Love Stories – Hermitage Amsterdam – Love has countless faces
review: Love Stories – Hermitage Amsterdam
Met Love Stories – Art, Passion and Tragedy Hermitage Amsterdam has the European premiere of a traveling exhibition that travels all over the world. Renowned portraits of love in all its forms have been collected from the treasury of London’s National Portrait Gallery. A selection of Dutch portraits has been added in Amsterdam in consultation with the English Museum and the Dutch National Portrait Gallery. In all the images we see great artists and celebrities, and of course also in a British exhibition royal houses not missing. What do they tell us together about all those wonderful ways of love?
Changing visual language
The exhibition includes painted and photographed portraits from the late sixteenth century. A thematic classification has been chosen, with sections such as The muse, Partner in portrait NL Love under fire. The historical development in the view of love remains somewhat underexposed, but you do catch a glimpse of it between the lines. For example, the respectable banker couple Anna Maria and Thomas Jenkins are still immortalized at the end of the eighteenth century with their symbolic dog, which stands for marriage. Several decades later, poet John Keats is captured in a painting in a melancholy moment, lost in a book that refers to the sad poem he wrote that very day (Ode to a nightingale). In such portraits you can clearly see how the early modern courtly view of love evolves into the romantic one of the moving century; how the focus shifts from honor and loyalty to yearning and passion.
The paintings and photographs from the changing century are often a feast of recognition, depending on your cultural interest and which generation you belong to. For example, there are beautiful portraits of married actors who enrapture theater and cinema visitors together. Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, for example, and the illustrious duo Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Or take the greats of English pop music, the four Beatles met their partners and Mick Jagger met some of his loves. Each one very mediagenic and with a story that strongly appeals to the public imagination. Here, too, you see a change in the visual language. The somewhat older portrait photos from the 1930s and 1940s clearly have a more subdued and traditional character than the more exuberant and loose images of later years.
Forbidden love and tragedy
The portraits in the category Love under fire are not all about homosexual relationships, but those – mostly forbidden – loves do get a lot of attention. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Oscar Wilde and his ‘Bosie’… from the end of the influential century, they made their appearance in British portraiture. With the famous photo of Wilde and Douglas you should of course also quickly think of the sad fate that awaits Wilde in the end. At the time of that portrait, the future does not smile at Wilde kindly and full of promises, the horrors of his trial and conviction, his lonely death in Paris, no one can foresee. Because of his sexual behavior (‘gross immoral acts’), the writer was sentenced in 1895 to two years hard labor in the prison of Reading, UK. After his release he was penniless and vomited out to France, where he soon died of meningitis.
With our hindsight, more promising portraits turn out to be the prelude to broken hearts and tragedies. What about the happy photo of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? How do we watch Elizabeth Taylor lovingly cut Richard Burton’s hair? Married twice, divorced twice. In your mind you can hear their crackling name-calling from the oh-so-relevant movie version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But when Taylor dies in 2011, she takes the last letter from Burton – who died in 1984 – with her in her coffin. Love stories the exhibition is not called Love portraits.
go Dutch
As mentioned, a selection of Dutch portraits has also been added in Amsterdam. The first (secret) photo of Beatrix and Claus; Johan and Danny Cruijff in a colorful bedroom; Mathilde Willink through the eyes of Carel… they are historical historical images. Don’t forget the city’s reputation for free love, too. On April 1, 2001, the consummate mayor Job Cohen is the world’s simultaneous same-sex marriage. In the Hermitage hangs a picture with the four happy parents.
How unexpectedly many faces love has. And what a beautiful opportunity it is to be able to take a moment to reflect on all these faces. Love in dark days, we can use that.