The Hermitage, Amsterdam

This Easter I am enjoying the luxury of temporary Empty Nest Syndrome; hubby and the kids have gone to Sweden to visit his sister and her kids, leaving me to sleep in the the mornings, read in bed for hours before finally turning out the lights, and wallowing in luxious hot bubble baths for as long as I want. While I do like visiting the family in Sweden I'm not sad to avoid returning to snow and cold; it's at best 2 degrees there at the moment and after such a long, cold winter I don't feel the urge to revisit it.
Not that the weather is much better here. Making the most of a couple of free days meant it was the perfect time to visit the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam, which is currently hosting the exhibition Matisse to Malevich; Pioneers of modern art from the Hermitage. The top painting is Matisse's 'The Red Room' and it is truly stunning to see it on the wall. The painting above is The Dancers, depicting five women who seem to be almost struggling to burst out of the frame of canvas. Yet however wonderful Matisse is, it's the Kadinsky paintings which I love the most. The one below is rather unimaginatviely called Composition 6, but it was just breath-taking. If that's no your cup of tea, you surely couldn't fail to be amazed by his use of colour in the next one, titled simply Winter Landscape.

The story of how Russia's world famous Hermitage came to have a branch in Amsterdam is quite interesting. In the early 1990s Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, was exploring the possibility of having satellite museums in the West. The relationship between the Nieuwe Kerk (a catherdral in Amsterdam which hosts exhibitions) and the Hermitage had developed through the co-organisation of major exhibitions. As a result the director of the Nieuwe Kerk, Ernst Veen, had the idea of opening a branch of the Russian museum in Amsterdam, inspired in part by the tercentenary of the historic links between the two cities.
Around the same time, the Amstelhof nursing home decided that its buildings no longer met the standards required for modern care. For 324 years the building was a home for the elderly. The Parish of the Reformed Congregation, which owned the building, declared that the Amstelhof should have an exclusively cultural function. Veen came up with the idea of locating the Hermitage branch in Amstelhof. Since June 2009 the site has been home to Hermitage Amsterdam.

It's an impressive building with vast spaces flooded with light, pale wood floors and inimate rooms adjoining the main gallery. The scale of the huge old stone structure, which is a hollow square with a central green lawn, gives the exhibition the space it needs to be truly appreciated. And it's location on the banks of the Amstel is so quintessentially Dutch.

If you're in Amsterdam I really recommend the exhibition, although with the collection of the Hermitage St Petersburg as it's disposal, every exhibition is going to be a great one.

By the way you might think that a day in Amsterdam would turn out to be a long one - but in truth it was really cold and pouring with rain. I went into the Bijenkorf department store, remembering my last visit years ago with a frisson of antcipation, but was sorely let down. The layout of the floors was a mess, cheap SALE!SALE!ACTION! posters in lime green making me want to put on my sunglasses as hordes of people poured over sloppily constructed displays. The only good thing was they had an Apple shop, so I could get new skin for my iPhone to replace the original which was torn. So Bijenkorf was - ever so slightly - redeemed; aplace that has an Apple shop can't be all bad, right?.