Art in the Park

I received an email about a month ago from a professor at CMU who taught at the University of Groningen for a while.  He was talking about some of his favorite parts of Holland and specifically mentioned the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo, so I decided that I needed to go check it out.

I often get confused about exactly where we are in the country when we're on a train because, even thought the entire country is roughly the size of my pinky finger, it takes quite a while to get anywhere from Groningen.  A Dutch lady I met at the Eindhoven airport the other day acted like going to Groningen was the equivalent of a winter expedition into Siberia, even though the two cities are only about 2 hours or so apart by car.  An interesting tidbit:  according to Wikipedia, the Netherlands is the 61st most populated country in the world. There are 21 other countries with a higher population density, but they are all smaller than Holland.  Apparently though, if the water area of the country is not counted, there are only 16 countries ahead of it.  The thing is though, it seems like there is a ton of open land in the Netherlands filled with farmland or woods.  Where people live, they seem to be extremely concentrated.  The effect is basically that people live super, super close together where they live, and then they leave vast expanses open.

But I digress.

My whole point is that Otterlo, the area where the park was, seemed to be smack dab in the middle of Nowheresville, Netherlands, making the park itself Nowheresland.  We took a train to a main station, then took another really small train to a stop in some small town.  The bus we got on from there crossed through about 4 or 5 small towns on the half an hour that we were on it. All of the towns in the country, and even the cities, have a distinctive quaintness about them.  They have very old-school looking houses and buildings coupled with very peculiar modern architecture that I can't really explain.  The next bus that we had to get on was actually a van-bus, and we were the only people on it.  Did I mention this place was in the middle of nowhere?

Anyway, when we did get to the museum, it was well worth the journey.  It held a ton of famous pieces by people like Monet and Van Gogh. In fact, the Van Gogh collection in the museum was actually the 2nd largest Van Gogh collection in the world, behind the one in Amsterdam.

Beyond the more classical type of art, the museum had a rather extensive collection of modern art.  I'm not typically a fan of modern art, because I typically place it into one of two categories: #1-I don't understand it or #2-I painted something just like that in preschool. But I actually loved a lot of the modern pieces.  I'm not sure what got into me, perhaps my brain was a bit rattled from the monsoon we just walked through through the park and I was just happy to give my socks a chance to dry, but I was extremely intrigued by some of the art pieces.  There was one that was two bugs dried on a huge piece of paper that was scribbled all over in a ball-point pen.  I realize that sounds absurd, and it was, but it really demonstrates the range of pieces in this museum.  Then I stared for five minutes at a black square on the wall because the caption promised it would reveal a shape.  It eventually did, but I felt a bit silly looking at a black square for so long.  

My favorite piece was this room filled with seven (I think) stuffed tigers covered in arrows. They were all suspended in the air and in various poses of agony.  The lighting in the room was superb so they all cast really distinct shadows in patches of light among the darkness. I think the caption said that the artist was trying to demonstrate the brutality of killing and the pain and suffering of dying because we've become too immune to it in the modern age and with modern weapons.

The museum also had an outdoor component that stretched into the park.  There were sculptures and all other sorts of weird things scattered throughout the woods that I have an excessive amount of pictures of myself with because Charlotte doesn't believe in taking pictures if she doesn't have somebody in them.  I have a feeling that I didn't understand most of them, but I still enjoyed wandering through the park and trying to figure them out.

I'm not really sure what this was but it appeared to be the stairway to Heaven.  It was the tallest flight of stairs I've ever found in the woods in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn't anything that you could see at the top.  It didn't look like anything was up there or that it led to anything.  I can't say for sure, though, because we didn't climb it.  Partially because it was blocked off but primarily because, well, look at the thing.  Would you have climbed it?