The Metropolitan Museum, like other museums around the world, are planning to “reattribute” several of its Rembrandts. Many scholars feel that de-attribution has gone too far.

When the Metropolitan Museum’s Thomas P. F. Hoving dropped the word recently that the Met was planning to “reattribute” several of its Rembrandts, there was a gasp from museumgoers. Fake Rembrandts at the Metropolitan, of all places? It seemed altogether too shocking to be believed. But art scholars in Rembrandt’s…

Alexander Orlow, managing director of Holland’s Turmac Tobacco Co., commissioned 13 painters to produce art for his plant.

THE NETHERLANDS

Alexander Orlow, 48, managing director of Holland’s Turmac Tobacco Co., has put his love for abstract art to industrial use. “However complicated the operation of a machine may look,” he says, “it soon becomes a monotonous routine to a factory worker.” Like many another industrial leader,  Orlow…

Painter Hendrick Terbrugghen establishes a new reputation more than three centuries after his death. The Dutchman’s first exhibition is in Ohio’s Dayton Art Institute.

By 1600, European painters found themselves losing the Renaissance reverence for Greco-Roman antiquity. Following the Italian artist Caravaggio, they stopped looking backward and returned, as artists have done repeatedly throughout history, to the direct observation of the visible world. What they saw was a growing middle-class life in an ever…

Dutch Anthropologist Adrian A. Gerbrands talked at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art about the religious art of the Asmat, a little-known Papuan people who live in New Guinea.

Before his tragic death on an expedition to Netherlands New Guinea last year, young Michael C. Rockefeller, 23, managed to collect much of what he was searching for in the far Pacific: the religious art of the Asmat, a little-known Papuan people who live on the waterlogged Casuarinen Coast. Last…

Rock Hudson plays in the film The Spiral Road, an aggressive, self-centered young doctor out from The Netherlands for a five-year tour of duty in the tropical Dutch East Indies.

The Spiral Road, metaphorically, leads to God. If filmgoers find themselves slightly agape to discover Rock Hudson traveling this road, they will be no more taken aback than the character Rock plays, an aggressive, self-centered young doctor out from The Netherlands for a five-year tour of duty in the tropical…

Last week, in celebration of its centennial, the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem had on view the largest exhibition of Hals paintings ever held.

Until they opened a museum in the summer of 1862, the burghers of Haarlem in The Netherlands never fully realized the extent of their riches. There had been paintings in various public buildings all over town, but now they were assembled under one roof, and the effect was dazzling. The…

Report on the great 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch, who lived an died in ’s Hertogenbosch.

THE great 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch was much obsessed with sin and hell; his best-known paintings are populated by griffons, scarabs and demons in a fantastic landscape in which sinners ride on mice, embrace pigs, are bound, speared and tortured by horrifying monsters. Lustful monks and covetous priests are…

To know what happened with Anne Frank, author Ernst Schnabel searched the German and Dutch archives and interviewed survivors of the camps who might have known her.

The diary of 15-year-old Anne Frank ended abruptly when the Nazis broke into her family’s hiding place in Amsterdam. What happened next? Of the last days of one of the world’s best-known modern heroines, little was known except that she had died, like millions of other Jews, in a German…

Pieter Bruegel was a lowbrow in art. He kept his Dutch feet firmly on lowland ground, stuck close to everyman’s taste. Surviving paintings are shown in Vienna at the moment.

PIETER BRUEGEL was a lowbrow in art. In an age when the Italian Renaissance was sweeping all before it, Bruegel kept his Dutch feet firmly on lowland ground, stuck close to everyman’s taste. His zestful love of practical jokes, wise saws, old proverbs and the daily life in field and…

Dutch critics believe that no Italian singer can surpass light-timbred Dramatic Soprano Gre Brouwenstijn, 41, as an interpreter of Verdi.

For nearly a decade, those two warring soprano queens, Maria Meneghini Callas and Renata Tebaldi, have dominated the world of European (and U.S.) opera, leaving other postwar singers to peep about to find themselves honorable mention. But slowly, and largely unnoticed in the U.S., old Europe has fashioned a new…

A report on the life and work of painter Piet Mondrian. 13 years after Mondrian’s death his recognition is reaching new heights.

WHETHER they know it or not, the architect, the layout artist, the sign painter, and even the counter girl who wraps a candy box asymmetrically with a gay ribbon all owe a debt to a lone Dutchman named Piet Mondrian. Cubist Mondrian’s crisp, rectilinear paintings, once scoffed at as being…

Rotterdam that is now risen from the ruins, added the latest and handsomest building de Bijenkorf (“Beehive”) department store, designed by Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer.

Nazi Stukas zeroed in on Rotterdam on May 10, 1940, and they did not let up until they had leveled or gutted 11,000 buildings. But well before liberation, an underground city-planning commission went to work drafting plans for the 20th century Rotterdam that is now risen from the ruins.

Latest…

In the Walls Came Tumbling Down, writer Dutch Henriette Roosenburg tells about her attempts to return to the Netherlands from Germany after being released from prison at the end of WWII.

THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED (245 pp.)—Ivan Bahriany—St. Martin’s Press ($3.50).

THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN (248 pp.)—Henriette Roosenburg—Viking ($3.50).

Each of these books is an intriguing mixture of political terror and pastoral. The authors spent years in those plague spots of the 20th century—concentration…

Alongside an American painter sat Dutch Corry Riet, who was paralyzed by polio at the age of five. She learned to hold a brush with her teeth and makes a living from her paintings.

Charles Pasche was born with no right arm and only a useless stump where his left arm should have been. Like many such “congenital amputees” (cause unknown), he learned to do an amazing variety of everyday tasks with his toes. It seemed impossible that he could ever become expert at…

A report on painter Frans Hals, the artist who caught his fellow Dutchmen at their swashbuckling best, whether downing a glass of Haarlem beer or decked out in their Sunday finery.

WHAT the broad-bottomed, solidly middle-class burghers of The Netherlands asked of their artists in the 1600s was not classic grandeur but homey detail. Proud and prosperous, they wanted their portraits to be a frank and meticulous likeness, with full attention to the fine stuffs, starched ruffs and ribboned cuffs that…