Nina Siegal

But for two Amsterdam-based chefs, it was high time to go beyond simply edible, and to use mind-altering ingredients to create truly gastronomic cuisine.

New York-born Noah Tucker and former Londoner Anthony Joseph, who have co-founded five successful restaurants in Amsterdam, are on a mission to explore what Joseph calls the “holy grail” of ingredients: herbs, spices, plants and oils with psychoactive components. They started this quest in the Netherlands, where a tolerant policy toward soft drugs makes many of these substances legal and accessible.

In April, the pair’s new television series, “High Cuisine,” had its premiere on the Dutch streaming platform Videoland, and they’re now creating a series of cookbooks that will ultimately pull together about 100 mind-altering dishes.

The TV show follows the two chefs around the Netherlands as they learn about regional dishes, and then source Blue Lotus, Mexican tarragon, South African Kanna and other hallucinogens that are legal here, as well as various strains of cannabis recommended by local weed connoisseurs.

Tucker and Joseph combine what they find into elegantly presented multicourse meals, with dishes such as wild roe with cabbage, bacon terrine, baby salsify, duck’s liver and hash-infused mole sauce; and North Sea crab with crispy seaweed, yogurt sauce and a cannabis reduction.

The program is driven by Tucker, who describes himself at the beginning of each episode by saying, “I love to cook, and I love to get high.” Joseph, in contrast, doesn’t ever take drugs.

In “High Cuisine,” this yin-yang dynamic between the two chefs plays out in comedic moments, with Tucker often giggling in a billow of smoke, while Joseph remains sober and lucid, eloquently introducing each unlikely course to the diners.

The show’s marriage of haute cuisine and hallucinogens might seem possible only because of permissive Dutch drug policies.

But Karim Mostafi, a spokesman for the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, which oversees recreational drug policy in the Netherlands, said in an email that he could not comment on the legality of the show.

“The Dutch government is aiming at prevention of drug use, in any shape or form,” he wrote. “We don’t have knowledge/expertise on how recreational drugs can be used in meal preparation.”

Mostafi sent links to the ministry’s drug policy statement, which acknowledges that the status of cannabis is “ambiguous” in the Netherlands under the current policy of toleration.

“Selling and using are still criminal offenses under Dutch law, but the authorities choose not to pursue or prosecute lawbreakers,” the statement says.

David Duclos, chief communications officer at Sensi Seeds, a licensed Dutch distributor of cannabis seeds, said this policy leaves a lot of room for guessing. As far as selling edible products made from cannabis, he said, “there’s no regulation of any aspect of that; there’s no authority which can sign off on any of the products which are sold.”

Iris Freie, chairwoman of the National Association of Smart Shops, stores that sell what she described as “legal and safe alternatives to illegal drugs,” said that “High Cuisine” was raising awareness about how psychoactive edibles can be used.

“You buy a box of truffles and you can eat them just like that, or you can make tea, or you can also make a really nice dish out of them,” she said, referring to “magic truffles.”

“They also want to address the fact that these substances are illegal in some places and why is that?” she said. “Since they occur in nature, why can’t we consume them? They’re trying to focus on a new angle in this discussion, which I think is positive.”

Tucker and Joseph had both worked in Michelin-starred kitchens before they met about a decade ago in Amsterdam. They subsequently opened five restaurants together, before selling four to focus on their latest venture, Yerba, a “plant forward” restaurant in the city’s Museum Quarter, which serves seasonal dishes made from ingredients that are wild, local and sustainable — but nonpsychoactive. The cuisine leans heavily toward vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free dishes that only use animals from “traceable sources.”

About eight years ago, the two chefs came up with the “High Cuisine” concept and began to research the range of psychoactive ingredients available in the Netherlands, visiting cannabis cultivation farms and smart shops, interviewing experts, and then bringing the substances back to their kitchen to explore the flavors and the effects when boiled, braised, caramelized and eaten.

After testing these out on willing friends and experts — “always voluntary and always free of charge,” Tucker noted — the pair took their show on the road.

In each episode of “High Cuisine,” Tucker and Joseph explore a region of the Netherlands and, in addition to stopping at a top local restaurant, they visit a local hallucinogens specialist: a truffle farm, a marijuana seed farm, and, in Amsterdam, an importer and distributor of herbs and plants with an enormous warehouse full of rare goods.

“We looked at all those alternative ingredients as a chef would,” Tucker said. “We looked at their flavor profile, and then paired them with an appropriate flavor combination.

“With magic truffles, we pair it with wild mushrooms, so you don’t even taste it,” he added. “It’s already within the flavor profile of the dish — but you’re getting high.”

Then Tucker and Joseph head back to their own kitchen, and cook up a regionally-inspired feast, to be served to invited guests.

“The whole concept is micro-dosing, which is very important,” said Tucker. “We wanted our participants to leave feeling a slight euphoria, but still in control.” Or as Joseph put it, “about the same as if you had a glass of wine per course with a four-course meal. To be merry.”

The two chefs are now developing “High Cuisine” for an international audience. In June, they expect to start shooting the first segment of a new series in locations such as Colombia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Bali. They plan to learn how ingredients such as chaliponga, peyote and magic mushrooms are used in local rituals, in order to then combine them with culinary specialties from those regions.

“It’s a cooking show, it’s a drug show, it’s a travel show, and it’s a lifestyle show,” said Tucker. “We try to cover all the bases; it turns out we explore the whole culture through food and drugs.”

Duclos, the spokesman for Sensi Seeds, said he had seen attempts at combining cannabis and cuisine in the past, “and most of them failed because the community wasn’t ready for it,” he said.

But with the simultaneous loosening of drug laws across the United States and Europe, and the rise of a global foodie culture, “the timing is really impeccable,” he added.

“Even just thinking about it makes my mouth water,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/high-cuisine-dutch-tv.html" id="1a89608f-1f15-3f5f-a03d-7c5d27b39075">The New York Times</a>.

AMSTERDAM — Edibles is the word most often used for foods that make marijuana and other hallucinogens go down easy. Think pot brownies and space cakes — not exactly famous for pleasing the palate.

On This Cooking Show, the Ingredients Make You High

Arthur Brand, an independent art detective based in Amsterdam, handed the painting over to an insurance company two weeks ago, he said. Brand had been trying to track down the Picasso painting since 2015, but all of his leads went nowhere.

Earlier this month, he said, he was contacted by “two persons with good contacts in the underworld,” who said the painting was in the Netherlands.

“They told me, ‘It’s in the hands of a businessman who got it as payment, and he doesn’t know what to do with it,'” Brand said in an interview. “I talked to the two guys and we made a plan to get it out of his hands.”

The two contacts, whom Brand declined to name, dropped the painting off at Brand’s house in Amsterdam in two plastic garbage bags, he said. “They delivered it right to my door,” he said.

Brand said they drank a toast to the painting and, after that, he hung the Picasso on his wall. “The urge was too great; I couldn’t resist,” he said. The next day, a Picasso specialist from the Pace Gallery in New York flew to the Netherlands to check the painting, and verified its authenticity, Brand said. (A spokesman for Pace declined to comment.)

Brand turned the painting over to a retired British detective, Dick Ellis, founder of Scotland Yard’s art and antiquities squad, who is now a representative for an insurance company that Brand declined to name. Ellis, who did not respond to requests for comment, told Agence France-Presse, “There is no doubt that this is the stolen Picasso.”

The subject of Picasso’s portrait, Dora Maar, was a French photographer, painter, poet and one of the artist’s lovers. He portrayed her in many paintings and drawings. This one, painted in 1938, was apparently one of his favorites, which he kept in his private collection until he died.

Brand said that was part of the reason that it had been difficult to recover. “It was never published, there were almost no pictures of it, and it had never been in a museum,” he said. “Picasso is one of the most stolen artists.”

The owner in 1999 was a Saudi Arabian billionaire, Sheikh Abdul Mohsen, who had it on his luxury yacht at Antibes, France, when it was stolen. Brand said it probably came into the Netherlands as “payment for drugs or for arms deals.”

Brand said that he will probably receive no payment for recovering the artwork. “At the time there was a reward offered of 400,000 euros and I don’t know if the reward will be paid,” he said. “If there is a reward, it should go to the people who brought it in. My reward was to have a Picasso on my wall for one night. I can tell you, it was great.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/design/stolen-picasso-dora-maar-amsterdam.html" id="e4d24013-604d-3075-a350-e449851a2cc5">The New York Times</a>.

AMSTERDAM — An art crimes investigator in the Netherlands said Tuesday that he had recovered Pablo Picasso’s 1938 painting “Portrait of Dora Maar,” which was stolen from the yacht of its Saudi Arabian owner in the south of France in 1999.

Stolen Picasso Painting Is Recovered in Amsterdam, Investigator Says

The American filmmaker known for macabre, enigmatic films such as “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” as well as his recently revived hit 1990s supernatural crime TV series “Twin Peaks,” seems to have a manic creative drive that has compelled him to explore every conceivable form of art: paintings, lithographs, black-and-white photographs, drawings, comics, collage, sculptures, stop-motion animation and even anthropomorphic design lamps.

“Yeah, I love to work,” Lynch said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives and has his studio. “Every medium is so beautiful but each in their particular way, and you learn about them by getting in there and working with them and talking with them.”

More than 500 of Lynch’s artworks are on display in the sprawling exhibition, which runs until April 28 and coincides with the TEFAF Maastricht art fair. A smaller version of the show will travel to HOME, a cultural center in Manchester, England, where it opens July 6.

Painting was a first love for Lynch, who studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. “First of all, I only wanted to ever be a painter, but painting led into filmmaking,” he said. “So I feel like I’m a painter and a filmmaker and I’m also into music. I always say, I go where the ideas take me, and that’s sort of how it is.”

He has been showing his work for several decades, with solo shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and at galleries in France, Spain and Japan; in 2007, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris hosted “David Lynch: The Air Is on Fire,” which Lynch said “opened up a bunch of doors.”

“The exhibition at the Bonnefanten Museum is a tour de force in extending the visibility of Lynch’s fine art practice,” said Bill Griffin, a co-founder of the Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery in Los Angeles, which has represented Lynch since 2011.

The works range from tiny — a series of drawings inside matchbook covers — to monumental, and from childhood sketches to mature paintings, so it functions, in a way, as a glimpse inside Lynch’s mind.

It is tempting to read almost everything in the exhibition as either a precursor to, or an outgrowth of, his moody, violent and graphic film and television work. A student graphite drawing on paper seems to be a sketch for the main character of “Eraserhead;” the large mixed media on canvas work, “Bob Loves Sally Until She Is Blue in the Face,” could be a reference to Bob, a character in “Twin Peaks.”

“Sometimes they kind of cross-pollinate, but mostly they’re their own thing,” Lynch said. “I don’t think I can give you an example of a painting that led to a film or a film idea, but in a way it has happened.

“There are some rules in painting that apply kind of obviously to filmmaking, like color and composition and stuff like that. But all these things, they’re their own thing, really.”

The works on display are organized semi-chronologically, with the earliest a childhood painting of a house, with trees and insects, from 1952, when Lynch was 6 years old. The painting is in part the inspiration for the exhibition’s title, said Stijn Huijts, the museum’s director and curator of the exhibition.

“Already as a kid he would ask himself, with these beautiful houses, what’s going on behind the facades?” Huijts said. “That’s really very Lynchian because he has a fascination with things that are under the surface, the fourth dimension, things we don’t know, the subconscious.”

One photograph, a print from 2013, seems to sum up Lynch’s imagination: “Head #11,” an outline of a head filled with storm clouds and lightning. There’s a lot of disgorging going on in these artworks; human forms are distorted into suggestive shapes; much of the imagery involves sexual violence or arson. It’s easy to notice references to the twisted bodies of Francis Bacon, an early influence, and the art brut aesthetics of Jean Dubuffet.

Griffin said that the artist’s primary influences were, indeed, “Bacon from a visual and theatrical point of view, but conceptually more in line with Ernst, Duchamp, Man Ray,” some of the pioneers of dada and surrealism.

Given the darkness of his imagination, one wonders about its origins. Lynch lived in several states while growing up and said that he had “a wonderful, happy childhood, incredible." It was when Lynch lived in Philadelphia, while an art student, that he discovered what he calls “the contrast” that fed the darker side of his imagination, he said. “I always say that the city of Philadelphia was my biggest influence."

“There was this black patina over almost everything like coal dust,” he added. “There was fear in the air, there was corruption, there was violence, there was insanity in Philadelphia. The rooms in the buildings were painted with a certain kind of green, with this dark wood and staircase railings, bricks and big casement windows, narrow streets, and this thick atmosphere of negativity.”

His student artworks displayed in the first rooms of the exhibition express the sense of gloom, including his first “moving picture,” made in 1967, “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times),” a 16-millimeter experimental short film projected onto a sculptural panel of six disembodied heads vomiting repeatedly, now a digital projection.

In the final room, monumental multimedia paintings are presented in large gilded frames behind glass incorporate materials like cardboard, fabric and knives.

The Bonnefanten has recently acquired his “Boy Lights Fire,” from 2010, an image of a bald boy in white underwear with uncannily long arms, striking a match against a matchbook. The sparks are orange light bulbs.

Lynch is now 73, and he’s still making TV programs and films, and still creating work in the studio.

His work “never stops,” Huijts said. “He has to create constantly.”

Lynch said that painting had been a little difficult in early March, “because I paint outdoors and it’s been really cold in Los Angeles lately.” But still, “I am working on two small paintings, and I’m building a lamp and I’m trying to catch ideas.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/arts/david-lynch-art-drawings-retrospective-netherlands.html" id="5f43780e-a2fc-3c6c-a086-41b7c1dfc701">The New York Times</a>.

David Lynch's Art Peers Behind the Facade

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — Exploring the Bonnefanten Museum’s David Lynch retrospective here, “Someone Is in My House,” one starts to conjure an image of Lynch’s hands: They must never stop moving.

Because it was originally organized by a group of dealers, who wanted to remain exclusive, TEFAF Maastricht has often seemed like a closed circuit to many art dealers. Those who took part were almost always invited to return, leaving very little room for new exhibitors. Even very successful newer galleries didn’t bother to apply, sure that they wouldn’t stand a chance.

When he became the chief executive of TEFAF Maastricht in 2015, Patrick van Maris said one of his primary objectives was to make the application process for the Maastricht fair more transparent, to encourage new applicants and to bring in fresh blood. This year, for the first time, visitors will start to see the results of that process, as 40 new dealers replace some longtime participants — about a 15 percent turnover in a showcase of 279 exhibitors.

The greatest change is taking place in the TEFAF Modern section, which welcomes 14 new galleries, including international heavy-hitters such as Pace Gallery from New York; Galerie Gmurzynska, based in Zurich; Germany’s Sprüth Magers; and Simon Lee from London.

The effort to revitalize the section was spearheaded by Belgian contemporary art dealer Christophe Van de Weghe, chairman of the TEFAF Modern selection committee this year and a member of the board of trustees. “The Modern section of TEFAF had to be improved; that’s a reality, it just had to be improved,” he said in a telephone interview. “A lot of our collectors were saying that the quality of the dealers was not high enough. Well, now that has changed.”

Mathias Rastorfer, chief executive and a co-owner of Gmurzynska, said his gallery participated for several years when TEFAF Maastricht first allowed galleries showing 20th-century art in the early 2000s, but then stopped because he felt the focus of the fair wasn’t really on modern art.

“TEFAF was a fair you went to for old masters, jewelry and fantastic designs,” he said. “And then you would also look at 20th century and if there was something interesting, you might buy there as well.”

However, his gallery has taken part in the last two editions of TEFAF New York, a satellite venture begun in 2016, where he felt the modern and contemporary art were given a great deal more attention. When Van de Weghe approached him to return this year, he said that he had more confidence.

“Obviously, there has to be a critical mass” of strong galleries, Rastorfer said. “But even if fewer modern galleries of that caliber would have come, I still would have done it. What I really like about the new approach of TEFAF is that it gives that element of magic, that element of surprise where each gallery is allowed to do an individual presentation.

“I don’t want a flea market experience; I want an idea, a concept, a curated show and a display that feels like you’re entering a gallery space,” he continued. Gmurzynska will be presenting a collection of early modernist paintings that explore the links between abstract and figurative art, centered on Fernand Léger’s “Nature Morte au Compas” from 1929, priced at $4.5 million.

Pace Gallery, which has branches all over the world, last participated in TEFAF Maastricht in 2006 and 2007. Now, it returns with an extraordinary collection of 18 paintings and drawings by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, formerly owned by American art collector and dealer Sidney Janis, who was a close friend of Mondrian’s. Among the highlights is Mondrian’s charcoal on paper “Reclining Nude (Dunes and Sea)” from 1910 with an asking price of $5.5 million.

“A lot of factors joined up at the same time for 2019,” said the London gallery’s senior director, Elliot McDonald. “Christophe Van de Weghe is heading up the section and he’s been the lead on it, and he’s such a great voice in that field so he was a factor, of course, and we’re in great company.” He added: “It is really underpinned by being able to present the paintings and drawings of Mondrian. Taking that work to that geographic location turned out to be too good to be true. So we went for it.”

Since the overall fair has not grown in size, 40 in also means many dealers had to be left out, and that has come as harsh news for some of the long-term participants. Nico Delaive owns Gallery Delaive in Amsterdam, which specializes in works by Sam Francis, as well as postwar artists from the Cobra movement, sells contemporary work by artists such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and has shown at TEFAF Maastricht for 26 years.

“This is the first year that I was told they don’t have space for me,” he said in a telephone interview. “It feels more like I got a divorce without knowing what it was about, why I should go. I didn’t expect it; they didn’t ever complain about anything.”

Van de Weghe said Delaive was a friend and colleagu, but hard decisions had to be made among many qualified applicants.

“For a lot of people who have been doing the fair for many years, it’s their bread and butter, and we’re all aware of that, and it’s very difficult,” Van de Weghe said. “We had a lot more applicants this year than in past years. We selected 14, and we had another 35 or 40 more galleries that wanted to participate that had never participated in TEFAF Maastricht before.”

Other longtime dealers who are returning this year are concerned that the competitive nature of the selection process makes the fair atmosphere less collegial.

“When I joined in the 1980s, TEFAF was a dealers’ fair for dealers, and they all worked together, and it was a fantastic combination of people all pooling their efforts in a friendly and community fashion,” said Lewis Smith, a director of Koopman Rare Art in London, which is bringing a collection of antique silver, including a gilt-silver “Shield of Achilles” from 1823 with an asking price “in the region of 5 million pounds,” Smith said (about $6.5 million). “I don’t like the idea of each man for himself. I like the idea of dealers working together.”

Van Maris said he had sympathy for those who weren’t able to return this year. “I understand the pain,” he said. “But TEFAF wants to be sure that we have the right mixture and balance in the fair. If you weren’t selected this year, it doesn’t mean you won’t be selected next year.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/arts/tefaf-maastricht-admits-new-galleries.html" id="6c4ff485-b685-3d92-afb4-7d0094fb1bb0">The New York Times</a>.

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — TEFAF, one of the world’s most opulent art fairs, held every year in the southern Netherlands town of Maastricht, offers an encyclopedic array of paintings, sculpture, antiques and antiquities, presented in custom booths designed as mini-museums. This year’s showcase takes place at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Center from Saturday to March 24, decorated, as usual, with wall-to-wall carpeting and thousands of tulips.

TEFAF Maastricht Refocuses Its Lineup

In the Van Gogh Museum’s blockbuster spring exhibition, which runs through May 26, David Hockney’s dazzlingly vibrant multicanvas paintings — like “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011” — are hung like murals across the gallery walls. Van Gogh’s much smaller landscapes appear here and there on pillars, somewhat like punctuation marks to Hockney’s effusive sentences.

And if you imagine that the link between the contemporary British painter and the 19th-century post-impressionist is the use of bold, contrasting colors — purples and blues set against mustard yellows — you will quickly think again. The brilliant palette of Hockney’s 2008 “More Felled Trees on Woldgate” looks psychedelic next to van Gogh’s subdued cobalts and azures in “The Garden of St. Paul’s Hospital (‘Leaf Fall’)” from 1889. Van Gogh was one of early modernism’s most radical colorists, but Hockney has taken the ball and run with it, far, far down the field.

Scale and color may not be the things that tie these two major art figures together, but it is clear from “Hockney/Van Gogh” that Hockney’s admiration for van Gogh is far from incidental. There are drawings in the exhibition that could have been ripped from van Gogh’s sketchbook.

“Midsummer, East Yorkshire” — Hockney’s 2004 series of 36 watercolors on paper — is a direct homage to van Gogh’s Provence landscapes, with their wheat fields, wheel-like haystacks, stocky clouds and high horizon lines. Squint a little and one can easily mistake Hockney’s 2005 oil painting “Woldgate Vista” with its layer-cake structure of wild grass, farmland, hills and sky, for van Gogh’s “The Harvest” of 1888.

Hockney said he believes that the main link between him and van Gogh is not color, brushwork or subject matter — though both men clearly have a fascination with nature: “It’s clarity of space, I think,” he said in an interview. “Van Gogh could see space very, very clearly.”

In the exhibition catalog, he elaborated: “Somebody once said that my work has a graphic clarity, and I suppose it does. But if that’s true, van Gogh’s work has a double graphic clarity.”

“Hockney/Van Gogh” is neither a side-by-side comparison nor a Hockney retrospective — he had three of those in 2017, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Instead, it is a selection of about 60 works by Hockney, and eight paintings and three drawings by van Gogh. The bulk of the Hockney works are landscapes created from about 2004 to 2011, created in the Woldgate Woods in northern England.

Edwin Becker, chief curator of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, said that van Gogh’s influence on Hockney started after the artist visited a van Gogh exhibition in Manchester, England, in 1955. “It lingers on and on and on,” Becker said. “Sometimes it’s more direct, and sometimes it’s more subconscious.”

About half of the exhibition is devoted to depictions of Woldgate Woods — particularly of a path through tall, slender trees captured across the seasons in different media. Some are oil paintings made “en plein-air” — outdoors, as many 19th-century painters did, including van Gogh — over three or four days. Others are digital video compositions and drawings made with an iPad.

For the video installation “The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods” from 2010 to 2011, Hockney mounted nine cameras on a moving Jeep to simultaneously film the path in the woods from multiple perspectives. Here, they are presented as clusters of nine monitors on four walls, each presenting the same view in different season: winter, spring, summer or fall.

With each camera pointed in a slightly different direction, the viewer is forced to look at the scene as a composite of multiple perspectives. “I know it makes it more interesting because you have to look at each one, and to do that, you have to make space in your mind,” Hockney said.

In spring 2011, Hockney revisited the woods with his iPad, creating the series “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire” in the electric greens, pastel blues and hot pinks of the device’s palette.

Hockney, now 81, has actively embraced digital technology, especially in his recent work, and is one of the few artists of his generation to have done so. Becker, the curator, said he saw this as another important similarity between the two artists.

“Van Gogh was constantly on the search for new ways of working, from naturalism, to impressionism to post-impressionism, to add to his own style,” Becker said. “The same goes for Hockney, because he embraces new techniques, new developments — be it the Polaroid, the Pentax camera, the video camera, the iPad.”

Hockney said there was a pragmatic reason why, late in life, he learned to work with new technologies. At first, he said, “I realized that with the iPad I could draw without moving from my bed.”

“The first things I did were lots of sunrises from a window,” he said at a news conference Wednesday. “And I didn’t have to get up to get paint or water or a brush or pencils.” He made 70 or 80 pictures this way, “always in this same window, but every day it was different: different colors, no two sunrises are the same.”

This approach (minus the iPad) resonates with van Gogh’s practice of exploring the same view or subject from multiple perspectives, in changing light, in different seasons.

Hockney, who continues to work from early morning until evening (with the help of a midday nap, according to Becker), said that van Gogh put all of his energy and love into his work.

“He put some beans on his fire when he went out in the morning, and he painted all day — eight hours, nine hours — then he’d come home and eat the beans,” Hockney said of van Gogh. “Then he’d converse with his brother for two hours by writing letters. The only time left for him was to sleep.”

This, he said, is perhaps why van Gogh’s work has such enduring popular appeal — as does Hockney’s.

“People have always been very attracted to van Gogh’s paintings: Since they were first shown in 1906, people have flocked to them,” he said. “He’s a great artist, still. It’s contemporary; if it’s speaking to you now, it’s contemporary.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/arts/design/david-hockney-van-gogh-amsterdam-the-joy-of-nature.html" id="82044d45-7342-380a-aab7-0e96adfbeb6f">The New York Times</a>.

AMSTERDAM — It’s easy to miss the Vincent van Gogh paintings at “Hockney/Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature.”

Into the Woods, With Vincent

Next to it, a museum visitor is invited to wear a virtual reality helmet and step inside an enlarged rendition of the same double diamond, and to stand for a moment inside its silent, glittering core.

This is “Melancholia: The Diamond,” a puzzling exhibition created by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, which opened Friday at the M HKA, the leading contemporary art museum in Antwerp, and runs until May 5.

It was coproduced by von Trier’s longtime film producer Marianne Slot and Leonid Ogarev, a Russian businessman, who said that it brings together “the oldest material that exists on Earth and an absolutely new material,” virtual reality, which was “so young that you don’t even know how it’s going to be used tomorrow.” Ogarev paid for the diamond, but he declined to say what it was worth.

The M HKA would not provide photographs of the diamond or allow a photographer from The New York Times to take any. A spokesman for the museum said that von Trier insisted on this because “he wants people to come and actually experience it themselves.”

Von Trier said in a Skype interview from his home near Copenhagen, Denmark, that the diamond, which has a brilliant cut on one side but is rough on the other and has the filmmaker’s initials “LvT” carved into it, serves as a metaphorical representation of his 2011 film “Melancholia.”

In the movie, a young woman’s debilitating depression sabotages her wedding night, while a planet called Melancholia hurtles fatally toward Earth. The diamond seems to be a literal interpretation of the film’s apocalyptic denouement: two great stones collide to become a single form.

Von Trier was elusive when asked to explain how the diamond expresses the movie’s essence. “What I’m trying to do is to capture the mood,” he said.

He said he intended to turn all 13 of the films he’s made so far into diamonds and to present them at art institutions across the globe. Von Trier chose to begin in Antwerp, he said, because of its centuries-long association with the diamond trade, and because the city continues to be one of the world’s leading producers of cut diamonds.

The goal of the project, said Anders Kreuger, senior curator at M HKA, is to transform one artistic medium into another: in this case, a film into a tiny sculpture made of precious stone. “He’s created an object of thought rather than an object of entertainment,” he said. “It makes me think about how you can reformulate reality from one form and language into another.”

Von Trier, 62, who is best known for “Breaking the Waves” (1996) and “Dancer in the Dark,” for which he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2000, is frequently described as a provocateur of European cinema. His sprawling films such as the two-part “Nymphomaniac” and his latest, “The House that Jack Built,” feature sadistic violence and graphic sex.

This diamonds project is a departure, and von Trier admitted he wasn’t entirely sure how it fit into his career.

“It has been in a way a sideline, but you never know where life will take you,” he said. “When it started I thought it would take about two weeks to cut the diamond, and it would be interesting.” Instead, it took five years to cut the stone by hand.

The director said he couldn’t travel to Antwerp for the opening, because of ill health and a fear of flying (so severe that he has had to make most of his films in Denmark or Sweden).

“Right now I am trying to get off of these pills so that I can drive again,” he said, explaining that a new law in Denmark bars him from driving while taking certain prescription drugs. He said he was taking “Valium for anxiety, and I’ve been struggling with this since I was 7 years old, so it’s a struggle to get off of it.”

Von Trier has been notoriously press shy and somewhat reclusive for years, ever since what he called “an unfortunate press conference” meant to promote the release of “Melancholia” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. He jokingly said “I’m a Nazi” and added that he had sympathy for Adolf Hitler.

The uproar led to his temporary banishment from Cannes; he was charged with defamation in French court, a charge that carries a five-year prison sentence. The charges were subsequently dropped, and he has returned to Cannes; in 2018, he received a standing ovation when he presented his film, “The House that Jack Built.”

The fracas overshadowed and soured the reception to “Melancholia,” he said, although the film did receive the Best Film prize at the European Film Awards. Did he choose “Melancholia” as the first for his diamond project to give it a second shot at the spotlight?

“Maybe on a subconscious level,” he said.

As for his comments about Hitler, von Trier said that it was “a joke that didn’t travel well;” he didn’t believe anyone would take him seriously, adding, “I’m not a Nazi.”

“It’s the only press conference I ever had when I was sober,” he said. “It says a lot about the value of drinking before press conferences, otherwise you get so nervous that you suddenly say that you sympathize with Hitler. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

One of the things about diamonds that von Trier said first attracted him was Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel “Diamonds Are Forever,” in which a shopkeeper puts a sign in the window with that phrase, to attract buyers.

“Of course it’s not true,” von Trier points out. “Diamonds can burn at 800 degrees Celsius, and I think they completely disappear because they’re made of pure carbon.”

For his next diamond, von Trier said he planned to take his inspiration from “Breaking the Waves,” considered by many critics as his masterpiece. This time, he said, he plans to take a less literal and “more abstract” approach, using new laser-based diamond cutting technology.

“I hope it will take less than five years,” he said. After all, there are still 12 films more to go.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/arts/design/lars-von-trier-diamond-melancholia.html" id="7a45aa49-bc41-3ffb-a823-67549c961c38">The New York Times</a>.

ANTWERP, Belgium — Enter, the diamond. A 12-carat white double diamond, crafted out of two raw stones, sat on a black plinth in a glass vitrine in the center of a nearly empty white-walled space in an Antwerp museum.

The Mood of His Film, Within a Diamond

In his short film “Lunch,” from the 1992 series “Food,” two restaurant patrons, ignored by a waiter, devour everything in sight: napkins, plates, cups, their own clothes and, ultimately, each other. In “Little Otik,” a feature film from 2000 based on a Czech fairy tale, a childless couple adopts a tree stump, which comes to life but then turns homicidal.

How to interpret these darkly comic narratives? For a time during the 1970s, the Communist government of Czechoslovakia banned Svankmajer (pronounced SHVUNK-myer) from filmmaking, because they saw his movies as subversive. In an interview in Amsterdam last week, he said that this was “no tragedy” for him, because he always had been a multidimensional artist, and he used the hiatus as a time to work on his other creative project: surrealist sculpture, lithographs, writing and drawing.

These artworks, created while Svankmajer was unable to make films, are one of the most intriguing aspects of a new exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum here, running through March 3. “Jan Svankmajer: The Alchemical Wedding” presents around 250 extraordinary artworks that give a glimpse into Svankmajer’s wild imagination. These are displayed alongside a dozen of his short films on large screens in its exhibition hall. The museum is also screening feature-length films such as “Alice” (1987), “Faust” (1994) and his most recent, “Insect,” released this year in a cinema program.

“There are a lot of big names like Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay for whom Jan Svankmajer is really the godfather of animated cinema,” said Jaap Guldemond, director of exhibitions at the Eye Filmmuseum. “Filmmakers know him, but the general public has no idea who Mr. Svankmajer is.”

Guldemond visited Svankmajer’s studio outside Prague and his 18th-century country house in the Bohemian Forest, and said he was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of artworks Svankmajer had created over his 50-year career.

“There were piles of hundreds of his etchings and collages, and hundreds of sculptures, and we could choose what we wanted,” Guldemond said. “We didn’t have to get it from all kinds of different museums and collectors. It was just all there.”

Svankmajer was born in 1934, and was 13 when Czechoslovakia came under Communist rule. He studied theater directing and puppeteering, and worked at the Semafor playhouse in Prague before joining the Laterna Magika, an experimental company sometimes called the world’s first multimedia theater. In the 1960s, he joined the Czech Surrealist Group and applied its principles to his art.

“The audiences were leaving my productions disgusted,” he said, because they couldn’t understand the avant-garde aesthetics.

“That was when I realized that cinema is like a kind of time capsule, like a can where you can preserve a stage production and wait for the viewer,” he said. “I decided to focus on using the language of cinema.”

But making films in the Czech studio system meant that Svankmajer had to submit his proposals for approval, then submit the scripts, then the final film, and the censors could always reject the film at any stage.

In 1974, after his film “Leonardo’s Diary” was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, his work was condemned by a pro-government newspaper. The movie he was working on at the time, “Castle of Otranto,” came under greater scrutiny, and censors demanded he make many changes. Svankmajer refused and as a result was banned from filmmaking. He could not finish his movie until 1979 when the prohibition was lifted.

“I never was a political artist,” Svankmajer said “but I am an engaged artist, because surrealism was always an engaged art. The idea of surrealism is to change the world — that’s Marx — and to transform life — that’s Rimbaud,” he added, referring to the 19th century French poet.

Svankmajer’s films combine many animation techniques, including claymation, drawn animation, montage, puppetry and stop-motion, sometimes using actors for live-action as well. He often darkens the mood by incorporating exaggerated sounds, like high-volume slurping or chewing, or juxtaposing lilting classical music over unsettling images.

Many of Svankmajer’s two- and three-dimensional artworks are also based on this form of collage and assemblage, cutting and pasting. They include illustrations in books onto which he’s pasted images of eyes or genitals, or cut-up anatomical and scientific drawings with mismatched parts arranged in new configurations. His sculptures are fantastical animal amalgams, made from taxidermy, bones, fins, shells, horns or skulls combined into strange, hybrid creatures.

“When I arrive in the studio and there’s this pile of bones and stuffed things and natural objects, I know that the beast is in there and I just need to find it,” Svankmajer said. “That’s the adventure.”

The exhibition in Amsterdam also includes artworks created in the last decade or so. A series of “medium drawings,” Svankmajer said, were created recently by his wife, the surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerova, even though she died in 2005. He has built himself a spiritualist chamber called the psychomanteum, where he looks into a mirror, summons her spirit and allows her to draw using his hands, he explained.

Svankmajer remained straight-faced as he said this. “Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts,” he added. “This is a communication with my subconscious.”

Svankmajer, 84, said he felt fortunate that he has been able to produce so much work over the years, and that he could do so now in the Czech Republic, without concerns about censorship.

He still goes to his studio four days a week, where he’s working on a new series of lithographs and finishing up a novel that will be released in 2019, he said. He’s also completing a group of sculptures he calls “fractures,” which are made from bones, found objects and “discarded articles of daily use,” held together with bandages.

“Fractures,” could be an apt title for Svankmajer’s life’s work, a process of breaking things apart and bandaging them back together as something else. Under communism, he said, “you had these waves of the grip being relaxed and the grip tightening, and I was lucky enough to have experienced two waves of relaxation of the regime,” he said. “I was unlucky enough to catch one wave of the tightening.”

Asked how he thinks the censorship impacted his career as a filmmaker, he shrugged. “It turns out I was at my most productive period,” he said. When the authorities allowed him to make films again, he had “all these scripts and ideas.”

“So in a sense you can even take advantage of the totalitarian system,” he said. “Provided that it collapses in the end.”

Jan Svankmajer: The Alchemical WeddingThrough March 3 at the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; eyefilm.nl.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/movies/jan-svankmajer-amsterdam-eye-filmmuseum.html" id="7f51081d-f789-3d3c-a999-6a9a63ecb434">The New York Times</a>.

The 'Godfather of Animated Cinema' Makes More Than Just Movies

AMSTERDAM — The Czech master of surrealist cinema, Jan Svankmajer, is revered by animators for his stop-motion movies that are by turns absurd, grotesque, erotic and horrific.

Despite the obstacles that stood in her way — her parents wanted her to become a musician, she was a woman in a male-dominated art world, and she was painfully introverted — Lazzari became one of Italy’s most important modern artists.

Although her work has been presented in major museums, including Ca’ Pesaro modern art museum in Venice, the Vatican Museums, the Phillips Collection and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, Lazzari, who died in 1981, still is not widely known outside Italy.

“She isn’t yet a household name,” said Niamh Coghlan, sales director at the Richard Saltoun Gallery, which is devoting its booth at Masterpiece London this year to Lazzari’s work, mostly from the 1960s and ’70s.

“She’s still coming out of the Italian market, and she isn’t recognized on an international level,” Coghlan said in a phone interview. “That’s why this presentation at Masterpiece is so critical to growing her market.”

The gallery took some of Lazzari’s work to the Frieze New York art fair two years ago, and “we had a sellout stand almost immediately,” Coghlan said. “People literally walked onto the stand and said, ‘I want that.’ They didn’t know the name of the artist or the title of the works. They just had a passionate attraction to them. It was a pure recognition of aesthetic talent.”

Lazzari’s reputation has been building. Last year, S2, Sotheby’s secondary gallery space in London, where art that may be undervalued at auction is exhibited and sold, had the first British solo exhibition of her work, and the Phillips Collection in Washington presented “Bice Lazzari, the Poetry of Mark-Making.”

When the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice presented some of her work in 2002, a press statement described her as “one of the greatest female protagonists of 20th-century abstraction,” mentioning her along with artists like Anni Albers, Sophie Tauber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay.

“It is a good moment for Bice Lazzari’s work,” said Maria Isabella Barone, executive coordinator of the Bice Lazzari Archive in Rome, where the artist eventually moved, because there is “much more attention to women artists who are less known.”

Recently, she added, the archive is “receiving a lot of requests for works to take part in group exhibition or solo exhibition in Italy and abroad,” she said in an email. “We are on a good path now.”

Born in Venice in 1900, Lazzari worked in several different styles throughout her life — first in the applied arts, making tapestries, pillows and bags. She moved on to figurative painting before turning to what is known as the Art Informel style of abstract expressionism. In the 1950s, she turned her focus to geometric abstraction, and in the ’60s and ’70s she settled on very simple abstract work based on lines and basic shapes.

“As a pure artist, she was humble enough to give up and start again, then give up and start again, and she did this three or four times in her life,” said Renato Miracco, an independent curator who has worked on several Lazzari exhibitions, including the one at the Phillips Collection. “She was quite blind at the real end of her life, and she continued to draw with just two little pencils, black and red.”

Lazzari was not overlooked during her lifetime only because she was a woman; she was also extremely shy, Miracco said, and even though she was surrounded by well-known artists, including Alberto Giacometti and Alberto Burri, she did not promote her work.

“She lived through two world wars, and a lot of her artistic career, and her life, was broken up by these huge world events,” said Bianca Chu, deputy director of S2. “Being born in Venice, she wasn’t in the immediate centers of the art world of the postwar period.”

Chu added, “We often find with artists who dabble in different spheres, they can sometimes be underappreciated in their lifetimes.”

Barone noted that Lazzari was very prolific, making about 3,000 works of art throughout her career. “Stand in front of her paintings and look deeply, and you will find an incredible harmony, a symphony of color and signs,” she said. “Follow the line, and you will find a sound. Her remarkable control is a direct result of her method of applying color and pigment to tell a story, to create a visual poem.”

Saltoun will have eight works on display in its booth at Masterpiece, with others available on request. Prices for the smaller start at 20,000 pounds (about $25,000), with the largest paintings priced around 250,000 pounds.

“The prices are shockingly low compared to Agnes Martin or any of the minimalist painters who would have been her contemporaries,” Coghlan said.

Chu agreed that the Italian male artists of Lazzari’s era — Burri, Lucio Fontana and Domenico Gnoli, for example — sell at auction for much higher prices. Prices for works by Fontana, who was born just a year before Lazzari, are in the millions.

“Postwar Italian art has been recognized on the masterpiece level,” she said, “and someone like Bice Lazzari should be seen in that context.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/arts/bice-lazzari-art-masterpiece-london.html" id="a2fcf02d-35f0-3b3f-ae3f-39a4c9a61afd">The New York Times</a>.

An Overlooked artist finds a spotlight at masterpiece

As a young woman trying to educate herself to become an artist in the 1930s and ’40s in fascist Italy, Bice Lazzari once said that the only resource she had was illegally imported art magazines. “For many, the only way to survive artistically was to establish a continuous dialogue with oneself: a challenging monologue to build one’s own art,” she wrote.

<h1>AMSTERDAM — In the summer of 1888, Vincent van Gogh invited his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin to visit him in Arles, France, and to stay with him at the house where he hoped to establish an artists’ retreat. When Gauguin arrived in the fall, he found his room decorated with van Gogh’s artworks, including a painting of sunflowers arranged in a ceramic vase against a yellow background.</h1>

The two-month visit ended disastrously. The two artists had a blowout fight, and van Gogh sliced off his ear, suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in the hospital. Gauguin fled back to Paris.

A couple of weeks later, however, he wrote to van Gogh requesting that painting, “Sunflowers,” praising it as “a perfect page of an essential ‘Vincent’ style.”

Understandably, van Gogh was reluctant to hand over what he felt might be his most accomplished work, and so he decided to paint another version of the yellow “Sunflowers” to exchange with a work by Gauguin. He completed that one in January 1889, but never sent it.

These two paintings, both called “Sunflowers,” are generally accepted as the finest of several depictions of the thick-stemmed, nodding blooms that van Gogh made in 1888 and 1889 during his time in Arles. The first is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London, and the second is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Van Gogh referred to this work as a “repetition” of the London painting. But art historians and curators have long been curious to know how different this “repetition” is from the first. Should it be considered a copy, an independent artwork or something in between?

An extensive research project conducted over the past three years by conservation experts at both the National Gallery and the Van Gogh Museum has concluded that the second painting was “not intended as an exact copy of the original example,” said Ella Hendriks, a professor of conservation and restoration at the University of Amsterdam, who was the lead researcher on the project.

“Though the basic palette is the same, there were different colors that were used, differences in paint texturing, and his brushwork is different,” she said.

Although both the London version and the Amsterdam version are too fragile to travel, it was possible to conduct a kind of virtual side-by-side comparison of the works using new mobile scanning technologies.

Rather than removing the paintings from the galleries for physical analysis, or taking invasive paint samples — once common practice — researchers brought mobile digital scanning devices into the museum that could map paint layers, brushwork and pigments without touching the artwork. They could then compare the data from each work.

The two-month visit ended disastrously. The two artists had a blowout fight, and van Gogh sliced off his ear, suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in the hospital. Gauguin fled back to Paris.

Nina Siegal

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