The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra performs with Dutch Violinist Janine Jansen
May 5, 2007 at 8:00 pm

The "lively, imaginative" (New York Times) Dutch violinist Janine Jansen makes her Carnegie Hall debut with the Grammy Award-winning Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in a program of Romantic masterpieces, including Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Poul Ruders Credo and Trapeze, and Schumann's Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61. Learn about Janine Jansen at www.janinejansen.com and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at www.orpheusnyc.org

ORDER TICKETS ONLINE NOW:
http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/box_office/events/evt_7325.html
Please enter code "ORPH" to receive the 20% discounted price. (Discount offer valid for Parquet, Dress Circle, and Balcony seats. This offer is not valid on previously purchased tickets and is subject to availability.)

Tickets are also available at the Carnegie Hall Box Office, 57th Street and 7th Avenue, New York, NY 10019 or charge by phone at Carnegie Charge (212) 247-7800.

Janine Jansen's appearances with Orpheus are supported in part by a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation.

NAF ANNUAL MEMBERS MEETING
June 14, 2007 at 4:00 pm

This year's Annual Meeting of members, followed by a Board of Directors Meeting, which we encourage all NAF members to attend, will take place at the offices of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP in New York City on June 14, 2007 at 4 p.m. An agenda for the meeting with a slate of officers for election and other meeting information will be sent to all NAF members in mid-May.

Dutch-American Friendship Day
April 19, 2007

President George W. Bush has issued a Proclamation recognizing Dutch-American Friendship Day on April 19th commemorating the 225th Anniversary of the day that John Adams, the second President of the United States, was received by the States General in The Hague and welcomed officially as Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America. It was also the day that the house he had purchased at Fluvenlen Burgwal 18 in The Hague was to become the first American Embassy in the World. The Proclamation was presented and read at the NAF Awards Dinner on April 20, 2007 in Arlington, VA near Washington, DC. The Proclamation marks the beginning of higher recognition and visibility for the Dutch Community in the United States and the long-standing friendly relationship with the Netherlands.

The Proclamation followed a Resolution passed by the House of Representatives on March 12, 2007 (H. Res. 89). The Resolution, introduced by U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), requested that a Dutch-American Friendship Day be established to celebrate the historic ties between the United States and the Netherlands, "Dutch ideals such as individuality, freedom, hard work and human rights have flourished in the United States," Hoekstra said. "A Dutch-American Friendship Day would raise the special relationship that the countries share as allies over the past 225 years." Congressmen Hoekstra and Chris van Hollen chair the U.S. Congressional Caucus on the Netherlands. Tulips were delivered to the offices of all members of the U.S. Congress on April 19th to recognize Dutch-American Friendship Day and the "Laura Bush Tulip" was delivered to the White House.

To read the full text of the Proclamation go to: http://www.whitehouse.gov/new/releases/200704/20070419.html/

What Scarlett Johansson doesn't know about Vermeer

Amy Golahny, Mia Mochizuki and Lisa Vergara, editors, In his milieu: essays on Netherlandish art in memory of John Michael Montias, Amsterdam (Amsterdam University Press) 2006. ISBN 90-5356-933-2. This publication was supported by a NAF Cultural Grant Awarded in September 2005.

When in the 1970s the Yale economist John Michael Montias (1928-2005) stopped studying the command economies of eastern Europe and turned to the history of art instead, the world should have taken notice. In hindsight, his abandonment of his former specialty " "Nothing was changing, it was a big bore," he told me in the 1980s " can be seen as an early sign of the collapse of Communism. At the time, though, not even Montias saw it that way. He just found Dutch art more interesting than, say, the "Background and origins of the Rumanian dispute with Comecon," the subject of an article he wrote in 1964.

Economically speaking, Montias's switch was immensely profitable. No one with his knowledge of economics had ever looked at the financial and social aspects of the vast Dutch art market of the 17th century. What's more, he wrote about his findings in language and with figures that were understandable to art historians. A field that resisted encroachment from anthropologists and sociologists and insisted on dictating terms to the chemists who study art, surrendered willingly to this economist, even at his most reductive. Thanks to Montias the Netherlands has since led the way in the economic study of old art. A less obvious part of his move was his acquired love for archive research and for the kind of unexpected information it turned up. I don"t think that Scarlett Johansson knows it, but many of the details underlying her Girl with the pearl earring derive from Montias's monumental study of Vermeer and his environment. I once wrote that Michael Montias deserved a Nobel Prize. Well, he deserved an Oscar as well.

Thirty years into his second career, three American art historians were putting together a Festschrift for Montias when he succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting for several years. The presentation of the finished volume to his family took place in New York on February 15th at the Otto Naumann gallery. It is a tasty book that anyone with a serious interest in Dutch art will devour. The contributions are full of the warmth that Michael Montias evoked in his colleagues. They cover the whole field of Dutch art, not just the market for it.

To pick one example of the 35 articles in the volume: my own weaknesses for weird surprises, facts that subvert accepted knowledge, exacting research into minute circumstances, and complete bodies of material as opposed to choices, were all satisfied simultaneously by Nadine Orenstein in her article 'sleeping caps, city views and state funerals: privileges for prints in the Dutch Republic, 1593-1650." Reviewing the applications for copyright protection submitted to the States General in that period, Orenstein came across several requests from the Utrecht artist Magdalena de Passe for the exclusive privilege to print certain images on men's sleeping caps. The capture of Leipzig was one of the motifs, but so were four shepherdesses. No such object (Orenstein compares them to printed t-shirts) seems to have survived. That was the weird surprise. The subversive fact in the article concerns the art patronage of the princes of Orange. The stadholder who took the most active interest in printed images was not Frederik Hendrik, with his reputation as a mecenas, but Maurits, who is often thought of as a philistine.

Anyone who ever enjoyed a course in Dutch art history, and misses the satisfaction of a good read in the subject, now can repair the damage.

© Gary Schwartz 2007. Published in Loekie Schwartz's Dutch translation in Het Financieele Dagblad, Amsterdam, 10 March 2007, p. 21

A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires
June 15 - August 15,2007

NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berskhires is the result of an unprecedented collaborative effort amongst some of the most prominent arts organizations in this culturally rich region. MASS MoCA, Tanglewood, Jacob's Pillow, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Colonial Theatre, and Shakespeare & Company have all joined forces to work with leading artists from the Netherlands to present a selection of the finest Dutch offerings in the visual arts, dance, music, theater and film, as well as a series of lectures dedicated to Dutch architecture, design, and contemporary society.

In the spectacular natural landscape of the Berkshire Hills, the artists will collaborate on new works and present new interpretations of classic works, reflecting as a whole the strong Dutch tradition of art and innovation. From June 15 through the end of August, a wide array of events is planned. Detailed information on the program and the artists, as well as on the venues and partner organizations, can be found at the festival website:http:www.nl-berkshires.org/