offer a remarkable vision of domestic life in seventeenth-century Holland. He had a notable fondness for intricate interior spaces, meticulously ordered and furter enriched by the effects of sunlight penetrating ...

This essay focuses on the Dutch identity debate and on the attempts of intellectuals to promote national cohesion.Van Ginkel concludes his survey with the observation that discussion about Dutch individuality is always fed by fear on the on...

The political and social upheavals in Belgium during the late 1990s have not left Flemish literature untouched. There was a brief but vigorous debate about politics and literature in the literary world, but the creative fall-out of all this...

A short biographical article about Henriette Roland Holst-van der Schalk, poetess, writer and socialist. One of the most revered women in the history of the Netherlands and a great international figure, she owes her reputation to her politi...

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in Leeuwarden in 1876 but became infamous as Mata Hari, exotic, mistress extraordinaire and possible superspy. Was she indeed as deceitful and voluptuous as often described? Lots of questions and only so...

The fact that Belgium embarked on an ambitious colonial adventure in the last quarter of the nineteenth century can be attributed to the initiative of King Leopold II. Congo literally became ‘his' colony. For the production of rubber, Leopo...

Happiness is often associated with riches. The author scans the limitations of this connection. He defines poverty and concludes that 6.7 percent of the population in the Netherlands lives below the poverty line. Hence the author dwells on ...

A very close reading of Toon Tellegen's work. In his stories and poems this Dutch author never wants to start with the things that we take for granted. His writings do not present a view of the worl, they present a view of language. (with f...

Until fairly recently it was thought that in early modern Europe children were not very highly valued. This is a misconception, as the author illustrates by looking at some children's portraits from the Low Countries (which were part of an ...

Co Westerik is a loner in the post-war art of the Netherlands. He combines a craftsmanslike technique with an utterly unique style and approach to his subjects. With very oddly chosen images, in a distorted perspective and a different scale...

An impression of the ‘difficult' poems and novels of Flemish writer Peter Verhelst. In the space of thirteen years he has constructed a totally individual oeuvre, with a style and themes - self-annihilation, the body, death - which are imme...

The Flemish artist Patrick van Caeckenbergh has constructed a fantastic mental world in mixed media to protect himself against the lacklustre outside world. ‘Melancholy' seems to be a fitting word to describe his work: the ‘Sehnsucht' hanke...

Thomas Rosenboom's approach to the historical novel is quite unlike that of his Dutch colleagues. His work embodies the difference between a real historical novel and the old-fashioned biographical romance. What stays in mind after reading ...

The importance of bridges to the life of a country such as the Netherlands is almost impossible to overestimate. The country has the highest bridge density in the world. The author gives an abbreviated account of the history of Dutch bridge...

Dutch is a strong and vital language. The author writes about the changes that have taken place in recent decades. He also looks at the most important works published on the Dutch language in this period, works which bear testimony to the v...

Translated poems by Miriam van Hee, Hugo Claus, Lut de Block, Eva Gerlach, K. Michel, Piet Gerbrandy, C.O. Jellema, Frank Koenegracht, Peter Holvoet-Hanssen, Leonard Nolens, Gwij Mandelinck, Hagar Peeters, Stefan Hertmans, Esther Jansma and...

A survey of recent short films in Flanders. The author believes that the Flemish short film would benefit more in the medium term from forceful acting projects that from the familiar Flemish ‘serieux'. He also thinks that the new digital me...

Mourning. Cherishing the dead. Examining, delaying, outwitting, toying with, and renaming death, in order to finally let go of it again. This is the essence of Esther Jansma's work. She is a past master in bringing home to the reader the co...

In recent years it has been almost impossible to keep up with the attempts made to describe the distinct character of Belgian – and in particular Flemish – contemporary architecture, and to identify and promote it as such. A review of three...

In its twenty years of existence the Flemish cultural centre De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam has evolved into the first port of call for anyone in the Netherlands who is interested in Flemish culture. It is no Flemish cultural reservation but ...

The IDFA has been the catalyst in reviving the documentary climate in the Netherlands while at the same time gaining an international reputation for itself. In 2000, the IDFA was the largest documentary film festival in the world.

The internationally renowned Flemish maker of animated films, Raoul Servais, can look back on a glittering career. With a relatively small number of animated films, only twelve over forty years, he has won prizes at all the world's major fi...

One can rejoice in the fact that immigrant participation in both Dutch-speaking and foreign-language theatre has been going on for years, long before the government decided to attach importance to it. About the Onafhankelijk Toneel, Het Wat...

Belgian cinema has often been thought of as one of the most undervalued in Europe. Researchers will have great difficulties in finding relevant literature on it. However, in recent years there have after all been some extremely useful publi...

A portrait of a stubborn grand old man in Flemish theatre. Both as writer and director Tone Brulin shows himself to be a man who has made the world his sphere of operations.

When the German Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam on 14 May 1940 some nine thousand people lost their lives, 25,000 dwellings were destroyed, 11,000 buildings, 2,350 shops, thirteen hospitals, two thousand factories and workshops, two theatres, tw...

In the academic year 2000-2001, the Catholic University of Leuven celebrated the 575th anniversary of its foundation in 1425. A short history.

A review of Geert Mak's Jorwerd, the Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe, an account of the slow death of the small village in the northern province of Friesland where the author spent his youth (Geert Mak, Jorwerd. The De...

A review of two books about Dutch immigrants in Canada (Herman Ganzevoort, The Last Illusion. Letters from Dutch Immigrants in the ‘Land of Opportunity', 1924-1930. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999 / Frans J. Schryer, The Netherla...

The central theme of Elsbeth Locher-Scholten's new book on Women and the Colonial State is how, especially and increasingly during the first half of the twentieth century, Dutch and Indonesian women, despite their shared aspirations, were k...

As early as 1991-1994, the British National Corpus (BNC) was set up: a huge collection of one hundred million British-English words, spoken and written in context. A medium-sized language like Dutch cannot stand still in the rapidly expandi...

In 2001 the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier had two books to his name – together hardly more than three hundred pages, but more than enough to warrant the assessment that Dutch literature has been enriched with a new sound. And what is so rema...

Babel literary guides are known for being handy-sized, upbeat reference books that review works of literature in succinct commentary followed by brief excerpts. This guide to Dutch and Flemish fiction begins with a compact introduction to s...

The Watou poetry-summers, which take place every year in the West-Flemish village of that name close to the French border, knock the usual tedium of a summer in the country clear out of sight. Each year the organiser and poet Gwij Mandelinc...

The Netherlands has acquired a reputation for producing well-edited publications in the field of music and maintaining good working relationships with the country's composers. This article is a review of a detailed guide to a hundred Dutch ...

In June 2000, the Museum of Musical Instruments (Muziekinstrumentenmuseum, or the MIM), moved into the former building of to the Old England department store chain near Koningsplein in Brussels. After twenty-two years of plan-hatching, fund...

In October 2000 the Dutch-American mathematician Dirk Jan Struik peacefully passed away at his home in Belmont, MA, at the age of 106. Struik made his name as the author of A Concise History of Mathematics, published in 1948, one of the fir...

In the past scholars have underrated the significance of Spinoza (1632-1677) as a key figure in the radical thought of the Enlightenment: that is the view of the British historian Jonathan I. Israel. In his new book he attempts to rectify t...

A personal account by an Englishman living in Belgium: Belgium is remarkable in the unremarkable. If pressed to find a single word to describe life in Belgium, one might well settle for ‘easy' .

On 28 November 2000 history was made in the Netherlands. On that day the Second Chamber, the lower house of parliament, passed the Euthanasia Bill by a majority of 104 to 40. An analysis.

The exhibition Brussels, Cross-Roads of Cultures resolutely followed the course taken by the arts, with the emphasis on painting. Starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it continued right through to the present day, as if ther...

If one considers all the well-known Dutch sculptors who have built up a considerable body of work, there is none with such a relatively large proportion of sculptures for public spaces as André Volten. The square, the cube, the circle, the ...

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

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This article is an overview of the historic iconoclasm that swept through the Low Countries in 1566. By destroying images and desecrating the host, the Reformed Protestants drew a sharp dividing line between themselves and the rest of soci...

A personal vision, from a Catholic perspective, of secularisation in the Netherlands. People are abandoning the churches, and the author observes that the structure of the Church and religion have become historical. And since the structure ...

In the sixteenth century, some 18,000 ‘unbelievers' were tortured and executed in the Low Countries. They were not even ‘atheists', as atheism was an exceptional phenomenon up to 1850. The author describes the history of, for example, De Da...

‘A strange calm after the storm' is how the author describes post-Catholic Flanders at the beginning of the 21st century. In fact, there never was a storm: even before the Second Vatican Council, a noiseless dechristianising had begun. It h...

The article begins with a discussion of the ‘Flemish Enlightenment' in the 18th century and militant freethinking in the 19th century. As old ideological oppositions – belief v. unbelief – dissolve in today's secularised society, most non-b...

Did Dutch and Flemish literature turn its back on God after the Second World War? The author points to His presence or conspicuous absence in the work of authors such as Walschap, Claus, Reve, Hermans, Biesheuvel, Wolkers, and Reve. In the ...

Nowadays very few new churches are built in the Netherlands. But secularisation has another consequence: more and more existing churches are falling into disuse. Some of these buildings are given a second lease of life: they are now used - ...

A collection of poems about belief, unbelief and the difficulty of faith: ?Hadewijch, Jacobus Revius, Joost van den Vondel, Nikolaas Beets, Guido Gezelle, J.A. dér Mouw, Pierre Kemp, Martinus Nijhoff, Maurice Gilliams, Gerrit Achterberg, Id...

Finding new uses for parish churches is not yet a problem in Flanders since very few of them are redundant. Several aspects of the situation are very different from that in the Netherlands. The churches are managed by church councils called...

This article presents a brief study of the way in which Jesus was portrayed in late-mediaeval art. The author focuses on the Mayer van den Bergh Breviary (1500-1510). Here we see how the artists used the same models and were inspired by the...

Broadly speaking, until the 1960s there were two traditions in church music in the Netherlands: Protestant and Catholic. Every age has the right to a contemporary expression of its faith. And in the twentieth century that faith has been sev...

A short history of Dutch Protestant missionary work in the Indonesian Archipelago. At the beginning of the 16th century, Portugal's Catholic missionaries were expelled by the Dutch and replaced with Protestant clergy. Surprisingly, Islam an...

As early as 1651, a number of Flemish Capuchins were working as missionaries in the old Kingdom of Congo. In 1885, King Leopold II proclaimed the birth of the Congo Free State and was granted permission by the Belgian parliament to assume t...

Compared with other European nations, the Dutch presence in North America reaches far back in time. The author discusses the presence of religious groups of Dutch origin in the United States and Canada. The article focuses not only on the f...

The large number of contemporary dance groups and institutions in Brussels has had two main consequences. The 1990s saw the beginning of a large-scale migration of young dancers to companies in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium. In this rap...

The Amsterdam photographer Jacob Olie Jacobszoon (1834-1905) was not a professional photographer, but, despite an industrious and eventful life, he found time to take some 5000 photographs. All his photographs have been preserved and meticu...

The role played by George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923) in the history of Dutch painting is comparable to that of Courbet or Manet in French art. Breitner's aim was to paint the history of his own era, of ordinary people, of the man and woma...

As early as the 1970s, the Flemish poet Luuk Gruwez called for a return to emotion, to a profession of beliefs, to the great themes in which the reader could recognise him or herself. The primary function of poetry: to touch the reader, to ...

Furniture design in Flanders is blossoming as never before. Some of its creations would be more at home in the world of art and some take their inspiration from architectural principles, while others draw on traditions of craftsmanship. In ...

There is always something informal and casual about the work of the Dutch writer J. Bernlef (1937-). From his earliest work onwards, he has searched for things that have not yet been recorded, catalogued or given significance. He searches f...

Dutch artist Teun Hocks (1947-) is sometimes described as a photo-painter. He makes carefully arranged black-and-white photographs, which he then uses as an artist's canvas. Apart from the self-timer, there is only one protagonist in his wo...

The author examines the influence of the Dutch Old Masters on English landscape painters such as Sir Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and the Norwich School of John Crome. The article also discusses Encounters. New Art from Old, the exhi...

In 1998 Bruges was named European City of Culture 2002. The city had of course been chosen for its image as a model mediaeval city of monuments and museums. However, the selectors had also looked for evidence of a dynamic society, and that ...

The work of the Dutch poet J.C. Bloem (1887-1966) has been reprinted many times. Bloem was a superior craftsman who wrote many poems about human life that are intensely personal but at the same time universal. His poems, never ‘popular' or ...

Carel Visser (1928-) is probably the most influential and innovative of the post-war generation of Dutch sculptors. To many people Visser is best known as the sculptor of stacked bars, cubes, double forms, and for Holes, which appeared in t...

The Flemish poet Karel van de Woestijne (1878-1929) still features prominently in histories of literature, but the author observes that the writer who, despite his aristocratic attitude and baroque rhetoric, once enjoyed the boundless admir...

From the beginning, the three-dimensional work of the Flemish artist Berlinde de Bruyckere (1964-) has had a fundamental duality. Her sculptures and installations can be quickly interpreted, in that a substantial part of each one can be ‘un...

Since his remarkable debut Blue Mondays (Blauwe maandagen), Arnon Grunberg (1971-) has been the enfant terrible of the Dutch literary scene, while at the same time being the embodiment of the mediagenic teddy bear. De Rover presents an over...

A brief history and guided tour of this elegant museum in The Hague, created around the private collection of Baron Willem van Westreenen (1783-1848). After 150 years the museum has been thoroughly restored, and the baron's house was re-ope...

After his relatively late debut, the Flemish writer, translator and critic Paul Claes (1943-) let loose a flood of articles and more than fifty books and booklets. Van der Paardt regards him as a true literary wizard, who feels at home in a...

The Leonardo Da Vinci of the Low Countries is responsible for many revolutionary discoveries in physics, architecture, mathematics and linguistics.

Johan Goudsblom (1932-) is a sociologist by profession but he is also a poet, a historian of ideas, a cultural historian, and more. In other words: a man whose exceptional erudition and style skills have taken him beyond the boundaries of s...

A short overview of the work of this architect duo: work that is the product of a personal mythology, expressive architecture that evokes a primitive human experience

At the translators' residences in Amsterdam and Leuven, translators of Dutch or Flemish literature can enjoy a brief taste of the cultural atmosphere

Review of published papers from this conference. Contributions deal with the historical role and international nature of the book trade in the Low Countries (Lotte Hellinga et al.,The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in ...

The quinquennial tradition of passion plays in Tegelen, a village on the River Maas in the southern, predominantly Catholic, province of Limburg

This article discusses the history and future of the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels, which is one of the most important in the world

A critical analysis of Jeroen Krabbé's film of The Discovery of Heaven, the magnum opus of Dutch writer Harry Mulisch

Review of Unspoken Allies, a book focussing on Anglo-Dutch relations between 1780 and 1980 (Nigel Ashton et al., Unspoken Allies. Anglo-Dutch Relations since 1780. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001).

A short biography of William III, the Stadholder of Holland, who became King of England but remained passionately Dutch. This article commemorates the 300th anniversary of his death

The Dutch United East India Company (VOC; Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) was founded on 20 March 1602. The VOC was a Dutch trading co-operative which, in a relatively short period of time, built up an empire of settlements and trade re...

Review of Words of the World, a book on language rivalry in the global language system (Abram de Swaan, Words of the World. The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press/ Blackwell, 2001)

Portrait of Bart Moeyaert ((1964-), the Flemish author who writes ageless books for the young

Review of a literary guide to Amsterdam (Manfred Wolf (ed.), Amsterdam, A Traveler's Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 2001

Review of a volume of essays on the Arthurian tradition in the Low Countries (Geert H.M.Claassens et al. (eds.), King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries. Medievalia Lovaniensia, Series I, Studia XXVIII. Leuven University Press, 2000)

Portrait of the Flemish composer Peter Benoit (1834-1901), commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of his death. Benoit was an innovator and left behind an impressive oeuvre that was the figure-head of Flemish music in the 19th century

Portrait of the Dutch composer who, for some four decades, has been internationally acknowledged as an innovative force in electronic music

A portrait of the musical competition, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2001

This article discusses the growing popularity of philosophical reflections written for a wider public and linked to topical subjects. Attention is paid, for example, to the philosophical essays of Stefan Hertmans and Patricia de Martelaere

The Fleming Peter Piot has headed UNAIDS since 1996. This article describes his efforts to set in motion a worldwide campaign against Aids.

Wim Kok was Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1994 to 2002. Leader of the ‘Purple Cabinet', he had a down-to-earth, common-sense approach and was level-headed, but his tendency to wait until all the cards are shuffled often drew critic...

The Lambermont Agreement was a further step towards state reform in Belgium. The power of the regions has increased since it came into effect on 1 January 2002

This article discusses the drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the context of the exhibition Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Prints and Drawings, held in Rotterdam and New York

A discussion of current research into Hieronymus Bosch, focussing on a number of recent publications

The work of Sibyl Heijnen is more than textile art. In her constant search for new and unusual forms, she often transcends the boundaries of many artistic disciplines

The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra isolates the people she photographs, flashing them out of the tumult of existence into an image never to be forgotten. This article marks the publication of a book of Dijkstra's photographs: Rineke Dij...

The sculptor Norman Dilworth was born in England, but has been firmly established in the Netherlands for many years. This article marks the publication of Norman Dilworth 12131. Amsterdam: Art Affairs, 2001

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries

Mainly about the theme of this book: water, which keeps turning up where you don't expect it.

Whoever wants to know what Dutch society finds important and what the Dutch might think of a future in Europe and the world, would be well advised to consider the history and the ambitions of national water management in the Netherlands. Th...

As the title says, these are supposed to be excerpts from the log the author kept on board of a number of boats during two river trips: one down the Scheldt, and one down the Maas, each time from source to estuary. But the author himself ad...

A short history of Dordrecht, once ‘the key to Holland and Zeeland', the demographic and economic centre of Holland. Already in the seventeenth century the city had lost its significance as a seaport, but it did continue as a centre for inl...

The story of a remarkable nature reserve in West Flanders, reduced to its present size by centuries of silting and reclamation. It is a relic of a sea-inlet which once extended to Bruges. The mud flats of the Zwin are still submerged by eve...

The Amsterdam canals are so engrained in our consciousness and so obviously ‘beautiful', that hardly anybody stops to wonder about the thinking behind their powerful visual impact. There is nothing to suggest that they form part of an origi...

For centuries the Dutch have done their best to keep their feet dry. The simplest solution has always been to live above the NAP: the ‘Normaal Amsterdams Peil', or the zero Amsterdam ordnance datum. Yet as early as 600 BC people were making...

Since time immemorial locals and visitors have been impressed by the beauty of the river valley between the various villages along the banks of the river Leie, to the south of Ghent. Near the end of the 19th century painters and sculptors, ...

A history of the Elfstedentocht, the skating route that takes in eleven Frisian towns. The saying in Friesland is ‘When it freezes hard, the Frisians thaw'. When the frost is so hard that it is possible to skate on the waterways and lakes, ...

An anthology of poems which show water in its regular or ephemeral form: snow, ice, mist and clouds. By J.A. dèr Mouw, Willem de Mérode, Richard Minne, Martinus Nijhoff, Paul van Ostaijen, H. Marsman, Adriaan Morriën, Lucebert, Roland Joori...

Life on board with the VOC for today's armchair traveller: between 1595 – when four ships from Amsterdam sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia – and 1794 – when the last flotilla of ships under the flag of the Dutch East India Company...

Extracts from two novels: while the storm breaks over the ark in Anne Provoost's Voyagers on the Ark (De arkvaarders), Jeroen Brouwers' houseboat bobs peacefully on a river in Secret Rooms (Geheime kamers).

‘Think again!' is the answer to the question in the subtitle of this article. There's plenty more to tell about water: Dutch naval heroes, Prince Willem-Alexander as a true waterlander, Manneke Pis and Hans Brinker, Delta and Sigma Plans, t...

Heroics of yore with a Belgian on wheels and a Dutchman on the pitch: Eddy Merckx, the finest cyclist in the country, of all generations, all countries, and Johan Cruijff, the football player without parallel, unsurpassed in all his feats o...

History has left many a Dutch mark on the English language. There is a sizeable English vocabulary of Dutch origin and borrowing from Dutch is an ongoing process, as witness recent additions like apartheid, coffeeshop, lekker and gabber mus...

Whatever genre Joke van Leeuwen turns her hand to – from little books for ‘fresh' readers to poetry for adults –, she constantly surprises her readers with her uninhibited way of looking at people and things. She continues to hold the inter...

Freek de Jonge and Youp van 't Hek are perhaps the only two who could compete with each other for the prize of the top cabaret artist in the Netherlands, but both are now in the autumn of their careers. ‘Le grand cabaret', the art of such d...

Vincent Geyskens is a young Flemish painter who handles an apparently tired medium in a dapper and varied way – so much so that the author cannot help wondering if the medium really is so tired. Can a painter achieve anything more beautiful...

There was a time when airports were a focus of national pride. The biggest airport in Belgium is still called ‘Brussels-National', and no book on the history of the Netherlands fails to mention the building of Schiphol Airport on the reclai...

Few artists make the news as often as Joep van Lieshout. The products of his company, Atelier van Lieshout (AVL), sometimes elicit violent reactions. It is not that he sets out to shock, in fact he most likes to give pleasure, but his unadu...

Flemish story-writer, novelist, playwright, translator, columnist, pamphleteer and performer, Tom Lanoye is a versatile and much talked-about author. During the course of his twenty-year career, he has become an authority in various literar...

On 6 April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck sailed into Table Bay and unwittingly laid the foundation stone for today's South Africa. There is no other country in the world with which the Dutch have such close ties as the country that is the legacy of...

After the Belgian parliamentary elections of June 1999 the Green parties Agalev (Dutch-speaking) and Ecolo (French-speaking) joined the coalition government for the first time. There is however a clear contrast between Green thinking and th...

A short history of the Dutch slave trade. The initial Dutch objections to the slave trade did not last long. After capturing part of Brazil from the Portuguese in 1630, it quickly became apparent that the demand for sugar by Dutch dealers c...

On 26 January 2000 Gerrit Komrij was chosen Poet Laureate of the Netherlands for a period of five years by a poll taken among Dutch poetry readers. Appropriate indeed for a man who knew ever since he was a child that he would become a poet....

A lot of poets and critics rate Richard Minne among the greatest Flemish poets of the twentieth century. But his work is no longer in print, and today he has become something of a cult poet. Sometimes his lines surface as protective incanta...

A piece about the interaction of the three languages which an educated Dutchman in the period 1400-1800 was expected to read and write: Latin, French and Dutch. These three languages were taught in schools: in Primary schools, in French sch...

Architects do not often use the terms ‘lumpen', ‘surly', ‘sullen' and ‘ham-fisted', and certainly not when they are describing their own work. Yet these adjectives capture the essence of the work of Willem Jan Neutelings, who runs the archi...

When in 1998 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow celebrated its hundredth birthday, it did so in an unexpected way. The museum undertook a complete cataloguing and exhibition project of its paintings and drawings from Flanders and the Netherlands....

With his activities as a conductor and his extensive discography the Fleming Philippe Herreweghe (1947-) has become one of the stars of the international music industry. His road to fame started with early music. With his choir, Collegium V...

Along with the visual arts and polyphony, organs and organ music in the Low Countries were from an early date of high quality and much in demand. The author presents some of the most remarkable organs in Flanders and the Netherlands. He als...

About Pig City, a project developed in 2001 by Dutch Architects MVRDV to illustrate an alternative method of organising the Dutch pig industry: the art of stacking.

A short survey of the work of Flemish architect M. José van Hee. According to the author her architecture is absolutely urban because it seeks a measured contact with the life of the streets.

Within the Old Library of Trinity College (Dublin) is a large, originally Dutch collection of books: the Fagle Library from The Hague, auctioned in London in 1802.

About the history of the Irish College in Leuven, now in fact the Irish Institute for European Affairs.

The story of the now restored Bibliotheca Thysiana in Leiden, which was re-opened in 2001.

A thorough analysis of L. King of Pain by the Antwerp Toneelhuis company, a radical rewriting of Shakespeare's King Lear. Director Luc Perceval's adaptation starts from a specific view of the character of Lear. Shakespeare's most comprehens...

A portrait of Dutch choreographer Ed Wubbe. The author thinks his strength lies in pure dance and lyricism rather than in passionate dance-drama.

A critical account of this Flemish director's career. He goes his own way, but it doesn't seem entirely clear what that way is.

A personal account of the 1953 North Sea flood that struck the Netherlands, north-west Belgium, England and Scotland.

About the bible translator whose life ended at the stake in Vilvoorde. An exhibition in Antwerp (with an interesting catalogue) paid a fitting tribute to a relatively little-known man who made an important contribution to the formation of t...

Review of two books about Jews in the Netherlands: Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda (eds.), Dutch Jewry, Its History and Secular Culture (1500-2000). Leiden / Boston / Cologne: Brill, 2002 and J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld and I. Schö...

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, KNAW, devoted a memorandum to the question of whether Dutch is under threat as a language of science and scholarship. The author analyses this matter.

A short survey of the novels of this highly versatile Dutch author, with some special attentention being paid to the translated Love's Death (Liefdesdood, 1997) (Love's Death. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).

About the work of the Dutch novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog, who died in Houston, TX, in September 2002. He was a very successful writer who settled in the US in the 1950s and started to write in English at that time. In the Netherlan...

About Hooverphonic, a Flemish pop group flourishing on the international stage.

A short biography of Simeon ten Holt (1923)-, a Dutch composer who is at the same time a ‘loner' and a pop idol of classical music.

A short survey of the work of Jaap van Heerden, Dutch essayist extraordinaire with books which have titles to die for and essays which are never boring.

The Centre for Genetic Medicine at the University of Brussels celebrated its twentieth birthday in 2002. It plays a pioneering role in the field of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

About the new Edita-series, which intends to cover a very broad spectrum of scholarship in the arts and sciences (Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans. The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575-1750 / Gerhard Wiesenf...

On 11 July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army overran the ‘safe haven' of Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in Bosnia that was under the protection of the United Nations. In the days that followed, 7,500 Muslim men and boys were brutally murdered. Dutch...

An analysis of the electoral succes of the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc). The author thinks Flanders will have to sweat it out with this extreme right-wing and polically isolated party for a while yet.

A survey of 2002, an eventful year in Dutch politics: right from the emergence of Pim Fortuyn (who was murdered in May 2002) up to the elections in January 2003.

About MoMU, the new Fashion Museum in Antwerp: a beautiful and interesting museum, which should however refrain from verbal pomposity in its communication if it really wants to be an accessible exhibition and information centre for a wide r...

About the Flemish artist Honoré d'O and his fresh view on art: it should not be worshipped, it can be used. Nevertheless his intriguing work often comes across as completely hermetic and literally incomprehensible.

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

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An introduction to the 12th yearbook and its theme

Mobility is much more than the technical phenomenon of people moving from one place to another and using infrastructure, taking up space and getting in the way of others in the process. Understanding mobility, to say nothing of regulating i...

What possesses a modern human being to make him shoulder his rucksack and set off on foot through the Netherlands, which as we all know is the world's most built-up delta area? This country may not be primeval, but a walk through the Nether...

An extract from Pol Hoste's novel, in which a Flemish memory is itemised on the way from Ghent to Brussels Airport.

At the beginning of his essay the author descends the majestic stairs of Antwerp Central Station, ‘the Cathedral of the Tracks'. Then he tells us he collects stations and shares some Flemish stations from that collection with the reader. He...

If you had to take one photo that summed up the Netherlands as the average foreigner sees it, what would it show? Queen Beatrix in clogs, cycling past a row of windmills, with the glassy eyes of dozens of cows staring at her in astonishment...

The unbelievable story of Anthony Fokker, the Dutch prodigal son who gave his country wings. By the outbreak of war in 1914 luck, skill with his hands, family money and an iron determination had placed him in a position where his small comp...

As a child of the port of Antwerp, Eugeen van Mieghem was fascinated by the colourful hustle and bustle of life at the dockside. His origins determined his later art. He did not need to go in search of inspiration, for the world was on his ...

A visit to the Bepol shipyard, taken from the first pages of Thomas Rosenboom's novel ‘The New Man' (2003).

Cars. There are too many of them. An account of how the automobile conquered the landscape and how the motorist became king. The king of the road has become a prisoner: the illusion of the freedom of driving hardly exists any more. Nor does...

The term ‘national identity' sends many Dutch people into a spin of denial. Nevertheless, there are very few countries in Europe that have such a pronounced ‘national identity'. The author takes a look at it in a historical and European con...

When transsexuals claim they were born in the wrong body, Portnoy can understand how they feel. Growing up in the USA, she felt that she had been born in the wrong place. She had known since childhood that she wanted to be a writer, and sin...

Travellers usually enjoy discovering the distinctive characteristics of the towns or regions they visit. But rarely does a trip to the zoo figure on their itinerary. And yet those who actually take the trouble to visit every zoo they come a...

About the work of Carl Friedman, an authentic author in the sense in which Mario Vargas Llosa uses the term: someone who ‘can accept her own demons' and goes with them as far as she can, in other words someone who writes about the subjects ...

Even the consolation prizes got crushed in her handbag when Paula van der Oest went to Hollywood in 2003 hoping to collect an Oscar for her film ‘Zus & zo' (aka Hotel Paraiso). She had to make do with a Academy Award made of chocolate. ...

Ivo Michiels is the grand old man of experimental literature in Flanders. Particularly remarkable is the naturalness and consistency with which the author has stuck to his chosen path of experimental literature. With an unmatched confidence...

More than anyone else, it was Willem Pijper whose compositions and crusading spirit placed Dutch music on the European cultural map. One of his mottoes, ‘a composer only composes what he cannot express or communicate in other ways,' fits hi...

In 1977 Marie-Jo Lafontaine won the Young Belgian Painting Prize. Her work has come a long way since then: from threatening large abstract canvases to explicitly sensual colour photos of flowers. ‘How does one capture the sublime?' could pe...

During the last twelve years Anna Enquist has published a substantial body of literary work. She is a writer whose qualities and talents offer not only readability, but also lasting artistic integrity. Her art is about feelings both tragic ...

Anton Corbijn is known for his photographic portraits of today's rich and famous: musicians, academics, models and actors, writers and directors. People want to look at his photographs, and celebrities want to be photographed by him, becaus...

The normally rather reserved world of Dutch art critics was frankly enthusiastic and full of praise on the occasion of the opening of the new Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in January 2003. It even received the accolade of being called ‘the f...

It's early morning in Mechelen and the streets are empty. Derek Blyth is looking forward to wandering down the cobbled lanes, looking inside gothic churches, passing some time in the municipal museum, and ending up, as everyone does, in one...

Karel Appel who in the 1950s himself said ‘I just mess around', is now generally acclaimed as one of the genuine innovators of modern painting. His controversial breakthrough came in 1949 when he was seen as one of the leading lights of the...

It is one of the pillars of Dirk van Bastelaere's poetry that a poem is never self-evident. The problem this poet is struggling with is poetry itself. He is trying to keep contemporary poetry alive by thinking it through thoroughly to the e...

After 2002 the Dutch have had to drastically modify their view of themselves. Theirs is not an idyllic island surrounded by an evil outside world. They are not immune to developments that have taken place in countless other countries. But p...

On December 2, 1998, Unesco inscribed thirteen Flemish beguinages on its World Heritage list, recognising them as sites ‘of worldwide significance'. With only three elderly beguines alive at the time of writing, of whom only one still resid...

For the Dutch, The Hague is, as it has been for centuries, the country's administrative, judicial and diplomatic centre. Not many are aware of that other rich Hague tradition which also boasts a history stretching back a hundred years: The ...

Preposterous combinations are nothing unusual in the work of Gerald Van der Kaap. His oeuvre is, to put it mildly, pluriform and exploratory. It has such genuinely spectacular elements, and is so diverse, that no general audience can grasp ...

The work of Flemish painter Dan van Severen exudes naked contemplation, detached timelessness and a complex simplicity. It shuns all forms of ostentation, all embellishment, all pictorial effect. Van Severen could be regarded as a secular m...

If there is one architect in the Netherlands who is confident in his ability to use architectural and urban development means to solve problems and heal rifts, then it is Jo Coenen. Coenen has his own architectural firm in Maastricht. Three...

The combination of the Flemish landscape architect Jacques Wirtz' thorough knowledge of horticulture and his personal philosophy, more recently supported on two fronts by the commercial contribution of his sons, has seen his firm grow into ...

The first architecture biennale in Rotterdam was held from 7 May to 31 August 2003. For a year various research teams, at home and abroad, examined the relationship between mobility and architecture. Their results formed the basis for the b...

In the heart of Brussels, on the corner of Leopoldstraat and Prinsenstraat, an impressive building is undergoing renovation. The intention is that this building will become the Dutch-Flemish Centre for Europe in Brussels, which will be open...

On 12 December 2003 the Dutch Language Union and the Republic of Surinam signed an ‘association agreement'. Surinam will officially become a member of the Dutch Language Union. The hope is that this will strengthen the ties between users of...

Alain Platel and his Ballets C. de la B. generate universal and poetic visual images by showing day-to-day reality.

Herman van Veen, cabaret artiste and singer, remains primarily a gentle, tender idealist and a clown, who with just a silly hat or a red nose radiates a childlike mirth that transforms him, without a single touch of makeup, into a harlequin...

Anna Simoni's Ostend Story offers a fascinating illustration of contemporaneous reactions in print to the astonishingly prolonged siege of Ostend (1601-1604), halfway through the Eighty Years War of Dutch Independence from Spanish rule. (An...

Ernst Heinrich Kossmann (1922-2003) was one of the most outstanding Dutch historians of the post-war era. He was also a central figure in Anglo-Dutch relations, both while he taught Dutch history at University College London in the early si...

Raoul van Caenegem's ‘Geschiedenis van Engeland' is a learned, instructive, entertaining tour de force whose continental perspective is in refreshing contrast to the insularity and introspection of so many English histories. (Raoul van Caen...

For many years now the languages spoken by immigrant minorities in the countries of Europe have been the main concern of Professor Guus Extra of the University of Brabant in Tilburg, who has now published a substantial academic monograph on...

After French and Dutch, the most widely-known languages in Brussels are English, German and Spanish, but after the two official languages the languages most frequently spoken in the home are Arabic, Turkish and Berber. This brief overview l...

In his Preface to this anthology of Dutch (and Flemish) poetry Coetzee refers insultingly to Holland's ‘paralysing deference' to cultural fashions from abroad and its lack of ‘boldness of thought'. He is plainly wrong. What's more, the proo...

On 17 January 2003 Antwerp was unanimously selected by Unesco as World Book Capital 2004. An ambitious programme has been drawn up to give the book a place in the city in past, present and future alike.

Frank Westerman is fascinated by the remarkable relationship between hydraulic engineering projects, literature and dictatorship. In his book Engineers of the Soul he looks into that relationship in Stalin's Soviet Russia.

After dEUS every pop and rock musician in Flanders knows that you can devote yourself one hundred percent to your art, but international fame and fortune will probably never come your way. That doesn't stop young, and rather less young, boy...

Dutch composer Peter Schat (1935-2003) was a radical underminer of every accepted authority, but that didn't stop him from composing increasingly in the romantic style. Freedom was to him the answer to all questions.

Georg Rumphius (1627-1702) can be considered the founder of Indonesian botanical exploration In 1999 Professor E.M. Beekman published a monumental scholarly edition in English of Rumphius' Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (1705). Continuing this ...

For writer Paul Binding Abraham Ortelius is first and foremost an artist, with his atlas (the Theatrum, first published in 1570) as a very special work of art and an enduring benchmark. It remains imperishable as an introduction to ‘the big...

Fanny Blankers-Koen, best ‘Female Athlete of the Century', died in January 2004. A portrait of the Dutch ‘queen with a man's legs' of the athletics tracks.

On 13 August 1914 the Gazette van Detroit for the first time addressed its readers, the Flemish immigrants in the United States and Canada. Despite a rather uncertain history, this weekly paper has kept its promise to its readers. In 2004 ‘...

‘Fun' is a very serious attempt to get an intellectual grasp of a rapid, explosive and confusing development that has taken place over the last few years. Tracy Metz reports on the relationship between leisure and landscape. The question Me...

Emmy Andriesse died at the age of thirty-nine. She left behind 14,000 negatives. To this day no photographer in the Netherlands has had so much feel for the medium as she had. She was looking for something, for the exemplary that is so typi...

A critical review of a book about Dada in the Low Countries. The positive thing for the English-speaking reader who wishes to find out about Dadaism in Flanders and the Netherlands is that this story – much of the material for which is in D...

In 2004 the Rubens-lover is to be pampered by a plethora of exhibitions in both Europe and America. In short: anyone who fails to visit a Rubens exhibition in 2004 is either living on another planet or is a real Rubens-hater; and for the la...

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

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Where does modern poetry end? You can discuss this for a long time too, but Gerbrandy suspects that if we look back in 2050, we shall find that modern poetry in the Netherlands ends with Tonnus Oosterhoff (1953-). Ever since his debut in 1...

A foretaste of the 13th issue

Do gardeners get it too, that urge to dash off and do something they've just been reading about? In the same way as Marjoleine de Vos, when she sees certain fish at the market or when she reads about shoulder of lamb with kidneys, immediate...

(Poems by Marjoleine de Vos and Peter Theunynck)

The author chose a small sampling of Dutch and Flemish 17th-century paintings from collections in the Netherlands and America that demonstrate how these artworks give an insight into seventeenth-century Dutch food practices and bring a new ...

(Poems by Lucebert and Erik Menkveld)

In the opinion of foreigners the Dutch, unlike the Belgians, have never progressed very far in the culinary arts. They also seem to have earned a reputation for their lack of refinement and appreciation of culinary pleasure. Dutch restauran...

(Poems by Patty Scholten and Manuel Kneepkens)

When David Stroband was asked to write an article about ‘art and food', he was a little confused at first. What was he supposed to take into consideration? The art of eating? On the other hand, images also loomed up of self-service restaura...

(Poems by Charles Ducal and Ida Gerhardt)

Three words are sufficient to introduce the artist Koen Vanmechelen: the chicken, the cage and the egg. You might call them the obsessive foundations of his life and work. Since his childhood Vanmechelen has been obsessed by everything that...

(Poems by Ben Cami and H.H. ter Balkt)

Cornucopia. In Flanders fields Belgian waffles and Ghent chicken casserole are being served. Too much is never enough. The author serves the reader each letter of the alphabet and paints a picture of waiters shrouded in monk's habits, waist...

Four Flemish and Dutch recipes to try at home

An extract from Herman Brusselmans' Diary of a Weary Egoist': smoking, drinking and puking… in retrospect it's all just literature.

(Poems by Miriam Van hee and Luuk Gruwez)

Buruma cannot remember the first time he became aware of the Holocaust, but it was certainly before he ever heard, let alone used that word. There must have been hints, snippets of overheard adult conversation that could have alerted him a...

The Second World War in Flanders is ‘an undigested past'. The metaphor of digestion is a seductive one. It captures the sense in which the events of the war and its aftermath have seemed doomed to recur in public life and politics in Flande...

Before 1945, America, the land of endless opportunities, far beyond the horizon, had always had a magical ring to it, the stuff of dreams. Perceptions of America suddenly became more concrete at the end of the Second World War, when America...

The photo was taken in the spring of 1999, close to the Albanian town of Kükes. It was published on 24 April 1999, exactly one month after the first NATO bombs on Serbian targets, as a special section to the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. The...

Bert de Beul's intimate paintings are a nostalgic evocation of memories and associations from his past. The viewer should not look for an underlying message or contentious cultural symbols. In his paintings De Beul goes in search of intangi...

Barely three years ago the Netherlands was still being overrun by foreign delegations eager to learn everything they could about the ‘miracle Hollandaise', the economic and industrial relations system based on consensus and referred to as t...

Musician and director Tom Barman isn't the sort of person who enjoys appearing on television. He doesn't like talking about his private life. Yet he is still widely perceived as an important artist and he is one of the few Flemish people to...

The addition of the historic city centre of Paramaribo to the UNESCO World Heritage List was due to the exceptional value of this piece of cultural heritage. At the same time virtually nothing remains of Suriname's traditional plantation cu...

How is it possible, year in, year out, to engage in a harsh and unrelenting fight against life and against ageing, provoking time and torturing yourself by continually painting and drawing your own face: that head that changes, those featur...

When Pol Hoste is in Montreal, to him forever Montréal, his thoughts often drift back to when he was a young boy sitting with his family staring in silence at a sooty black cauldron full of pig swill. But when he's at home in his own little...

Where does the author start? With a building that no longer exists. ‘The Utrecht', the only genuine Art Nouveau building ever to grace the city, had to make room for a large-scale development of offices and shops known as the Hoog Catharijn...

In this theatre company's repertoire, what is most conspicuous is the attention paid to bourgeois society. STAN's favourite authors, Chekhov and Bernhard but also Ibsen, Wilde and Shaw, show up the fat on the bourgeois mentality. There is a...

If you want to study Dutch, you no longer need to travel to the Netherlands or Flanders. All over the world, interest in the Dutch language is growing. By 2005, Dutch will be taught at approximately 220 universities in more than 40 countrie...

In the last decade of the twentieth century, Droog Design was one of the most talked-about cutting-edge movements in the world of design. It rapidly succeeded in gaining international attention for its new design mentality, with its emphasi...

A portrait of the Dutch Master of the unfinished and his highly original literary work. To Frerichs Nescio, who kept as quiet as possible about his writing, is essential a lyricist, a poet who writes prose. He's a romantic, too, and a cynic...

Kousbroek is the author of an oeuvre of mesmerising richness and diversity, ranging from poetry and language, photography, the archaeology of motorcars, travel, literature, children, cats and other animals, through memory, emotions and the ...

The oeuvre of Liza May Post consists of images that you can never forget, but which are difficult to describe. They are vivid and concise, but they operate on ambiguous levels of reality. Photographed or filmed with great visual precision, ...

Almost unnoticed among the controversial projects and ideas from firms such as Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, MVRDV and UN Studio, a completely new style of architecture has evolved in the Netherlands in recent years: ...

As the capital of the then Belgian Congo, Kinshasa occupies an important place in the history of Belgian architecture and urban planning. The development of the capital was an outstanding project of Belgian Modernity; but nowadays that mode...

On 28 October 2004 a series of books entitled ‘Dutch Culture in a European Perspective'was launched at DeBuren, the Flemish-Netherlands House in Brussels. The books in this series are not only highly informative, they also make for thorough...

On 2 November 2004 in Amsterdam-Oost, three Theo van Goghs were murdered: a talented, productive and independent-minded filmmaker, a gifted television interviewer and the provocateur who in his columns fiercely lashed out at everything he o...

Het muziek Lod in Ghent presents itself as a platform for all-round musicians who take a very broad view of their own domain and are open to music theatre and other art forms. During a fifteen-year voyage of discovery, Het muziek Lod has es...

In 1993 ‘Suites (Dances for the Queen)' marked the international breakthrough of the Dutch choreographer couple Andrea Leine and Harijono Roebana. In their search for an ideal language for dance, music is both their basis and their guide. A...

A sad anniversary. 1915 was the year of the first gas attack and of the Second Battle of Ypres, but it was also the year that John McCrae wrote his poem ‘In Flanders Fields'. However, the Great War was about more than gas attacks and the de...

Cold and hunger played a major role at the end of the the Second World War. The Battle of the Bulge still fires the imagination. Heroic combat encounters, in exceptionally bad climatic conditions, have given rise to many stories and myths, ...

At the end of October 2004, the long-awaited New Bible Translation was presented in Rotterdam and Antwerp. Like other language areas, the Low Countries too now have an ecumenical church Bible. Rather than making other translations redundant...

All around the world today, English, as the language of globalisation, is rapidly spreading everywhere. In a number of EU member states this development has triggered debate about the future of their own national language. The language issu...

The world of his youth underlies the whole of Kees Ouwens' writing. This is certainly true of his poetry, but applies equally to a number of his novels. The recently deceased Ouwens has the reputation of being mainly a poets' poet. His work...

Like his alter ego Arnon Grunberg the young Dutch novelist Marek van der Jagt writes life stories. His 2000 debut, ‘The Story of My Baldness', could be seen as a novel of adolescence or Bildungsroman. His second novel, ‘Gstaad 95-98', which...

In 1994 the new Brussels Jazz Orchestra (BJO) came up with a basic repertoire that left nobody in any doubt as to its ability, tastes and direction. They made their intentions clear from the outset and resisted any temptation to churn out r...

The first Nits single, ‘Yes or No', was released in 1977, the year in which punk made its breakthrough on the international music scene. From that moment it was clear: The Nits were not punk, but an arty band influenced by the New Wave scen...

There can be little doubt about the relevance of Spinoza's thinking. It is reflected in the fact that societies like the Dutch-International Spinoza House are flourishing, and by the continuing world-wide interest in Spinoza's philosophy in...

Marcel Minnaert (1893-1970) was a Flemish activist, an astrophysicist, a professor, an educational reformer, a social and scientific pioneer, and an advocate of Esperanto. Leo Molenaar wrote the account of a packed, rich and multifaceted li...

In the botanical world of the sixteenth century Carolus Clusius played a key role. Some fifteen hundred letters testify to the scale of his international contacts. This slightly anarchic network is now being opened up with the aid of digita...

The Dutch government had asked the Nexus Institute to organise a series of international conferences during the Dutch presidency of the EU in the second half of 2004, focusing on the values that Europe embraces, the values that it should em...

The cultural review ‘De Gids' commissioned eminent Dutch intellectuals and writers to contribute to a one-off English-language issue entitled Misunderstanding the Netherlands, and subtitled ‘Misunderstandings about the Netherlands'. The aut...

The Antwerp musem of photography has recently taken on a new lease of life after many decades of dormancy. The FotoMuseum, as it is now called, is owned by the province of Antwerp and has a very extensive international collection of photogr...

Lily van der Stokker is a wallflower who is very much in demand. This pop star's playlist just keeps getting longer. As a solo artist or in a group. Actually, all that's missing is for T-shirts to be sold with the names of the cities that s...

The 17th-century Dutch painter Fabritius was highly regarded in his own time. That comes as no surprise when you see what he was capable of in his self-portraits, ‘The Goldfinch', or ‘The Raising of Lazarus'. However, many of Fabritius' wor...

Is Jan de Cock, of whose installations little of a tangible nature remains, an innovative artist? Or, as some would say derisively, a furniture-maker with pretensions? In September 2005 Jan de Cock has an exhibition at Tate Modern in London...

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

A foreword: Why does someone take the trouble to get up and go somewhere, to travel?

At the beginning of 1999 Geert Mak left Amsterdam for a trip through Europe that was to last an entire year. It was a sort of final inspection: Mak wanted to see how the continent was faring at the end of the twentieth century. But it was a...

Over the last 50 years tourist activity has increased considerably all over the world. More people are travelling, more people are travelling more frequently, more people are earning their living from tourism, whole regions have been able t...

Joost Conijn's work is prompted by his desire to move from one place to another under his own steam. This independent attitude characterises the way he moves through life, through the world, through the air. Driven by his urge for freedom a...

'A Barbarian in China' is Van Dis' travel report about his journey along the silk route. The title of the book, which became a bestseller in the Netherlands, recalls Henri Michaux' 'Un barbare en Asie' (published in 1933, revised in 1945 an...

When the Dutch Republic first embarked on overseas expansion, its impact was immediate. There wa a huge demand for travel accounts and the De Bry publishing house in Frankfurt caterred to this. The collection of voyages was indisputably the...

December 1983. In a Spanish museum of natural history, nineteen-year-old Frank Westerman finds himself standing face to face with a stuffed African – El Negro. Who is this man? Who stuffed his body? Twenty years later, the author follows El...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder may be seen as one of the few artists who for centuries have played a role in determining the perception and image of Flanders. Whether historically accurate or not, many people – and certainly not only foreigners –...

Amongst modern Flemish artists who have an original approach to the theme of travel, Christoph Fink (1963-) is a name that cannot go unrecorded. Recent exhibitions in Cleveland, Ohio, and at The Drawing Center in New York confirm the intern...

Poems about travelling and not travelling

When the author of this piece decided to drive from Brussels to Antwerp on the old N1 road, it was partly an attempt to discover the other Flanders, the space between the cities. He imagined that the whole journey would take a day at most. ...

The author doesn't need a reason for not travelling. Just as the reader doesn't need one when he decides he will go and pack his suitcases. This article is not a diatribe against tourism – and most certainly not against travelling. Ad Vinge...

If the International Quality Press is to be believed, the entire Netherlands has recently undergone a complete metamorphosis. Until recently it was supposedly inhabited by a collection of decent, tolerant, liberal, open-minded burghers who ...

The Supplement to the Fourth Policy Document on Spatial Planning (in Dutch: ‘Vierde Ruimtelijke Nota Extra, hence VINEX) set out a plan for 635,000 new houses to be built between 1995 and 2005 at inner city locations and on the outskirts of...

Belgium, a favourite haunt for lovers of the absurd, is hidden away on the edge of a political twilight zone. Belgium is a state that should not really exist. It is an experiment in wish-fulfilment; an artificial synthesis. Belgium is a no-...

In the course of 2005 an inventory of relics of the Great War in the Westhoek region of Flanders will become available. This joint initiative by the Province of West Flanders and the Service for Monuments and Landscapes of the Flemish Commu...

Artists in the Netherlands now help to give shape to the public space. However, you can have too much of a good thing. With the mushrooming of art in public areas over the past 50 years and the related stifling red tape, a lot of forgettabl...

Michaël Borremans has a deft touch with the handling of paint. At a time when painting itself is at issue, Borremans makes mysterious and compelling paintings that combine both skill and intelligence. He has succeeded in creating, within a ...

The idea that a rock group from the Low Countries might attract large crowds elsewhere has become less and less bizarre in recent years. The world's become smaller because of the spread of music via the internet, which means that fame is no...

In April 2004 Joost Swarte was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Admittedly, he had to share the honour with, among others, the enormously popular singers Marco Borsato and Frans Bauer, but even so.... It is still an honour that...

Patricia de Martelaere herself is unwilling to provide any detailed explanation of her novels. She refuses to give interviews and declines TV appearances. She is first and foremost a professor of philosophy, as well as being a brilliant ess...

There's a vagrant living in Dirk Braeckman's photos. No-one has ever seen him, but he does live there. He is the one operating the camera. He often hangs around in buildings where the gas and electricity have been cut off. Where it is pitch...

The graphic artist M.C. Escher became famous for ‘impossible' objects such as his ‘impossible cube', a three-dimensional image that only ‘works' because it is projected onto a two-dimensional plane surface. Krol is Escher's literary counter...

Fernand Khnopff was more personally and artistically oriented towards contemporary British art and culture than any other Belgian modernist of his generation. As the Brussels correspondent for the authoritative journal The Studio, and an oc...

‘Tolerant but indifferent to so many of her distinguished visitors, England made no exception in the case of Emile Verhaeren, the fair-haired young Belgian poet', wrote Beatrice Worthing.Though the poet came to Britain almost annually from ...

Louis Andriessen's oeuvre now stands at around one hundred published works. Their unique and headstrong idiom, their instrumentation and their role in the history of music make some of the compositions that have been discussed key works of ...

When it came to higher education, Leeuwarden was the place to be. At the end of the sixties, after having spent a few years in Amsterdam, the author returned to Friesland badly infected with the artistic bug. He thought he might do somethin...

Rembrandt studies are a nerve-racking field. It is nearly impossible to write a proper paragraph about the artist or his work without stepping on the toes – or kicking the shins, depending on your mood – of a colleague. Part of this is due ...

Herman Brusselmans, the self-proclaimed Handsome Young Jupiter of Flemish literature, is nothing if not prolific. Since his debut in 1982 he has published two books a year with clockwork regularity and his total production now exceeds thirt...

The ‘repulsive oeuvre of a dangerous psychopath' or ‘the Netherlands' greatest poet': Gerrit Achterberg (1905-1962) is undoubtedly the most controversial figure in twentieth-century poetry. A hundred years after his birth he is still either...

When the election for the greatest Dutch person of all time was held in 2004, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek came fourth after Pim Fortuyn, William of Orange and Willem Drees, but before Erasmus, Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh. Van Leeuwenhoek's tr...

John Updike traces his heritage.

As preparations for the second International Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam forged ahead under the apocalyptic title The Flood, the surging waters of the tsunami were wreaking havoc in Asia. This event was a chilling reminder of the dis...

Is there an art-lover anywhere who has never heard of Rembrandt or Mondrian? Probably not. Many people think of the Netherlands primarily as a land of visual artists, far more than of writers. But are today's Dutch artists also known abroad...

'All that Dutch' is a varied collection of articles and opinions by those responsible for making and implementing international cultural policy in the Netherlands. The book does not make happy reading, because it gives the impression that c...

In 2005 the Dutch Minister of Education, Maria van der Hoeven, set up a commission of wise individuals to produce a canon for primary and secondary education. This canon, the ‘Story of the Netherlands' in an international context, is to tak...

Critics love to take stock of an artist's development, sketching the broad outlines of his artistic evolution, roughing out a context for a creation that is always part of a bigger picture. And it becomes even more interesting and rewarding...

To the author, it is impossible to imagine living in the Low Countries without talking Dutch. Deprived of the Dutch teaching he had as a native speaker of English, he would remain baffled by Dutch street names, like Beenhouwersstraat, Hands...

Today, as a result of almost four decades of innovative sociolinguistic research by scholars such as Durk Gorter of the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden, we are rather well-informed about the actual state of the Frisian language. But although i...

The widespread secularisation of recent decades led to speculation that God would disappear from the Netherlands. This prediction did not come true. The terrorist attacks in New York (2001), the murders of Pim Fortuyn (2002) and Theo van Go...

The Belgian shipping company the Red Star Line was established in 1872 with rich industrialists from Pennsylvania as its principal shareholders. The company worked exclusively with steamships (some of which still had auxiliary sails) sailin...

Biographers choose pragmatic solutions, but they do that because they have no other choice. The never-ending battle between disciplines leads inevitably to theoretical relativism: there is no such thing as a generally applicable ‘theory of ...

On 16 November, at the age of 57, Dutch writer Henk van Woerden died in his sleep in Ann Arbor as the result of cardiac arrest. Van Woerden had been delighted with all the enthusiastic reviews of his latest 'Ultramarine', a novel that if on...

Everywhere they go, The Ex make the impossible possible by following the age-old adage ‘do it yourself' (‘…because no-one else will do it for you'). An American reviewer once described their sound as ‘a beautiful frenzy', a phrase from the ...

Although experimental music only arrived in Flanders half a century after the successes of Charles Ives and Erik Satie, it has since then achieved an impressive record of accomplishments. This is to no small extent thanks to the Stichting L...

On 10 July 1908, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes became the first person to bring helium under control. In room E' of his Natuurkundig Laboratorium, opposite Van der Werff Park in the heart of Leiden, at the end of a long and exhausting day, he succ...

Ten years ago the decision was taken, and in the Summer of 2005 it was officially opened in the port of Antwerp: the largest tidal dock in the world, the Deurganckdok. Thanks to this dock, large container ships putting into Antwerp no longe...

Job Cohen quietly waits his turn. He is polite. He is engaging. But he never hesitates to say whatever needs to be said, and is always prepared to step into the breach for groups or individuals who, for whatever reason, are in danger of bei...

The fact that Christophe Coppens chose not to exhibit hats at a show, when hats are after all the hallmark of this Belgian designer, is significant. Although Coppens gained fame in Belgium with his hats, he is at home in many fields, as is ...

Artists who choose painting as their medium have a hard time of it with the art critics. When they work figuratively in the tradition of the “old masters”, their work is seen as almost deliberately perverse. For years the realistic figurati...

'Vlaamsekunstcollectie', written as one word and meaning literally ‘Flemish art collection', is a new name for a collaborative project involving the three most important art history museums in Flanders: those of Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. T...

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

A Foreword. Money matters: but so do arts and society in this yearbook.

How do the Flemish regard money? How do they deal with it? And is their financial culture essentially any different from that of their northern neighbours? Of course there's always that cliché lurking in the background: the frugal Dutchman...

In January 1991, Willy Claes, the Belgian Minister of Economic Affairs, approved ‘cheque charges': users would from then on have to pay for writing out a cheque. In his weekly column in Humo, a Flemish weekly (which invariably ended with th...

Many buildings in Amsterdam have historical connections with the trading activities that created the city's wealth. From the seventeenth century there are the offices of the East and West India Companies, business premises, merchants' house...

In 1992, Hella Haasse's novel Gentlemen of Tea (Heren van de Thee) appeared, in which she describes the fortunes of the young Dutchman Rudolf Kerkhoven. In the 1870s, this young man leaves for West Java to assist his father in the tea busin...

Because the traditional trading mechanisms in medieval Europe collapsed in the first half of the fourteenth century, the overland routes and the Champagne fairs, which connected two very different systems of trade in Southern and Western Eu...

Hellema – aka Alexander Bernard (Lex) van Praag – is a master of letters who has remained unknown – a writers' writer. Van Praag (1921-2005) was a resistance man during the Second World War who ended up in a German concentration camp. After...

Take a walk around Antwerp's diamond district, and all seems to be peace and tranquillity. In the three streets by the Central Station where the diamond trade is concentrated, Belgian-Jewish, Indian and other diamond dealers are going brisk...

1933 sees the publication of Willem Elsschot's short novel Cheese (Kaas). His protagonist Laarmans, a clerk working for a port authority, is inveigled into setting up as a dealer in cheese, but comes to grief because the work goes against h...

How do artists deal with the market? Are art and economics each other's opponents, as they have traditionally been regarded? Is it a question of a stronger and a weaker sibling? Or can they go hand-in-hand and even sustain each other? In th...

In Marja Brouwers' novel 'Casino', Rink de Vilder, a journalist on a national newspaper, meets the yacht designer Philip van Heemskerk in Monte Carlo. It is the onset of an acquaintance with a tempestuous, somewhat whimsical but astoundingl...

The website www.belgendoenhetbeter.nl, which was launched in 2005, ushered in a new era in Belgo-Dutch relations: the era of mutual constructive jealousy. Right from the start the website sought to convince the Dutch that the ‘Holy Grail' o...

Fits of depression, manic spells, a failed marriage, 12 different jobs and 13 disasters, one attempt at suicide. The utter hopelessness of an existence on the fringes of society, with a few shreds of comfort from beer, tobacco, and a bit of...

Politicians in Belgium as well as the Netherlands are often quite keen to promote the concept of the self-sufficient citizen, whereby people are largely responsible for their own welfare. Yes, there is a safety net, but they should not make...

A critic once wrote that Frans Pointl's short stories are populated with people like himself: ‘they hover between the social and the antisocial'. The Amsterdam Soup Kitchen, grimy coffee tables, his ‘dingy, dead-end street', the comforting ...

The behaviour of people in exceptional circumstances is one of the main themes in the work of Aernout Mik. Mik himself says of his manner of working: ‘I like to begin with images that everyone thinks they are familiar with. But as the viewe...

Is it possible nowadays to think of any field whose historical dimension has not been insistently brought to our attention in recent years? Is it possible to think of any subject whose history or heritage is not being presented today as ‘in...

Those who frequented the auction rooms and antique shops of Brussels over the past few years will often have met them: obscure nineteenth-century painters with unfamiliar names, but whose mental world was wide-ranging and full of variety. T...

The writer Erik Vlaminck (1954-) uses in a cycle of six novels verbal photography to portray a century of Flanders through the maternal and paternal side of his family. The voice of the common people resounds in all its proverbial pithiness...

The Bard and the Low Countries connection: Shakespeare in translations and portraits, bawdy references to the Low Countries and much more.

Jan Hendrik Leopold (1865-1925) has the reputation of being a difficult, not to say obscure poet; which is why for almost a century, despite the eminent position accorded him in the canon of Dutch literature at a time when that canon was co...

The method in which video artist Johan Grimonprez, who plays with images from the collective memory, stands out from the field is montage. Right from the beginning, both in the photo montages of John Heartfield and the montage techniques of...

In the course of a mere decade, Arthur Japin (1956-) has amassed a literary oeuvre of which many would be envious. It is clear that here is an important writer who also knows how to appeal to a wide audience. One probably has to go as far b...

Mels Crouwel currently holds the post of Chief Government Architect in the Netherlands. His counterpart in Flanders, the Chief Architect to the Flemish Regional Government, is Marcel Smets. The post of government advisor on architecture is ...

Hella Jongerius made her debut in 1993 at Droog Design, a more or less haphazardly formed group of Dutch designers who caused a furore in the 1990s with their alternative group exhibitions at the Milan furniture shows, exhibitions that were...

Pierre Audi is a theatre-maker through and through who is the artistic director of both the Netherlands Opera and, since 2005, the Holland Festival, which since 1947 has been offering a wide range of impressive and spectacularartistic proje...

Today the circus in Flanders enjoys variable fortunes. Most enterprises take a pessimistic view of their prospects for survival. On the other hand the Flemish Minister of Culture, Bert Anciaux, wants to turn Flanders into a progressive circ...

The Netherlands has almost one million Muslims; a statistic that terrifies quite a lot of people. In addition to practising believers, this group also includes hundreds of thousands who are non-practising or occasional Muslims. With the arr...

It should come as no surprise that the famous story of Pinocchio the marionette by the Italian author Carlo Collodi has become the standard that is constantly used to demonstrate the nature of puppet theatre. A piece of wood that becomes hu...

Despite the sometimes doom-laden messages of extremist or populist political parties feeding on Islamophobic prejudice, the realisation simultaneously grew in Belgium – as elsewhere in Europe – that the Muslims were here to stay and that th...

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Berend Strik's work touched upon the growing accessibility and mass consumption of images that might induce a state of rapture. Particularly in his embroidered work, he alluded to the ever-increasing need fo...

They may not paint a cheerful picture of man and the world, but the books of Willem Frederik Hermans are worth re-reading, says writer Henk Pröpper.

Is public broadcasting an outdated concept? Looking at the discussions which have been taking place on this theme in the Netherlands and Belgium over the past fifteen years one would not immediately give an affirmative answer. In general on...

As the man who walks through life, contemplating, experiencing the change around and inside himself, Jan Eijkelboom lifts reality to another level and creates a poetical universe all his own. (with 5 translated poems)

The author paints a portrait of Aalst. Then he makes a confession. For him, Aalst was first and foremost a smell. When he first came to the town about 35 years ago, it was the all-pervasive, acridsmell of starches – the factory! – that stru...

Review of the new 'Architectural Guide to the Netherlands 1900-2000'

Dutch studies in Britain are not dead or dying. But numbers, and consequently resources, are limited and, if anything, dwindling. Virtual Dutch was devised as at least a partial response to this problem. It is an alliance between the main u...

In 2005 the Dutch Minister of Education Maria van der Hoeven set up a commission with the task of establishing a canon of Dutch history. Now that the canon is actually in existence, the initial sceptics seem rather more positively inclined....

Black Book is presented as Paul Verhoeven's first Dutch film in 20 years, and in precise terms this is indeed the case. But Black Book is certainly not a typical Dutch film (whatever that may be).

It's always worth watching the latest Abattoir Fermé production, because what you see is always aesthetic, original and stimulating in many ways. Abattoir Fermé sends out a confused shriek into man's deepest depths. The echo that comes back...

Thea Beckman's 'Crusade in Jeans' is most definitely not an obvious book to film. A review of the film adaptation.

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 marked the beginning of difficult times for the majority of the Belgian population. Seven million Belgians were threatened with starvation. A handful of politicians and business people trie...

The Coppenhagen Collection has recently been acquired by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. This collection was built up by three generations of the Coppenhagen family in Amsterdam, Isaac (1846-1905), Haim (1874-1942) and Jaco...

Edward Anseele is the socialist chairman who originated the ‘modèle gantois', the ‘Ghent Model' that was imitated, extolled or maligned in all sections of the Second International. No serious biography of Anseele has ever been written, whic...

In 1790 the banking houses of Van Staphorst, Stadnitski, Van Eeghen and Ten Cate & Vollenhoven sent an agent, Théophile Cazenove, to the new United States and in the course of the next few years he bought about 2.2 million hectares (5.5...

Author Lieve Joris has been following Tolstoy's advice to perfection for all these years, and that is precisely what gives her books their universal and personal power. All one needs to do is to understand is that for Lieve Joris half the w...

'Joe Speedboat' has a very particular charm. The writing is clear and realistic and at the same time imbued with an enchanting imagination. It is simple and easy to read and yet very intelligently conceived with striking details that stick ...

It has been a long road for the musician Ben Sluijs we used to see some ten or fifteen years ago working in academic ensembles like Sax-No-End. Back then it was all about the hard work of getting the job done on time, but today we witness a...

At the beginning of the twentieth century Albert Einstein maintained intensive scientific and personal links with colleagues from the Netherlands. At the height of his scientific career, in the period between 1909 and 1927, Einstein corresp...

Christine van Broeckhoven was born on 9 April 1953 and, despite her strictly scientific approach to life, she does tend to say with a smile that her being born in this year was a matter not of chance but of predestination. For 1953 was a mi...

Mandeville, who was better known in the rest of the world than in his native country Holland, was a typical representative of the Enlightenment and today is considered one of the most important founding fathers of liberalism. But now, almos...

Balkende won the election of 22 November 2006 and is now one of the most experienced politicians in his own cabinet. He will now be presiding over a government for the fourth time in five years. And his popularity rating has improved consid...

‘Flanders still liveable in' was the headline in the Flemish daily De Morgen after the Belgian municipal elections (8 October 2006). So great was the euphoria following the very moderate election results of the extreme right party, Vlaams B...

In the Autumn of 2007 the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) in Ghent is holding a retrospective exhibition of British visual arts from c.1750 to c.1950, under the title of British Vision. With over three hundred works of art, including various outs...

De Jong has developed a virtuoso sense of form and composition. It is a brilliant embodiment of human madness. Or as he himself puts it: ‘I like the relationship between play and violence. Pleasure and brutality produce a strange mix. Perve...

When it comes to the history of Dutch fashion, Viktor & Rolf's story is an unusual one; in fact, it has all the magic of a fairy tale. Viktor & Rolf have successfully combined the eminence of haute couture with the broad reach of co...

A regular feature comprising short reviews of a selection of socio-cultural events and works recently published in the Low Countries.

The Dr Guislain Museum in northern Ghent is Belgium's only museum of psychiatry, and its rotating exhibitions – like its permanent collections – all attempt to uncover what it calls ‘the heart of madness'. That's an appropriate image to a ...

A foreword to the 16th yearbook and its themed section about love and lust, sent from the Low Countries with Tender Loving Care.

The narrator and his friend attend a party together, at an industrial park in Zaandam. A leather, lacquer and fetish party, called Wasteland. Sterility is already implicit in the name: Wasteland, the arid land, the vast barrenness where not...

The reader will certainly be familiar with the stereotype image of the Netherlands and sex. Sometime in the sixties of the last century a veritable sex explosion has supposedly occurred and led to a licentious society: pornography everywher...

A man talks about his wife: always rushing around, talking and organizing, but she didn't take her femininity too seriously. At the same time, there's a young girl there, cleaning the stairs: In those days, the girl did not yet have periods...

Anyone expecting to encounter only love of a courtly and idealistic nature in the literature of the Middle Ages may be disappointed. Even in lofty chivalric romances, love, at the right time and under certain circumstances, is depicted in a...

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The Dutch nineteenth century has the reputation of being prudish. Though in the 1960s Amsterdam particularly was in the vanguard of sexual liberation, if we go back a hundred years things were very different. Anyone studying the public cult...

A short colum about the overwhelming feeling of fullness. And you don't get that from cuddling. Only from fucking, according to the author.

The 'multicultural' love story of John Stedman and the mulatto slave Joanna in 18th-century Surinam is shown to have a double significance: on the one hand their relationship symbolises the power of love that makes it possible to overcome r...

An extract of Jef Geeraerts' highly personal chronicle of primal urges and unrestrained sex in the Belgian colony of the Congo.

Some people have gone to France or Italy in search of passionate romance, but others have fallen hopelessly in love in the unpromising dampness of the Low Countries. The stories of James Boswell and Belle van Zuylen, Charlotte Brontë and he...

To be a great poet and then to fall. When the little poet thought of what he wanted most, that was it. To amaze the world just once and just once have a fling with a poetess. He had had these thoughts repeatedly for years, naïve as he was.

Midas Dekkers combines an academic position as an internationally respected biologist with a much higher-profile career as a popularising author and broadcaster on Dutch TV. His breakthrough abroad came in 1994 with the publication in Brita...

Taboo time... About love for and sex with animals in a historical/literary perspective. Or as Dekkers writes: 'Sex is something that by definition you have with another being, whether of the same or a different sex, someone of the same race...

When the artists Ulay and Marina (Abramovic) met in 1975 in the then hectic environment of Amsterdam, they recognised a lot of themselves in each other and from 1976 they worked together. Ulay & Marina did not operate as a duo of artist...

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About love and lust in the contemporary Low Countries. There's no heart without loins and no loins without heart, and just think what your head can get up to. Love is a battlefield, lust is a struggle in which your body and soul are at stak...

Climate policy in Belgium and the Netherlands exhibits all the dilemmas of policy-making at the present juncture: the policy has to be global, but the political system remains largely national, and therefore operates on a relatively ineffec...

Carl De Keyzer lives the life of a restless photographer who is always thinking of new things and translating them into action. Operating on the frontier of the impossible. Every time a new series of photos by Carl De Keyzer comes out it is...

It can be said that Melchior de Hondecoeter represents a synthesis of the new scientific awareness of the natural world, coupled with an understanding of the advance of realism and the sophistication of technique which was evident at the cl...

It is to be feared that most of the Dutch are ignorant of a language which is officially recognised by their own government. That is largely because previous, nineteenth-century governments were not very sympathetic towards Yiddish, in whic...

At the end of the nineteenth century the city of Amsterdam's two most iconic commissions (the Central Station and the Rijksmuseum), made possible by the favourable economic climate, and hence representative of Dutch national pride, were the...

In the South Holland municipality of Lisse lies the area of dunes once known as Keukenduin van Teylingen. A name that points to the fact that the produce of these dunes was destined for the household of Teylingen. Teylingen, which in the fi...

Anyone reading a novel by Paul Verhaeghen finds themselves balancing for a while on the boundary between fact and fiction. In his debut novel Lichtenberg Verhaeghen tells the story of Tom Pepermans, a young researcher who encounters strange...

Hans Op de Beeck's prodigious oeuvre, spanning Sculpture, Installation, Photography, Video and Drawing, bears witness to his desire to question boundaries between media, and between artist and spectator. The task of the work is to engender ...

About Willem Jan Otten's art, which sees literature as the respectful exploration of the mystery, searching for an understanding gaze. A gaze that doesn't want to resolve the incomprehensible, but to embrace it.

In an overcrowded and hectic world it is comforting to realise that there is still such a thing as tranquillity and space and above all being true to oneself. Jeroen Doorenweerd's oeuvre is one of the finest examples of this. His works, ins...

A portrait of Maastricht by one of its literary citizens. He points out that this city remains new to him, presents itself to him as new at so many moments. But for that to happen you don't have to come from outside. I hope at least that it...

Brussels does not belong to Belgium's past. Brussels will continue to play the role history has imposed on it for centuries. As a crossroads of peoples it will remain a focal point of constantly changing realms. Brussels decks itself in the...

The humanist promise of Expo'58 remained a dream. The rivalry between the Superpowers did not lead to war, but neither did it bring rapprochement. One of them collapsed and the Cold War gave way to new conflicts. The great fellowship failed...

There was no discrepancy between the intellectual Ruusbroec, as he addresses the reader in his writings, and the impassioned mystic, for whom people flocked to Groenendaal from far and wide. The wondrous – and essential – ingredient of Ruus...

Kees van Dongen always presented himself as an untrained artist who followed his natural intuition and worked spontaneously, without analysing what he was doing. The development of Van Dongen's artistic ability has been a contentious subjec...

‘My novels are always about ordinary people, but by shining an intense light on them they become detached from reality and turn into enigmatic characters. Literature should make people special', according to Jan Siebelink on his website. He...

In the course of the 1890s the Flemish painter Jan Van Beers became a key figure in party-going European high society. Van Beers' photographic paintings made him an immensely wealthy man, so that although the quality of his work declined in...

The number of city poets in the Netherlands and Flanders is steadily increasing. The present figure for the Netherlands is about thirty. In Flanders only five cities so far have named a city poet: Antwerp, Ghent, Ninove in East Flanders, Da...

The way the newly-graduated Jo Crepain made his appearance on the Belgian architectural scene was forceful and convincing. In recent years Crepain Binst Architecture has won a number of major competitions in Flanders. In these projects the ...

Slightly more than half a century: that is the gap that separates Dutchman Leo Vroman and the Fleming Jan Lauwereyns. In other respects, the two gentlemen have a great deal in common: both are poets, both are also scientists, and both live...

Some artists from the past are familiar figures to those in the know and those with expertise in the field, but are entirely unknown to the general public. Johannes Stradanus – the Latinised version of Jan van der Straet, known in Italy as ...

Francine Houben from the Delft firm Mecanoo is the leading female architect in the Netherlands. Beauty is certainly not the only thing Houben aims at in her work, but it is undoubtedly the common denominator in Mecanoo's oeuvre, which range...

Ben X scored a ‘Highly satisfactory', but really not much more than that from Flemish press. How totally different were the reactions in Canada, where the film had its world première at the Montreal Film Festival. A standing ovation, glowin...

On 17 May 2007, the eve of the twenty-seventh anniversary of the death of the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, Control, the first film by the Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, had its premiere in Cannes. Control, which opened the ‘Quinzaine ...

The content of the Roman Tragedies by Ivo Van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam is an enlightening and contemporary lesson in political decision-making. And above all, the form of the production makes it an all-round theatre experience, itself...

A Review of two books on the history of Royal Dutch Shell.

The internationally renowned Belgian economist and Trotskyist politician Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) has received the serious biography he deserved, the result of a solid piece of research which has looked at all the relevant facts in the lif...

Review of Ahmet Altan et al., Standing Tall in Babel. Languages in Europe. Rekkem: Ons Erfdeel vzw, 2007.

In recent years the Flemish thirty-somethings have been cutting a dash in Dutch-language literature. Even in the Netherlands people are impressed by this generation of writers who are all in their thirties and are reverting to the technique...

The Waste Land is just about the most commented-on poem of the twentieth century. Yet the English reader's guides were often no help to Paul Claes when he was making notes for his Dutch translation (Het barre land, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij,...

Hans Koning died on April 13, 2007 in Easton, Connecticut, USA after a busy and varied life: from sergeant in the British army of liberation, by way of a job as editor of the independent Dutch weekly newsmagazine De Groene Amsterdammer, to ...

Nowadays, Reinbert de Leeuw is known as a conductor, but that is not how things started.

Portrait of a historian. According to Hartmans Jonathan Israel reacts more like an ideologue than a historian as soon as any critical comments are made of the Radical Enlightenment. He has little sympathy for the Moderate Enlightenment and ...

On May 8 2008 the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) will have existed for 200 years. To celebrate this, a large number of events have been organised in the course of the year on the theme of “The Magic of Science”. The a...

The Martena Museum in Franeker houses the Schurman memorabilia, a collection of objects that used to belong to Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678). She was famous for being the most learned woman of her time (In 1636 she studied as the firs...

A personal account of Dutch 'nationalism' by the author, a Dutch correspondent in Brussels: 'In Brussels, I came into contact with Flemings who turned out to know the Netherlands quite well, and who often thought differently about this. The...

In 2007 ABN AMRO, the biggest Dutch bank and one of the world's major and most international banks, lost its independence in dramatic fashion, following which it was torn to pieces by three other banks.

The photographer Vanfleteren has simply dreamed up his whole personal, wilful, idiosyncratic Belgium and created his own truth. Belgium is in the eye of the beholder. Le spectacle est dans le spectateur. That spectator has now made an archi...

Its success in designing utility objects and industrial products in the Netherlands led the American Time Magazine to hail Eindhoven as 'School of Cool‘ in its Summer 2007 supplement ‘Style and Design'.

Introduction to the book. How good do people feel in the Low Countries, still after all a prosperous delta area? Comfortably discontented, as one poet writes? How do they cope with the way of all flesh known as ‘ageing', with the welfare-an...

'In Good Time' - 'Tijdig'

What has gone so wrong in a country that it takes a TV programme to bring warmth and solidarity to villages and towns? 'Fata Morgana' is certainly not the only initiative dreamed up by those on high to strengthen social cohesion in Flanders...

The words ‘welfare and happiness' set the tone for the book with which the Dutch philosopher, Hans Achterhuis (1942-), would achieve public recognition in 1980. Later on, iIn his book on utopia Achterhuis shows extreme reserve regarding any...

The Dutch fight against 'mindless violence': it's an echo of so many attempts to pinpoint a certain cultural uneasiness, the suspicion of social cooling, and to fight it. While mindless violence may be one of the most visible causes of a ge...

The issue of population ageing is receiving a great deal of attention internationally. In 2002 the United Nations produced an action plan with three key priorities: first, concern for the elderly and the development of this, embracing theme...

Long tailbacks on roads full of furniture shops, traffic at a standstill on motorway exits leading to furniture superstores, a wide range of interior design magazines and umpteen television programmes devoted to ‘home and garden': these are...

When the new Dutch cabinet took office in 2006, tackling the problem of deprived areas was high on its agenda. This was in response to the electorate's evident demand for positive solutions to crime and the general sense of insecurity. Dur...

In this article the authors compare urban mental health and substance abuse care in New York and in Amsterdam. In doing so, they recognise that globalisation and its effects on mental health are crucial. However, it is impossible to give a ...

In Geel, a town of about 35,000 souls in the south-east of Antwerp province, Sint-Dimpna reigns supreme. There is a Sint-Dimpna Hospital, a Sint-Dimpna College and a Sint-Dimpna Church, all located right next to Sint-Dimpnaplein. The local ...

A 'tour d'horizon' of well-being and happiness in the Low Countries. Welfare may be a subject of ongoing concern, happiness should not. Happiness exists precisely by grace of the imperfection of our existence, in which we are, at best, caug...

'Doing Extremely Well' - 'Herrlich Weit'

The Dutch Kröller-Müller is one of the few museums in Europe to be so deeply embedded in a nature park, and the park is the only nature reserve in Europe with a heavily visited museum at its heart. Yet park and museum are inextricably bound...

Louis Le Roy, now over 80, studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and became internationally famous from the early 1970s onwards for his innovative insights into the field of town and country planning, approaches to nature, garden...

The Dutch period in North America began in 1609 with Henry Hudson's exploration of the river that would be given his name. In 1614 the New Netherland Company was licensed by the States General of the United Provinces for fur trading in the ...

After three books, we have a fairly clear picture of what interests Jan Van Loy: modern, over-indulged, people and their relationship to the gilded cage in which they live. That theme gives scope for a lot of humour and for feelings. Thus f...

Over the course of music history, the 'forma formata' has achieved supremacy. JacobTV's current work calls this into question. His ‘Grab it!' is not a composition in the traditional sense; it is more of a performative concept. Ter Veldhuis ...

Heddy Honigmann transforms silent monuments into speaking stones whose expressive power is universal. This is an art in which she has no equal, and one that has won her many awards as a maker of documentary films. The faces that Honigmann p...

Can artistic interventions create a context for change? This is the question that visual artist Francis Alÿs asks himself. In his work the essence lies often in a transient action (such as a walk in the streets), which leaves behind no piec...

After his start as a CoBrA-painter, Constant was to be the designer, theoretician and spokesman of his one-man-movement New Babylon. He constructed innumerable mysterious models, wrote countless articles, gave lectures all over Europe and e...

Klaas Verplancke is one of the most important representatives of the ‘Flemish school': a group of ‘young savages' who are revitalising Flemish illustration and causing more and more of a stir both at home and abroad. Both in Flanders and be...

All over the world the friendly, green, ever-so-naïve Frog in his red and white striped swimming-trunks is a much loved figure in families, schools, nurseries and libraries. His father and creator Max Velthuijs, a modest Dutch artist who wa...

In Hasselt there's no big square, no great art collection, none of the sense of ancient history you feel in nearby towns like Tongeren or Maastricht. Yet it's somehow quietly appealing. At the end of his day in Hasselt, Derek Blyth took a f...

If ever a writer in Dutch literature was blessed with eternal youth, that writer was Remco Campert. For decades his books bore witness to an almost provocative insouciance, which was perfectly expressed by the boyish, slightly mocking laugh...

Whenever the King of Belgium enters the federal parliament, he is officially announced in Dutch, French and German – De koning, le roi, der König. In fact, contrary to the widespread assumption that Belgium is a bilingual (French/Dutch) cou...

Belgium's political system is by definition notably divided. There are, of course, the traditional differences between labour and capital, and the associated socio-economic conflicts. And as in many traditionally overwhelmingly Catholic cou...

Unlike many architects of their generation, at UNStudio they have no need to cling dogmatically to any particular idiom or theory. Although Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos have expressed their views on architecture exhaustively in various a...

Gerard Mortier is currently regarded as an important authority in the international opera world. He has directed both the prestigious Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera. That seems rather unreal. The principal reason for this is that Ger...

The posthumous rise to fame of the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck (d.1441), who was celebrated during and after his lifetime but, like Vermeer, only reborn a hero in the nineteenth century, paints a particularly vivid picture of the shifting ...

Erik Spinoy, who nowadays finds it extremely irritating to be tarred with the postmodernist brush and who regards himself as an einzelgänger, an individualist, in the tradition of the Flemish modernists Paul Van Ostaijen and Hugo Claus, reg...

Photography appears to be Viviane Sassen's way of confronting the friction between reality and truth. She goes to great lengths to compose the dream-like reality in the image, using clear cues to direct what she cannot control. She takes ri...

Review of Herman van Bergeijk (ed.), Amerikaanse dromen: Frank Lloyd Wright en Nederland. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2008, 192 pp.

In recent years a renaissance in the genre of the short animated film seems to have been taking place in the Netherlands. Never before have there been so many active producers of animation films. This is all to do with the digitisation of t...

With Cut Loose (Los), based on the novel by Tom Naegels, Jan Verheyen to some extent distances himself from the broadest conceivable audience and takes on a more social, and therefore less popular, topic. Not long after Cut Loose came the r...

Alize Zandwijk, since 2006 artistic director of the Ro Theatre in Rotterdam, is one of the most interesting theatre directors in the Dutch-speaking world. Her work has by now been seen in many other parts of Europe, yet in her own country i...

Helping to celebrate Henry Hudson's arrival 400 years ago on the shores of what is now New York, will be a replica of his ship the Halve Maen. This ship has been sailing up and down the Hudson River for many years. Captain Chip Reynolds wit...

Review of Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch. How England Plundered Holland's Glory. New York: HarperCollins, 2008, 406 pp.

On April 19 1839 the European Great Powers signed the 24 Articles of the Treaty of London and by doing so legally dissolved the ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands'. From then on Belgium and the Netherlands would go their separate ways. It w...

For many people Calvinism is inextricably bound up with Dutch history and culture, and the commemoration of Calvin's five hundredth birthday in 2009 may well confirm that impression. Calvinism was an important feature in the Dutch landscape...

Sojourner Truth, the United States' best-known African-American woman of the nineteenth century, grew up speaking Dutch. The narrative of Sojourner Truth is one example of how widespread the Dutch language and culture were among African-Ame...

Exactly sixty years after ‘Awater' could first be read in England in a periodical, with an Anvil publication the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff will finally get what he has always deserved: his first UK volume. Hopefully, and probably, it will...

Stefan Brijs' Angel Maker is a highly accomplished novel with many qualities. He offers us more than just a page turner, which of course the book also is: to quote the reviewer of the English translation in SFX Magazine, the novel ‘has supe...

More than anyone the Flemish conductor and musician Paul Van Nevel finds himself caught between these two extremes. His career, which now spans almost forty years, is an exciting tight-rope dance between the faithful and the wayward, watche...

Abram de Swaan, who in 2008 won the P.C. Hooft Prize, the highest literary award in the Netherlands, for his essays, has never allowed his curiosity to be shackled by any one doctrine, political tendency, research method, or even by a singl...

Robbert Dijkgraaf, who took over as President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie voor Wetenschap-pen, KNAW) on 19 May 2008, is a man of many talents. A brilliant mathematical physicist, h...

Herman De Dijn's philosophy has never been a purely intellectual game. With him, as with every important philosopher, it has always been a matter of commitment, in the service of which philosophy was used. So for many people De Dijn has bee...

Since the 30th December 2008 a new Prime Minister has been running Belgium: the Flemish Christian Democrat Herman Van Rompuy (1947-). The man has a long experience of the wheels of the State.

About the decline, fall and new lease of life of the Belgian-Dutch banking and insurance group Fortis.

Review of the first two issues of the new annual review 'Belgian Society and Politics'

Journalist Suzanna Jansen's Pauper Paradise (Het pauperparadijs) is a clever and moving description of the attempts to re-educate and integrate ‘the dregs of humanity' in the Netherlands in the period from 1823 to 1973. Her family history l...

With his creations Mark Manders constructs a universe of his own within the world in which he finds himself. In doing so he makes use of images and language. The archetypical artist is absent in his spaces – and when he's not lying under th...

Review of Mienke Simon-Thomas, Dutch Design. A History. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

The South African poet Elisabeth Eybers (1915-2007) moved to the Netherlands in 1961. In these poems, written in Afrikaans and later in life rewritten in English, she reflects on the position of the immigrant, condemned to be forever a disp...

A South African writer, in residence in a tiny village in Flanders, is cycling to the local post office to send some postcards to her son. A witty and sharp report on perception, fear for the other and gentle misunderstandings.

The Flemish writer Tom Lanoye, a part-time inhabitant of the Cape for nearly twenty years, diagnoses South Africa. About Zuma, definitely not the new Mandela, the need of a different ANC and hope for –despite all the violence- a continuing,...

Daniel Hugo, South African poet and translator, was allowed to go to Flanders in 1983 (during the heyday of apartheid) to study at the university of Leuven. He tells us all about “his” Low Countries.

The Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis takes the train from Cape Town to Stellenbosch to tell us that you have to be blind not to see that South Africa is a violent society, but he refuses to take refuge in resignation, indifference and despair: ...

The South African writer Riana Scheepers first set foot in the Netherlands in 1992. It was an intensely emotional experience. She felt that she was fleeing South Africa, going back to that maternal breast, retracing the route that her foref...

For the poet Alfred Schaffer South Africa is the country he continues to miss, even when he is there. In this article he looks for the country's soul in its poets: Breyten Breytenbach, Antjie Krog, Charl-Pierre Naudé. But he presents also y...

Anton and Mark Kannemeyer grew up during apartheid in an oppressive Afrikaner milieu and survived, thanks to their escape into a comic-book fantasy world. Their rebellion is recorded in the hundreds of pages of Bitterkomix. It all started w...

The day of the rugby final in 1995 (South Africa beating New Zealand in the World Cup) was probably the first day South Africa was ever an nation. Thanks to Mandela and the captain of the team Francois Pienaar. The World Cup football 2010 c...

For a long time Marlene Dumas felt like a stranger in her new country, the Netherlands. South Africa still has a number of meanings in her work, even if the painter now belongs to the world. Her exhibition For Whom the Bell Tolls was all ab...

Common Cultural Heritage is not always “shared”. Looking at two cases (Cape Castle in Cape Town and the Frans De Kuiper Monument in Kruger National Park), both partners (South Africa and the Netherlands) will have to accept different perspe...

Afrikaans gave the world the word “Apartheid”. After 1994 there were two silent voices in the debate on Afrikaans: first, the coloured voice; and second, the intellectual voice from the left. Only when Afrikaans has become fully diversified...

The Netherlands and South Africa have a remarkable relationship: a form of special neighbourliness, resulting from the relationship between Afrikaans and Dutch as well as other shared cultural elements. That history now belongs to the past....

One learns migration step by step, says the poet. “My accent was enough to indicate / from where I came. Strange, how they welcomed me / while treating you (sc. South Africa) to blind, official hate”.

In the period between 1600 and 1945 parts of the Islamic world were subject to Dutch colonial power. From 1965 to the present day there has been for the first time an increasing Muslim presence in the Low Countries. Today when Netherlands a...

Leiden is characterised not only by the Netherlands' oldest and most famous university and a number of associated museums of international renown, but also by what it lacks. Visit its almshouses, read its verses on the walls in several lang...

2009 was the year of mounting pressure in the never ending story of Belgian state reform. Before may 2010 the master of compromise, ex- Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, has to find a solution for BHV (read all about this mysterious institut...

Jacob van Maerlant (c.1230- post-1291), born in West-Flanders, in the Lordship of Bruges, was a prolific writer who wrote on practically anything. He made available in the vernacular countless fields of knowledge which, before his time, had...

Henk Visch (born 1950) makes drawings and graphic art, writes texts and poems and teaches, but is primarily known as a sculptor. Many of his works are to be found in public spaces. The posture of his figures is indicative of tension or is t...

Mortier writes a refined, sensual Dutch unmarred by fashionable clichés. The world his books evoke is still conventional and Catholic to the core. Sleep of the Gods (2008) has the Great War as its theme: it deserves to be mentioned in the s...

What do Alize Zandwijk, Luk Perceval, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers and Johan Simons have in common? They are wanted abroad as directors or even artistic leaders of a theatre company. Undoubtedly they are good, but perhaps such adjectives as ‘...

Rogier van der Weyden was born in Tournai around 1400 as Roger de le Pasture. He was appointed official painter to Brussels around 1435. Whereas Jan van Eyck seeks to engage his viewers on an intellectual level, Van der Weyden seems signifi...

It was with Jan Cremer (born 1940) that literature first encountered publicity focused primarily on the writer. In 1964 he wrote the right book at the right time. After the runaway success of I Jan Cremer he fled to the United States, stayi...

Little Sparta, Finlay's four-hectare garden lies in the Pentland Hills, an hour's drive from Edinburgh. De Nollen lies at the northernmost tip of the province of North Holland. Landscapes created by artists. A walk through De Nollen takes t...

More than any other Dutch artist for children, adolescents and adults Tonke Dragt, born in Batavia (now Djakarta) in 1930, likes to explore the boundaries of space and time. As an artist Dragt is a kind of Janus. She expresses herself just ...

Van der Pol is not an architect who designs imposing buildings. The word perhaps most adequate for describing her work is “sculpturality”. Her buildings stand as autonomous objects in their surroundings. She was appointed as first female ar...

For anyone familiar with Brassinga's (born 1948) work, pugnacity, witty contrariness and a bottomless melancholy have been at the heart of everything she has entrusted to paper in the last twenty years. Poetry is a natural phenomenon born o...

The universe of Jennifer Tee (born 1973) is a kind of Wonderland where the artist takes you by the hand leading you into a parallel world. She is deeply fascinated by mythological stories, religion and anthropology.

In describing the intriguing work of Merlijn Twaalfhoven (born 1976),one might at some point throw in a term like “polydiscursive”. That is to say, Twaalfhoven's music narrates different stories and events all at once, is sensory and multil...

In photography a fleeting moment is captured. In film there's a passage of time. But looking at the digitally manipulated images of the Flemish artist David Claerbout (born 1969) one is no longer so certain. He draws our attention to the im...

Dutch studies is global: it is taught at some two hundred and twenty universities and institutes around the world. Collaboration in teaching and research is widely stimulated with the support of the International Association for Dutch Stud...

Irma Boom (born 1960) mainly designs books. Ever since the 15th century there has been a rich tradition of printing and “building” books in the Netherlands. Boom sees the designing of a book as an interactive game between the development of...

In the decades before and after 1900 Théophile Van Rysselberghe (1862-1926) was a major figure in the artistic capitals of Brussels and Paris. A prolific portrait painter, this versatile artist also excelled in the Decorative Arts, designin...

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Dutch architects are renowned worldwide for their radical and pragmatic approach. It is clear that they are highly competent in marketing their architecture as an export product. The key question is whether a new generation can also cause a...

On 13 May 2000 the Dutch city of Enschede was shaken by a a catastrophic fireworks disaster. Soon after the disaster a development plan was drawn up under the direction of urban planner and architect Pi de Bruijn. About two-thirds of the pl...

The Royal Ballet of Flanders has dusted off his reputation since the arrival of its new artistic director, the Australian Kathryn Bennetts, at the start of the 2005-2006 season. On its fortieth birthday the ugly duckling has turned into an ...

The ups and downs of the US-Netherlands relationship are expertly detailed in this hefty volume by all kinds of specialists in their own field. A veritable and superbly readable encyclopedia.

2010 sees the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Congo's independence, but the question is whether there will be much to celebrate. Leopold II meets Kabila.

Early one morning in 1959 the first natural gas in the Netherlands was brought to the surface in the Groningen hamlet of Kolham. It made the Netherlands financially a good deal more stable than other European countries.

Dutch has left traces in American English and even in other North-American languages. “Yankee” for instance is likely to have come from the Dutch double Christian name “Jan-Kees”. And read all about Santa Claus (Sinterklaas).

This excellent and comprehensive literary history of the Low Countries, spanning more than a thousand years, will serve both to whet readers' appetites and to provide insight into the socio-historical and literary contexts in which that lit...

Van Gogh wrote 819 letters between 29 September 1872 and 23 July 1890 (six days before his death). What makes this new and complete edition (available in Dutch, French and Englih) brilliant is the illustrations and the notes. By the way, th...

It took the Flemish pop musician Bert Ostyn (born 1981) ten years to reach the stage of consolidation. His group Absynthe Minded knows its classics. Rather than running through the genres or going for pastiches the group makes its own synth...

The Afrikaans poet-singer (born 1963) has built a big, loyal following, not only in South Africa, but particularly in Belgium and the Netherlands. Waits and Dylan are often mentioned, but Nel's sensitivity is actually closer to that of the ...

This scientist (born 1958) analyses the emergence of deserts as easily as the collapse of the stock market. Scheffer demonstrates that in these two totallydifferent systems the same warning lights go on on the eve of a major change.

This sociologist (born 1937) was one of the first to apply the theory of “consociational democracy”. In a number of more popular works he explained why Belgian politics can be regarded as “armed peace”. Always able to strike a perfect balan...

This great Flemish theologian played a major role in the renewal of the Church and of theology. Often obliged to defend himself in Rome, he was never condemned. One could say that he felt a freedom with regard to Church structures that enab...

The first president of Europe is an intelligent, practicing catholic, belonging to the conservative wing of his party, the Flemish Christian Democratic CD&V. Herman Van Rompuy (born 1947) studied philosophy and economics and restored ca...

Ever since the fall of Antwerp in 1585 the river Scheldt caused tensions between Flanders and the Netherlands. It's the economy, stupid. In the end complex negotiations and some pressure led to the start of the dredging in the beginning of ...

The painter, poet, architect, designer and above all propagandist of the Avant-Garde Theo van Doesburg (1833-1931) is a staple figure in the history of modern art.

This new systematic catalogue of the paintings of James Ensor by Xavier Tricot (containing a detailed chronology, the catalogue of works, and a reference section) is most welcome. It confirms that, 150 years after his birth, the works and t...

The Hermitage Amsterdam opened its doors on 20 June 2009 with an exhibition on the splendour of the Russian court. It is a branch of the world famous museum in St Petersburg.

At the end of 2010 the Groeninge Museum in Bruges will outline the artistic exchanges between the Netherlands and Central Europe from about 1420 to 1530. The exhibition will start with the generation that included Van Eyck, Campin and Rogie...

A foreword to the 18th yearbook and its themed section about South Africa which hosts the Football World Cup in the summer of 2010. In this issue of the yearbook we are talking about South Africa and the Low Countries: how do they view each...

What do we see in the mirrors we look into and the mirrors others hold up to us? To form the theme of this edition we have put together a collection of images: images of Flanders and the Netherlands to be found in other countries and images...

In this portfolio you can find ten photos which in one way or another put across the image and the self-image of Flanders.

As an American with Dutch roots James Kennedy has always had an eye for the reputation of the Netherlands in the world. In this article he portrays the end of tolerance in a country in conflict with itself. For the time being the confusion ...

Utrecht seemed in 1979 like Utopia compared to the crumbling island monarchy the author had left behind. He was living in Maastricht when Thatcher went to war with Argentina. After Amsterdam he finally landed in Brussels. Sometimes Belgium ...

Just before the Dutch Revolt the Southern Netherlands were Protestant and the Northern Catholic. The rise of the antithesis between Catholic and Protestant is closely tied up with the self-definition of North and South as separate cultures ...

The label ‘Burgundian' that is now such a popular sales tool of the Dutch catering industry, which describes a rotund, good-natured man who fully enjoys the pleasures of life, is a twentieth-century invented tradition. It is popularly contr...

Turkish Delight, both book and film were perfect expressions of the upheaval of the sixties and its hedonistic paradise. The literary prototype of the Dutch bourgeois, however, dates from the nineteenth century: a personage named Batavus Dr...

In this article the author examines the extent to which the image of Flemish greedy sensuality and mysticism (or lavish living and piousness) is projected, if at all, in two grand novels that have become the idiosyncratic national epics of ...

In this portfolio you can find ten photos which in one way or another put across the image and the self-image of the Netherlands.

A Dutch poet responds to the diary of a Flemish poet by… writing his own. Nolens' diary lasts almost 30 years, counts almost 1000 pages, full of poetry, love and alcoholism. It's above all an uncompromising and cutting self analysis.

The quality of pop festivals in the Low Countries has attracted international attention. Queen of the festivals, Rock Werchter, has been named ‘Best Festival in the World' four times.

The work of Soeters van Eldonk, with its modernist inspiration, is far removed from mainstream Dutch architecture today. It is essential for them that architecture be comprehensible. A central theme in their work and thinking is how to make...

The author takes you on a walk through her city where books burnt, beer flows and beguines lived. The university is omnipresent, but an impaled iridescent beetle intrigues.

The author considers different relationships between poet and painting. In fact, the writing of poems based on paintings seems to have become a national sport in the Netherlands. Brueghel, Rembrandt, Cuyp, Vermeer, Asselijn inspired Enquist...

Gorter is more known as a revolutionary propagandist than as the most gifted poet of his age. In fact he was accused by some of having quit literature for the simplifications of dialectical materialism, but he himself saw his work as a cont...

This painter may base himself on reality, yet he never literally shows it. That is due to the translation process, from reality to photograph to painting, in which all superfluous details are jettisoned. What you see is what you don't get: ...

The author found a small pile of five books in a book village in South Wales: English translations of Maeterlinck, Nobelprize 1911, a Flemish writer writing in French. He finds out that in de fin de siècle and in the years prior to the Firs...

Gerard Reve felt frustrated after his successful debut The Evenings. The book sold well but did not produce sufficient income for a decent living. He therefore turned to writing in English. Eventually he realised that his English was not ‘r...

The Praise of Folly occupies a very modest position within Erasmus' oeuvre. Nowadays he is judged on the basis of this book. The impression may have arisen that it was employed only as a weapon in the fight against everything that was wrong...

In its heyday, Belgium used to be called the Mecca of the comic strip. But its success was due to its Walloon authors. A new generation of Flemish authors is changing all that.

In the Middle Ages belfries or hall towers were a symbol of the urban and middle class freedom and power in the Southern Netherlands. Here we show you eight of them. They all have a tale to tell.

Lucas was greatly admired in his own lifetime and his fame has not diminished since, mainly because of his engraving and woodcuts. He met Dürer, his great role model, in Antwerp in 1521. He was also a major innovator in his larger paintings...

Rottumerplaat and Rottumeroog are two islands in the eastern Wadden Sea which lie uninhabited on the edge of one of the most populated regions in the world. Twice a year a small group of volunteers goes to live and work on these islands. Th...

For years, visual artist Michael Raedecker was more popular outside the Netherlands than at home. In terms of technique he strikes a balance between art and design, between Painting with a capital ‘P' and handicraft with a small ‘h'.

This writer is so authentically and imperturbably himself, that one is inclined to see him as a ‘type'. Something of an exotic in his own country, since these days you don't often see anyone so typically Dutch, so Christian through and thr...

Actor for the theatre and film, director of theatre companies and writer. Josse De Pauw has achieved a position where he can allow his skills in acting, writing and working with music to mature without losing any of his originality.

Hardcore royalists need not to despair. Paradoxically, it is entirely possible that restricting the powers of the Crown will prove to be the best life insurance for the Belgian and Dutch royal houses. After all, a symbolic monarchy with a c...

English is necessary, useful and beneficial as a global lingua franca, but there is and will always be linguistic diversity and multilingualism. We will always need other languages besides English.

Religious heritage is and will remain a tense subject as long as the church has both a cultural and religious presence in society. It is, however, possible to reconsider our views when it comes to the preservation and re-use of heritage.

This movie tells the story of an American contract killer (played by George Clooney) who goes on the run and finds a hiding place in the desolate Abruzzo region of Italy. A melancholy gangster thriller by a former ‘rock photographer'.

In the normal course of events a theatre producer chooses a play and the decor flows from his interpretation of the piece. Peter Missotten has an image in his mind and so selects a specific play.

Running right across the middle of Belgium is a horizontal line, stretching from the border with France in the west to the German border in the east. This frontier divides Belgium into three distinct language areas: Flanders (Dutch-speaking...

Financial historians have only recently begun a serious examination of banks and banking on the European continent during the Second World War. This survey presents a model history of finance which other countries would do well to follow.

Three Flemish cities, Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven all have a new museum. They show three different ways of tackling a project. In each case, existing old collections are given a new, engaging presentation.

The Grand Dutch Novel of the nineteenth century has seen three complete English translations. The book continues to inspire the worldwide struggle for humanity and justice

A book about a boy and his dog, published in 1872, enchanted millions all over the world, especially in Japan. The boy will die on Christmas Eve, in Antwerp cathedral, in front of Rubens' famous painting, The Descent from the Cross.

This book is a coming-of-age novel about a 55-old man, living on a Dutch farm. He lost his twin brother a long time ago. His father lost his favourite son. The book is both typically Dutch and reaches out to the wider world.

A child that quickly gets bored with its toys and is forever in need of new stimuli – that's the picture one gets whenever he or she considers the multi-faceted career of Daan Stuyven. He reinvented himself lately, as his last album, Simple...

The Netherlands Bach Society has become a well respected and integral part of the musical infrastructure of the country. In anticipation of its first century of existence the Society has set itself the challenge of performing all the works ...

The Quartet is considered internationally as the very best in recorder music. The four members try to find the perfect instrument, or perfect combination of instruments, for every concert programme, based on the historical background to the...

Lemaire is not just a philosopher, he is also an anthropologist profoundly concerned with the relationship between man and nature. His own programme is determined by the approach: who is man in his landscape? From his self-chosen position o...

For brain researcher Dick Swaab life is largely a matter of chance and we can have little influence on it. Character is established in the early years; then we have to manage with what is there. We are our brain. Our spirit is the product o...

On October 10, 2010, Curaçao and St Martin became autonomous ‘states' within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, whereas the islands Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba became special municipalities within the Netherlands. The new construction leave...

Belgium and the Netherlands have a chaotic political year behind them. Holland is back on track, albeit in a locomotive with a two-stroke engine (a minority government of the Christian Democratic CDA and the liberal VVD), supported by the ‘...

A bombshell exploded in 2010 when the Bishop of Bruges confessed to sexually abusing his nephew for years more than two decades earlier. The annus horribilis that followed should be seen against a background of galloping secularization. Be ...

A practising Muslim, a Dutchman and a Maroccan, who came as a boy to the Netherlands, is in charge of the largest port in the world. Following the murder of Theo Van Gogh he said that young Muslims who didn't share core Dutch values should ...

The painter Metsu, one of the most valued painters of his own time, is enjoying somewhat of a comeback. He combined Dou's formal language with Ter Borch's subjects and was a master at conveying light and shade.

Gossart was certainly not the first artist from the Low Countries to travel to Italy, but he was most certainly the first to draw copies of classical statues and architecture. After his return he quickly became one of the most sought-after ...

In this introduction the Chief Editor presents the themed section of this issue: sports and play in general. He also reflects on twenty years of presenting the culture of the Low Countries to the world.

Why do the Dutch skate? Peasants and princes do. In this essay the author, an obsessive skater himself, tries to unravel the secret of this mild obsession. Perhaps it's a question of wanting to float, to fly without wings?

Why are the Flemish fond of cycle racing? Take The Tour of Flanders, that “High Mass” of cycling. A nation seems enraptured. Is it the admiration for the hardship, the often lonely and always unequal struggle between the athlete and the rai...