Word: hollande
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY Holland was a land of blood, sweat and beers. It fought long and fiercely to win complete independence from Spain; it amassed huge wealth by energetic trading at home and around the world, and like the U.S. today it developed a dominant middle class with a uniquely high standard of living. Unlike middlebrow Americans, the Dutch in their golden age prized paintings highly enough to buy them. In some towns, professional painters outnumbered the butchers. Perhaps a score of the artists achieved greatness; the works of a handful rivaled and vastly enriched the art of the ages...
...Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week, 98 paintings from 17th century Holland went on display. The brilliant survey was borrowed from museums and private collections across Europe and the U.S., will be shown next year at Toledo and Toronto. As the color reproductions on the following pages demonstrate, the exhibition's minor pieces and masterpieces alike were made by men who had the skill and will to paint precisely what they saw. The Dutch of that day evidently saw things in sharp focus, with a calm objectivity foreign to subjective 20th century eyes...
...started in the winter of 1951 when our part-time correspondent in Holland, Israel Shenker, heard about the work of Escher, a little known Dutch graphic artist, and tracked him down. Shenker was struck by Escher's technique and cabled our editors that he was worth reporting. The result was a long story which described Escher's "brilliantly conceived" work, and was illustrated with pictures of his prints (TIME, April...
Immediately after reading the story, TIME Reader Charles Alldredge of Washington, D.C. sent a bank draft and an order for prints to Escher in Holland. He liked what he got so well that he ordered more. Several of Alldredge's friends became equally enthusiastic and began buying Escher prints by mail order too. Alldredge began plumping for an Escher exhibition in Washington, organized a committee of sponsors to back the showing and talked the Whyte Gallery into a date. Last week TIME was able to report that the show was both a critical and commercial success. Prints were selling...
Artist Escher once made naturalistic prints in Italy. Says he: "In Italy nature is so rich one must do nature. But in the north, in Holland, nature doesn't suggest anything to me, and so I have to work from imagination. It was lucky for me that I left Italy-but to do what I have done since, I had to have all that nature first." Even in his Italian days, however, Escher had a passion for patterns. Then the abstract mosaics in Spain's Alhambra suggested to him the possibility of combining tight, flat patterns with illusions...