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Beer In Art #125: Pieter de Hooch’s Woman Drinking In A Courtyard

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art-beer
This week’s work of art is by the Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch who was active during the time period known as the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. The painting, completed between 1658-1660, is entitled Un homme fumant et une femme buvant dans une cour a Delft (which is translated as Man Smoking and Woman Drinking in a Courtyard in Delft). The original painting is in the Mauritshuis in the Hague.

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The woman looks positively modern, almost like she’s savoring the aroma of the beer before taking her first sip.

You can see more of Pieter de Hooch’s work at the Artchive, the Artcyclopedia, Olga’s Gallery and the Web Gallery of Art.

Beer In Art #102: More Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields

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art-beer
Last week’s artworks were all paintings of wheat fields by Vincent Van Gogh for the most recent Session on wheat beers. Since wheat fields were a favorite subject for Van Gogh — throughout his life he painted at least 40 artworks that included a wheat field — I couldn’t help but feature several more again this week.

Wheat field, painted in 1889.

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Green Wheat Field, also painted in 1889.

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Wheat Field with Reaper, from 1888.

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Sheaves of What in a Field, from 1885.

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Sunset Wheat Fields Near Arles, from 1888.

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Wheat Field Behind Saint Paul Hospital with a Reaper, from 1889.

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Wheat Field with Cypresses at the Haute Galline Near Eygalieres, from 1889.

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Sunset Wheat Field with Sheafs, from 1888.

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For more about Vincent Van Gogh, Wikipedia is a good place to start, though there’s even more at the Vincent Van Gogh Gallery, which has a complete list of his works. There are also tons of links at the ArtCyclopedia and another biography at the Web Museum.

Beer In Art #101: Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields

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art-beer
Today’s artworks are all by one of the world’s most well-known artists, Vincent Van Gogh. Given last Friday’s Session topic — wheat beers — I thought it would be fun to look at some paintings of what fields. Wheat fields were a favorite subject for Van Gogh and throughout his life he painted at least 40 artworks that included a wheat field.

One of his most famous wheat field paintings was Wheatfield with Crows, painted toward the end of Van Gogh’s life, in 1890, the same year he passed away. It was also the subject of an episode of Simon Schama’s Power of Art, a wonderful documentary series on art that I heartily recommend. In addition, it was used in a surreal sequence of a lesser know film by Akira Kurosawa called Dreams. The original is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Van_Gogh-wheat_field_w_crows-1890

Here’s what the Van Gogh Museum has to say about the painting:

Wheatfield with Crows is one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and probably the one most subject to speculation. It was executed in July 1890, in the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. Many have claimed it was his last work, seeing the dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows and the cut-off path as obvious portents of his coming end. However, since no letters are known from the period immediately preceding his death, we can only guess what his final work might really have been. Some scholars believe it was the Tree-roots, but we have no proof that this was the case.

Another one painted around the same time was Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky, also painted in 1890.

Van_Gogh-wheat_field_under_clouded_sky-1890

Can Gogh also executed a series of paintings called “The Wheat Field” series. All of the paintings “depict the view Van Gogh had from the window of his bedroom on the top floor of the asylum” at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence from June 1889 to May 1890. Here’s one from that series, Wheat Field, Sunrise, painted in 1890.

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And here’s another one, Wheat Field with Rising Sun, from 1889.

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For more about Vincent Van Gogh, Wikipedia is a good place to start, though there’s even more at the Vincent Van Gogh Gallery, which has a complete list of his works. There are also tons of links at the ArtCyclopedia and another biography at the Web Museum.

A Brewer Trying To Explain What He Does To His Father

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art
Here’s an interesting art project from the Netherlands. It’s called How To Explain It To My Parents? It’s a series by artists and directors Lernert & Sander in which five “abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about.” In Episode 1 Dutch artist Arno Coenen explains to his father about his latest project: brewing beer.

Coenen is not a commercial brewer, but it’s clear from the video that he’s been home brewing since he was in high school. He contracted two beers from the Brouwerij de Molen for his Eurotrash Brewery project.

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Here’s a description of the exhibition from Coenen’s website:

The Eurotrash Brewery project presented in full effect by an Oktoberfest beertent installation at the museum for contemporary art “het Domein” in Sittard Holland last autumn,during the local beerfest! 2 special brews were made, a beer named “Red Oktoberfestbeer”, brewed with mostly Munchener malt and a big dose of Bambergerrachmalz, fermented with a spicy Belgian yeast at a modest drinkable alcohol percentage. The whole brew (500 liters) was available on draft. Especially for the ladies however a mega strong (16% alcohol!) barley wine fermented with champagne yeast, served in elegant champagne flute, called “Eurotrash Lady.” And the ladies loved it.

Both beers were masterly brewed by Menno Olivier from Hollands best brewery “de Molen” from Bodegraven.

In the beertent a altar-esque installation build up by a bar wit 2 beerpumps refridgerators filled with 75 centiliter bottles of “Eurotrash Lady” 7 HD LCD screens with Eurotrash Brewery commercial videos and animations, e.g. the great music video “stars in a circle” by my friends Alex Kloster and Johannes Malfatti from transformer di roboter.

So that’s the context as Coenen tries to explain to his Dad why what he does is art, in this case why brewing a beer is art. It’s an interesting conversation and you can feel there’s some tension between father and son. It’s in Dutch, of course, but it is subtitled.

How to explain it to my parents – Arno Coenen from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo.

New Leader Emerges In Battle of Strongest Beer?

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t-Koelship-2
For the past couple of years, the battle for the world’s strongest beers has been between the Scottish BrewDog and the German brewery Schorschbräu, with the last volley mere days ago with BrewDog’s controversial 55% The End of History. Seemingly out of nowhere a new contender for the title emerged. The Dutch brewer Brouwerij Het ‘t Koelship announced today they’re releasing a new beer, Start the Future, no doubt a response to BrewDog’s name for their 55% beer. Start the Future is 60% a.b.v.

Here’s ‘t Koelship’s description, as auto-translated by Google:

It presents Reefer Biggest beer in the world now the Scots a 55% beer on the market was the question: what do we do now? He is START THE FUTURE 60% alc. In response to the Scottish reaction; Obilix 45% was a success, but this is even better!

START THE FUTURE is like a beer OBILX product, a heavy alcoholic drink with the ingredients Water, malt, hops and yeast. The beer is then processed into a product, a beer-based beer product. START THE FUTURE is like OBILIX is a product made of 100% beer beer. How? Ask the brewer. You drink our START THE FUTURE and Obilix from a small glass and not from a beer glass.

According to Reuters:

Nijboer’s Almere-based brewery, ‘t Koelschip (The Refrigerated Ship), sells the new beer, which is 120 proof and dubbed “Start the Future,” in a one-third litre bottle for 35 euros ($45) each.

Nijboer told ANP he developed the new brew to keep up with Scottish outfits that were also pushing the boundaries of beer’s alcohol content. His previous record-holder, a beer called Oblix that was 90 proof (45 per cent alcohol by volume), was eclipsed by a Scottish beer that reached 55 per cent.

“It has become a little competition,” Nijboer said. “You should see it as a joke.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that the brewery also operates a distillery, too.

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Below is a bad photo of the bottle, from ‘t Koelship’s website.

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UPDATE: It looks like the Start the Future may have whisky added to it, making it doubtful most people will consider it a beer. (Thanks to Ken W. for the info.) The controversy is unfolding on Rate Beer — and probably elsewhere — where many people are questioning that this is truly a beer.

Even Schorsch from Schorschbräu weighed in:

What Mr. Nijboer is doing is not only trying to fool all others who do a fair contest (at the moment I got 43% Vol) and I will try more, but not for the price of leaving the way of Reinheitsgebot (German purity law). It’s a regional special German law and I do not expect that beer must be produced in that way worldwide…but what Koelschip does is pure customer deception. This is also illegal by national Dutch law.

Bavaria Beer Marketing Terrorists Strike Again

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bavaria
You may recall that during the last World Cup in 2006, The Dutch brewery brand Bavaria got themselves in hot wort by stealth marketing their brand during a match where fans wore orange lederhosen with the brewery’s logo on them, an item they sold online at the brewery’s website. I wrote about it then under the title Beer Marketing In Your Underwear? The official beer sponsor, Anheuser-Busch, got their lederhosen in a bunch because they were the “official” beer of the World Cup, ruffling more than a few feathers in Germany with it’s own rich beer history.

Fast forward four years to the World Cup in South Africa and nobody seems to have learned a damn thing from history, except perhaps the Bavaria Brewery. This year, during the match between the Netherlands and Denmark, 36 women were arrested for wearing plain orange dresses in a block of seats. I’m fairly certain it was indeed stealth marketing on the part of the brewery, but they broke no laws. There was no branding on the dresses and orange is the national color of Holland. Bavaria Beer has an entire Flickr gallery devoted to pictures of women wearing their plain orange dresses.

women-in-orange-dresses

But FIFA stepped in to protect its revenue stream for the millions paid by Anheuser-Busch InBev to be the “official,” and more importantly exclusive, beer of the World Cup. The women were ejected from the game and “arrested under the Contravention of Merchandise Marks Act, which prevents companies benefiting from an event without paying for advertising.” FIFA in a statement said they “view ambush marketing in a very serious light” and called the act of wearing an orange dress an “illicit activity.” The police in South Africa have opened a “criminal investigation,” according to the UK’s newspaper, the Guardian.

But despite the rhetoric, they’re not exactly terrorists. They were all wearing plain orange dresses. Period. Arresting them gave the Bavaria beer brand more publicity than leaving them alone would have. And it does nothing to dispel the image of FIFA and ABIB as thugs who’ll do whatever they like to protect revenue streams above all else, human rights be damned.

As Pete Brown concludes in his own rant over this incident:

Let’s be realistic: even though Bavaria have denied involvement, of course it was a marketing stunt: why else would forty identically dressed women turn up in one block? But it’s a brilliant stunt: once again, Bavaria has had acres of free press coverage, and Fifa and Bud have been made to look really quite sinister and scary.

But that’s because they are. We all know it’s a marketing stunt, but it doesn’t break any rules. The rules prohibit competitive beer branding around the stadium. There was no branding. End of.

As the Bavaria spokesperson says, Fifa don’t have a trade mark on the colour orange. This is an astonishing abuse of human rights — admittedly a trivial one in the context of South Africa’s recent history, but still deeply disturbing, because it’s all about protecting the commercial rights of a beer brand. No brand should have the power to do something like this. If Fifa and Bud are to remain consistent in this policy, we should expect them to eject and detain any England fan with a St George’s cross flag, T-shirt or face paint, because this is a device used extensively in marketing by Bombardier, a competitive beer brand to Budweiser. That would be utterly absurd, outrageous and unacceptable of course. But then so is this.

How A-B InBev think this ugly, bullying behaviour helps enhance Budweiser’s reputation is beyond me.

I know it’s naive to think that any international sporting event should be just about the game, but I continue to hold out hope. But this is one more potent reminder of how the world really works. What Bavaria did may be technically against FIFA’s “policy” (which is very different from a “law”) yet they treated the policy-breakers like terrorists and used police powers essentially to carry out and punish people for breaking the rules of a corporation, reminding me chillingly of the way the military and police have been used to break up strikers. Money and power increasingly call the shots while human beings and small enterprise get trampled. I, for one, am going to start wearing a lot more orange.

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UPDATE: A few more worthwhile articles about the incident have popped up. These include another Guardian piece, Another triumph for Fifa’s chillingly efficient rights protection team, by Marina Hyde, and Central State Asylum has a nice post from a legal standpoint. But perhaps most hilarious, someone has set up a Facebook page, I’ll buy Bavaria for the match to annoy FIFA.

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UPDATE 6.19: Apparently the gals in orange did show up for the game versus Japan on June 19.

Beer In Art #80: David Teniers’ Peasants Celebrating Twelfth Night

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art-beer
Today’s work of art is another piece I saw last week wandering around the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, the day after SAVOR. It was painted in 1635 by David Teniers the Younger, a Flemish artist born in Antwerp. The painting is known as Peasants Celebrating Twelfth Night.

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Teniers was known for his depictions of everyday life, usually showing peasants in a variety of settings. The Twelfth Night revelry shown here also include, of course, drinking beer.

Online, the National Gallery has several detail views available, including this one below of the drinking going on at the table.

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He also painted a similar scene about Twelfth Night a few years later entitled Twelfth Night, The King Drinks.

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To learn more about David Teniers, Wikipedia has a good overview and there’s also a more detailed biography at the National Gallery. You can see more of his work at the Web Museum, Olga’s Gallery and the National Gallery. There are also additional links at ArtCyclopedia.