2013 is officially Frans Hals Year, marking exactly 100 years since the Frans Hals Museum opened its doors. The most important exhibition in this jubilee year is 'Frans Hals: Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian', in which key works by Frans Halsare presented amid paintings by such famed colleagues as Titian, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Jordaens and Rubens. In this eponymous publication, all the works in the exhibition are presented side by side, enabling the reader to compare the masterpieces and see how the artists inspired one another. These unique confrontations of master painters are essential to an understanding of seventeenth-century art. Famous painters, after all, often produced their works in response to one another, with the aim of surpassing the other and creating something unique. (Exhibition: Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands (23.3.-28.7.2013)).
MVRDV is a Rotterdam-based architecture and urban design practice founded in 1993 (its name is an acronym for founding members Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries). In cooperation with Ilka and Andreas Ruby, MVRDV assembled a monographic overview of 20 years of architectural practice, <i>MVRDV Buildings</i>, now available in a new, updated edition. Featuring user testimonies, journalistic articles, and previously unpublished images and drawings, <i>MVRDV Buildings</i> surveys the realized work to date of one of the world's top architecture bureaus. Acclaimed for its visionary research and thought-provoking projects such as Pig City (a high-rise landscape designed to solve lack-of-space problems for the pig meat industry in the Netherlands) and Grand Paris (a proposal to join Paris and its suburbs into a high-density "post-Kyoto city" by 2030), MVRDV has realized a stunning portfolio of buildings and urban plans. This volume includes MVRDV's famous projects, such as Villa VPRO (Hilversum), WoZoCo (Amsterdam), Balancing Barn (Suffolk, UK) and Edificio Mirador (Madrid), and explores these with a characteristically inquisitive attitude. How do these buildings perform? What is life like in a blue house (in Didden Village, near Rotterdam), on an orange tribune (The Why Factory, situated within a courtyard at Delft University of Technology), in a vertical shopping street (the Gyre Shopping Center in Tokyo) or inside a mountain of books (the Book Mountain library in Spijkenisse)?
The early twentieth-century film industry grew with the help of passionate entrepreneurs like Jean Desmet (1875-1956), who went from being a carnival showman to one of the Netherlands' leading cinema operators, and finally became the country's first professional film distributor. The first decades of film were its most adventurous years--a period of astonishing technological development, artistic ingenuity and creative entrepreneurship. With his cinema company, Desmet was part of the transformation of cinema from a novelty into a major popular entertainment industry. The Jean Desmet Collection, now housed at the EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam, consists of more than 900 films, mostly from France, America, Italy and England, including masterpieces that were considered lost for decades. In this publication the story of the early days of the medium is told through films in the Desmet Collection, along with related posters, correspondence, photographs and stills.