Rotterdam, Netherlands. In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there are portraits of burgers with earnest looks, dressed in black clothes sitting before black backgrounds, painted with meticulous attention to detail showing every wrinkle of the face and fold of the collar. There are un-dramatic landscapes, which mainly show the sky, and reflections of the sky in the water. There are still-lifes of meat and vegetables; bread freshly cut, with crumbs spread all over the table; occasionally a fly nibbling on a fruit. This is, what Zbigniew Herbert described so well in an essay, “het non-heroisch motief” of the Dutch paintings of the Gouden Eeuw. According to him the peculiar absence of war scenes in historic paintings serves as a metaphor beyond art, and describes a national psyche in which the banal is celebrated rather than the brutal.
For the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, built by Rem Koolhaas in the early 1990s, it is not the art that reflects this motive, but rather the building itself. It stands rather unpretentiously along an urban freeway on one side and faces a small park on the other. The building is a thoroughly honest expression of its budget limitations, and makes no secret of what was possible, and what not. One corner, for example, shows that the travertine cladding that gives a rather decent face to the park was just cut off and not continued around the edge. Instead the blank concrete is shown, and even more rough is the quickly brushed on, black bituminous coating that in usually never shown. Like the crumbs and the flies in the still-lifes, and the wrinkles and moles in the portraits, the attempt for beauty is countered by the brutality of the banal.
While the portraits in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam show a certain realism, the architecture of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam demonstrated another kind of realism, dirty realism.