artists use humour as a source of inspiration

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Monday, August 14, 2017

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Midas Zwaan, High mighty, 2008. Mixed media. Collection Sociale Verzekeringsbank. Photo: Isolde Woudstra Exhibition illustrates how artists use humour as a source of inspiration Hans Citroen, The Blue of the Sky, 1976. Photography Collection Eveline de Bruin. 1    HAARLEM.- The Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem is staging the major exhibition Humour: 101 Years of Laughing at Art in both venues. It illustrates how artists used humour as a source of inspiration. Since the coming of Dada in 1916, humour has played a major role in art, blowing a fresh new wind through the often serious and pompous art world. De Hallen Haarlem shows examples of humorous Dutch art—from Dada, Surrealism and Pop Art to Fluxus—along with humorous works from contemporary art. In the Frans Hals Museum the focus is on caricatures and parodies of famous works of art. The summer exhibition Humour: 101 Years of Laughing at Art echoes the theme that the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem is light-heartedly promoting in its programme this year. The exhibition features a wide range of paintings, prints, photographs, films and spatial works. It is the eleventh summer exhibition, and the first time it has been shared by the two venues. Dada and After  The show In De Hallen Haarlem is curated in the spirit of Dada. Dadaism or Dada was a rebellious art movement that protested with much clamour and humour against the bourgeois culture and the First World War. The movement was short-lived, but the spirit of Dada lived on. Later, in the nineteen-sixties, humour, playfulness and absurdism played just as great a role in Surrealism, Pop Art and above all in Fluxus. In much contemporary art humour features just as strongly as seriousness. The exhibition includes works by J.H. Moesman, Pieter Engels, Wim T. Schippers, Woody van Amen, Teun Hocks, Midas Zwaan, Martha Colburn and many others. Laughing at Art Under the title Laughing at Art, the Frans Hals Museum features caricatures and parodies of famous works of art. Following in the footsteps of the rebellious Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, who once gave a reproduction of the Mona Lisa a moustache and a beard, artists like Herr Seele and Kamagurka, Ger van Elk, Lucassen, Peter Pontiac and Gerrit van Dijk made their witty variations of classical, apparently inviolable masterpieces.