Amsterdam An Art Lovers' Guide

From towering temples...

This is a sensory overload.

..to gorgeous galleries.

They are just exquisitely painted.

From traditional tunes...

..to contemporary creatives.

Have you ever had a book rejected?

Pfft, I don't care.

Every great city offers a dazzling mix of world-class

artistic treasures.

And hidden delights...

that reveal its distinctive history and character.

I've really entered the territory of the hunchback of Oude Kerk.

Which would you choose to see on a flying visit?

I'm Alastair Sooke.

And I'm Janina Ramirez.

In this series we're selecting our personal must-see sights,

using the magnificent art and architecture of three great cities

to understand the forces that shaped them.

Keep one eye on your wealth,

but always keep an eye on your spiritual wellbeing.

We're two art lovers, with very different tastes.

From the modern...

..to the medieval.

As your guides...

I've lost all sense of direction on this map.

..we'll be avoiding the crowds,

by hunting for treats way off the beaten track.

SHE GASPS

And we'll also be finding new ways of appreciating

the most famous attractions.

That's my contribution to the Sagrada Familia.

Between us, we'll show how centuries of political intrigue,

privilege and the struggles of ordinary citizens

are all woven through the artworks and buildings

of these extraordinary cities.

On this mission to capture the spirit of a city through its art,

we're on a flying visit to one of the most freewheeling, liberal

and innovative centres in the world.

This, for me, is Amsterdam.

We are right by the Centraal Station.

It is busy. There are stag dos.

This is the liberal Amsterdam I've been led to believe exists with the

red-light district, drugs. You know, I can smell marijuana on the air.

You're not wrong there, but I do think that the coffee shop vision of

Amsterdam is a bit of a cliche.

I've got a very different sense of it, in a way.

And that's because my grandmother was Dutch,

and I've spent lots of family holidays in the Netherlands.

And this city, for me, is very much about that Dutch propensity

for orderliness.

There is a certain sense of schizophrenia in Amsterdam,

-I think.

-It's almost a paradox.

These two poles of their identity.

But a paradox we're going to unravel

and solve by the end of the programme, I'm sure.

So we've got a lot to explore, haven't we?

A lot to discover about this city.

We're going to find out about Amsterdam's unique identity.

And see how the city offered a pioneering template

for much of modern life.

Globalised trade, democratic ideas

and a balance between individual freedoms and community living.

It's been credited with creating a new kind of society,

dominated not by kings, but by citizens.

And it set the standard for a domestic lifestyle

familiar to us today.

The best way to begin our tour of how the city first took shape

is on the waterways.

I'm going to drive.

-Are you going to drive?

-Yes. I'm going to drive. I'm up for this.

-Hiya.

-Well, decision made.

-Ben, yeah?

-Yep.

-Hi, Nina.

-Nice to meet you.

Who's skipper?

Me.

-Need you ask, Ben?

-You can be navigator.

So, it's brilliant being out on the canals.

This is the way to see Amsterdam, isn't it?

But it's also great,

because this gives you a sense of how the city has developed

all around these arteries.

I've got the map here...

-Oh, yeah.

-..and you can see that medieval mess in the middle.

-Medieval mess!

-That's your period, isn't it?

-That's my passion.

-And there's a much more, sort of,

regular canal belt that follows around it,

where the city really expanded in the 17th century.

From 1585 to the end of the 17th century,

Amsterdam's population exploded

from 30,000 to 220,000.

So city officials embarked on an ambitious plan to reclaim swampland

and expand the centre.

Begun in 1613,

the 100-kilometre canal network

was hailed by other European cities

as the greatest urban feat of the age.

-There's a sign up there.

-There's rapids here.

-I don't think we can go down here!

-Yeah, yeah.

We can't go down here.

So when we see that sign, that means "no entry", OK?

Much like in the UK.

The digging of the canals transformed Amsterdam.

It made travel and trade easier,

while fostering a sense of collective responsibility

amongst its citizens,

who had to help build and maintain the system.

This forward-thinking approach to city living

also broke down social hierarchies

much sooner than in other cities in Europe.

So there's this Dutch term, isn't there, "salmon living".

This idea of living together, pulling together.

I think that's really influenced the way that Amsterdam was created

from the very ground up,

having to turn what was, essentially,

an uninhabitable marshland

into something viable as a place to live and to trade.

That wasn't easy to do.

90 islands, 1,500 bridges, they put in.

-Really?

-Absolutely.

And this is a huge...

I don't want to scare you, but there's a big boat called Sunshine

-which is coming up behind us.

-I'm going to...

-BOAT HORN HOOTS

-Why is he hooting so aggressively?

Cos we have to move faster.

I like the fact you see that community effort reflected in

the very fabric and structure of the city.

And you don't find huge disjunction between massive palaces,

places where the most powerful people could build huge...

huge piles, really, and then poorer parts.

It's relatively uniform.

-All of the architecture feels slightly bourgeoisie...

-Absolutely.

..but it's approachable.

You have that same sense of community spirit

that dictated the whole canal belt system.

-Nina...

-OK.

-..I've lost all sense of direction on this map.

-Alastair, you had one job to do.

-I've let you down.

-One job to do. I've driven the boat.

-I know.

Amsterdam's progressive town planning

and mastery of the water worked in its favour.

As the canal system was being engineered,

the Dutch 80-year war against rule by Catholic Spain

was drawing to an end.

Amsterdam became a mercantile boom town.

The wealth, rapidly amassed by its traders,

also fuelled a lucrative market

for spectacular Golden Age painting.

Today, many tourists head straight to the museums

to see the Dutch Masters.

Before I visit them myself, I've come to the main avenue,

the Damrak near Centraal Station, to follow the money.

I think, if you want to understand

why Amsterdam became such a commercial powerhouse,

and remains so important in terms of trade and finance,

then this is the perfect place to start.

Because it's the last surviving stock exchange in the city.

For an insider's view on the wealth that funded Amsterdam's art market,

I've come to meet a banker

who specialises in its financial history -

Simon Lelieveldt.

Simon, something that's always puzzled me,

what you have in the 17th century is known as the Dutch Golden Age.

You have these unbelievable amounts of money coming into the city,

transforming Amsterdam into the centre of this world power,

the Dutch Republic. But it happened like that, really quickly.

Just a couple of generations.

Why did Amsterdam become so rich, so quickly?

The preconditions for becoming rich were there already.

Essentially, you know, our lands were under water.

We couldn't grow grain ourselves.

So we had to be very early grain importers.

So we created a fleet of vessels and merchants going for trade.

So one of the preconditions is having a fleet.

We had the fleet because we had to feed the people in the country.

Also, Amsterdam and the Netherlands were a republic.

The Dutch had the first open society, as we would know it today.

So a sense of tolerance was there from the beginning,

which allowed trade...facilitated trade.

Well-organised, intent on self-governance and powerful,

thanks to its trading fleet,

this open-minded city was poised to emerge as the region's major port in

the mid-16th century.

What about the relationship between Amsterdam and the rest of the world?

Because right at the beginning of the 17th century

you had the formation of the Dutch East India Company

and that was crucial, wasn't it?

There were 30 small companies venturing out,

all making money in the trade in Indonesia.

And how did they make money? What were they bringing back?

They would bring back spices, luxury goods.

But if you do that with 30 companies,

it won't be profitable for long.

The rival companies merged

to form the Dutch East India Company in 1602.

An astonishingly successful prototype

for today's multinational corporations.

Goods, money and art flooded into Amsterdam from around the world,

ushering in the Golden Age.

The company was also the first to offer the public

a chance to invest in its stocks.

These were originally bought and sold down on the quayside.

But Amsterdam's traders eventually set up shop

in this monumental temple to commerce.

Built in 1898 by socialist architect Hendrik Belage,

the interior is covered in murals,

celebrating the efforts of the country's workers.

This whole space, it's a cafe now,

but originally it was the main entrance to the building.

And one of the intriguing details of it are these three ceramic murals

created by a Dutch artist called Jan Toorop.

And what's so intriguing about them is,

within the centre of commerce,

you have a slightly problematic coded socialist message.

Now, the way they are divided is into past, present and future.

And it's an idea of looking at how

the market has operated over history.

The first vision is really quite bleak.

A stern-looking man bartering by exchanging his sword

for this beautiful naked woman, who partly covers her face in shame.

And in the background you have a scene of real cruelty of slavery,

people, humans, pulling along something,

whilst this fierce-looking face in the background

cracks the whip to continue.

It's a sense of... Labour is being abused, frankly.

And then you come to the present,

and you find a much more ordered society.

We've leapt forward millennia.

Smokestacks, chimneys of factories.

Trains moving along.

There's a sense of industry,

a country that's found the Industrial Revolution.

It's still not an idealised vision of society.

But that's what you find in the final mural,

which tells a biblical story of the Samaritan at the well.

You have Jesus Christ, offering salvation.

And in the background, a vision of paradise.

Men and women acting in concert.

It's an Arcadian vision of leisure.

But there are reminders throughout of the costs of capitalism.

And, as a result,

a lot of the traders who came and used this building to begin with

found themselves slightly miffed by the decoration they were

confronted with every single day.

The traders also complained of poor heating

and after only ten years moved to a new building next door.

Yet a tension between the city's egalitarian idealism

and its zeal for the riches of free markets continues even today.

As Amsterdam grew into an international centre of trade,

a middle class of wealthy merchants emerged

and moved into new residential areas along the canal belt.

The city's twin desires for commerce and community had to be contained

within the buildings themselves.

You can see why this is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Amsterdam is known as the Venice of the North.

It's vibrant and very good for merchants.

Goods from around the world could be brought up these canals

and then they could be traded

and stored in these magnificent houses all along the edges.

Combining warehouse and family accommodation,

these homes are a vital way to understand the city better.

With a low-key monarchy,

Amsterdam doesn't have grandiose palaces or towers.

Instead, these homely-looking canal houses

became its best-known landmark.

And being an art historian, I love the idea that you can actually date

these buildings quite specifically from the architectural features.

On this side of the canal

you can see three of the most distinctive styles of gables.

At the end, the step design, originally in the 15th century,

and they have these very triangular gables.

But that wasn't fashionable in the Renaissance.

They didn't like diagonal lines.

So they introduce these steps in the very late-16th century.

The one at the other end of the three is known as a neck gable.

This strong rectangular shape with a pediment on the top.

And this starts to come in 1640s, 1650s.

It's a development into the baroque style,

and what this meant was you could display your wealth

through the finials and the decorations,

often picked out in white against the otherwise rather stark brick.

And then, in the middle of the three, the bell design.

This lovely graceful shape.

This really was a sign of great wealth.

You could have fruits, floriat designs, cartouches,

all of this decoration up at the top.

Amsterdam's houses are tall and thin

because they were taxed by width.

So people built upwards.

It's said that middle-class domestic spaces evolved in Amsterdam.

What we now call a home, a modest domestic space,

originated with these sorts of narrow, beautiful canal houses.

Beautiful though they are,

the rows of flat brick facades make the city seem austere

and lacking in green space.

Yet, modern residents know differently.

And two of them are sharing their secret with me.

-Hello, Hans. How lovely to see you.

-Nice to see you again.

Nice to see you.

Architect Hans Witt and costume designer Rien Bekkers

have allowed me to see what lies behind the narrow brick houses.

Their beautiful green, private gardens.

This is amazing.

So you've obviously done it in a very traditional style.

It's a really classical style.

Did you have to research what you were doing with these?

-No.

-I think we were creative enough to decide...

You could just do it.

Yes. It's an interpretation of the 17th century.

In the old times, the owners, and especially the ladies,

they'd want a lot of shadow, because white was in the fashion.

It was fashionable. You see, I'd be fine.

I'd be very fashionable.

The city's dual personality is built into these homes.

Tradition and affluence on one side,

but on the other a desire for individuality.

One of the things that strikes me about these houses

is that they actually seem quite conservative, quite traditional.

And yet, I always think of Amsterdam as this

super laid-back, really, really liberal place.

The architecture tells a different story, doesn't it?

Yeah, especially now it's a world UNESCO,

so that is very interesting and beautiful that it is protected.

As an architect, I don't like it so much sometimes,

because everybody wants to keep it now as it is.

You're right.

If you're very conservative about preserving buildings,

they don't become the documents of change that

they have been in Amsterdam.

As welcoming as Hans and Rien are,

it's time for me to go and meet Alastair in the museum quarter

in the south of the city.

Much like today,

visitors to Amsterdam in the 17th century were stunned by the

Dutch fondness for pictures.

Art wasn't only the preserve of the church or aristocracy,

but collected by everyone,

from well-off merchants down to craftsmen,

creating a uniquely fruitful climate for great works.

And we can't talk about Golden Age painting

without a visit to the Rijksmuseum.

My God, it's busy, isn't it?

Well, it's always busy here.

We have to fight our way through the crowds.

-Oh!

-But it is, in a way, the heart and soul of Amsterdam.

This is a very extravagant, almost cathedral-like space, isn't it?

And what's so interesting is, it's all moving towards this end.

This is the altar, isn't it?

The altar of Rembrandt.

Well, we've come in a side chapel, as it were.

But if you came right down the nave, the gallery of honour,

the whole time, you have this great masterpiece, The Night Watch there,

and you can see it the entire distance.

Rembrandt's famous civic guard portrait

is regarded as the superlative example

of his mastery of light and dark.

And aptly for Amsterdam,

his gift for capturing both the individuality of his subjects

and the strength of the group.

It is beautifully painted, beautifully executed,

but I can barely see it because of the sea of tourists.

This is not my idea of a good time.

This is a vast museum.

There are, within this space, lots of less familiar stories,

which are really worth exploring.

There are so many other Golden Age treasures here,

we're going to split up to make the most of them.

On my way, there's just time to pop in on the painter

who portrayed Dutch domesticity like no other - Vermeer.

If the city of Amsterdam today

seems to be caught between these two twin poles

of orderliness,

but also a real sense of permissiveness, liberalism,

if you go back to the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century,

you find exactly the same tension defining society then.

This wall of paintings has to be one of the best-known in the entire

museum. Paintings by Vermeer -

you're drawn into this very mysterious, tranquil world,

which he's so well known for.

You find a very quiet street scene,

two people sharing an intimate moment in a household,

and every single one is suffused with an air of enigma and mystery

and, of course, they are just exquisitely painted.

It's tempting to think this is what Dutch Golden Age art often was.

And it wasn't. There's another Golden Age artist who,

within the Netherlands,

is equally famous, but back home in Britain, and elsewhere in the world,

isn't on the same par.

And I find it really curious because, here at the Rijksmuseum,

all of his paintings are shown in the bay opposite this one,

and that artist's name is

Jan Steen.

LIVELY MUSIC PLAYS

To find out how Steen's work relates to the contradictions in Dutch

society, I'm meeting sociologist Stephram Bruegel.

For you, as a Dutchman, Jan Steen is very well known.

-Oh, yeah.

-But for British tourists,

I don't think people are so familiar with Steen.

OK. Let's change that.

Jan Steen, he is the painter of the people.

He said, "I want to show the life of ordinary people, ordinary life."

I mean, here, there's a drunk couple who are so inebriated,

they don't realise they're being robbed.

And here we have a family clearly getting drunk together,

including all of the kids.

Are we supposed to point a finger in judgment or are we supposed to enjoy

the human appetites which are being indulged?

From an art historical point of view, we always wonder,

is this the reality of Jan Steen himself

or is this his comment on society?

Today, his name has a really relevant currency

in the Netherlands, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah. We have the phrase, "een huishouden van Jan Steen" -

"a Jan Steen household".

We are expressing, "Oh, no."

The situation seems to be stronger than we ourselves

but, at the same time,

there is a humoristic approach on this chaos in the situation.

If I came round to your house and then said, afterwards, to my wife,

"Steph's house, it's a bit of a Jan Steen household."

-Yes.

-Would that be quite rude?

No, not at all. Because if your wife

would know the meaning of his paintings and this phrase,

then she would start to laugh and she will tell you,

"Alastair, you're right.

"Steph's house is just a Jan Steen household.

"But come on, let's join the party."

Very good. I mean, can I come?

Of course you can come. You're welcome.

Excellent. I can't even imagine it.

-I can picture the scene, Steph.

-Yeah.

This national museum

offers a remarkable window into the prosperous life

enjoyed by the Dutch during the Golden Age.

They vied with England

to be Europe's main importer of exotic luxury goods.

Merchants bought in millions of pieces

of expensive porcelain from the East.

But I'm drawn to a unique ceramic collection

that reveals a readiness to embrace new trends

and capitalise on them, too.

This is a very important pair of objects.

We're looking at tulip vases.

The tulip bulbs would be placed inside and the flowers would grow

out of these spouts.

What's interesting is that these are inspired by the porcelain

that they were importing from China.

Through the Dutch East India Company,

they were actually able to trade very freely in Chinese porcelain

and the people of Holland developed a taste for having

the finest Chinese porcelain on their tables.

This trade link was halted in the 17th century

and so they had to come up with their own solution

and that was Delftware.

It's made from clay,

glazed in tin

and it produces this very distinctive blue and white effect.

This is the closest thing

to reproducing the luminous white of Chinese porcelain.

And you can see that they've even been influenced in the imagery.

This is very oriental.

It's designed to pass as an example

that's been imported from the Far East.

Inventive and pragmatic,

the Dutch would export this cheaper imitation around the world,

even back to China.

We're halfway through the tour, so time for lunch at the Jordaan.

Famous for its 17th-century bars,

which exude an atmosphere that the Dutch call "gezellig" -

a kind of home-from-home cosiness.

Alastair, you've got a much more personal connection

with Amsterdam than me.

Because your family is partly Dutch, isn't it?

They are partly Dutch.

My grandmother was Dutch and, in honour of her,

I want to show you one of the really traditional

17th-century brown cafes.

I guess they're the Dutch equivalent of an English pub.

There are various Dutch culinary surprises waiting for you to try.

Oh, wow!

These are called bitterballen.

-OK. Yum.

-And they're a sort of Dutch snack.

It's a deep-fried ball of, well...

-Loveliness.

-..Dutch tastiness and there's also some herring,

some liver sausage and some very strong, old Dutch cheese...

-Wow!

-..which you dip in mustard.

This is not for the faint-hearted.

But luckily, I am of Polish origin and I can handle my raw herring.

-Perfect. Look at this.

-Oh, my goodness.

Thank you, let's put those over there.

That's just to tease me for after the liver and cheese.

Thank you.

OK...

Are they very hot?

I think they normally are pretty hot, so...

Mm... Mmmm!

-Mm!

-Once more with feeling!

They are quite hot.

This is going so badly!

My whole childhood memories are being trampled over by you.

FUNKY MUSIC PLAYS

With so much still to see,

I want to get closer to Amsterdam's most famous artistic genius -

Rembrandt.

I've come east across town to his five-storey town house,

bought the same year he painted The Night Watch.

Mirroring the materialism of his city's Golden Age,

Rembrandt stuffed his home with possessions,

but his spending habits eventually drove him to bankruptcy.

There's no denying the fact that the Rembrandt House is a major tourist

destination these days, but there's also a chance that I'm going to see

some etchings, which they don't have on public display,

to really get a handle, not on Rembrandt the painter,

that well known public side of him,

but as Rembrandt the innovative printmaker.

Rembrandt had to break new ground to get noticed in Amsterdam's

competitive art scene.

His carefully restored 17th-century home holds one of the largest

collections of his prints in the world.

David de Witt is the chief curator.

-Hello.

-This is a real treat,

because I know that you've got some prints

ready for us to have a look at.

I do. Let's take them out.

OK. What have we got here?

Some landscapes.

So, here, we see a print from 1650.

It's the landscape with the cow.

I mean, it does feel, as soon as you get close to it, it sucks you in,

because of that amount of dense, dense detail.

What do you think the process would have been?

A sheet of copper that would have been prepared with a type of resin,

through which he would've scratched.

He had developed an extraordinarily high level of facility in working

directly on the etching plate.

More so than many of his contemporaries.

Rembrandt transformed printing into a truly expressive form that could

capture the spirit of an individual.

OK, so here's the man himself.

Rembrandt embarks on a study of human emotions,

studying all the muscles and the details of the face.

And he used himself as the model for...?

And he had himself handy as a model

and he recognised that there was more

to be achieved by studying the human face more intently.

Can I just say, I mean, if you look at this up close,

it's extraordinary that there is no outline

which is delineating the face.

It's all this sort of slightly feathery

but very small delicate marks that creates that.

He is thinking, inventing and that's what he's...

That's the function of these things, is to figure it out.

And he thereby achieves a level of convincing human expression

that was, in his own time,

recognised as being without parallel.

We're about eight or nine years down the road here.

This is someone who is entirely self-assured.

There's much more poise.

His paintings and portraits and often self-portraits are known

for their sense of revealing something of the psychology,

the interior mind and life of the sitter.

So even in a moment of appearing very confident,

this is for public presentation,

you can still see a sense of a life lived.

Perhaps some hint of former anxieties written into the face.

That's how Rembrandt saw people.

FUNKY MUSIC PLAYS

Not only was Amsterdam a place where artists

could explore individual identity,

tolerance of individual belief was also protected here by law.

After rebelling against Catholic control in the 16th century

to become a Protestant state,

the Dutch Republic became far more open to other religions

and radical ideas than the rest of Europe -

an attractive place for migrants from all backgrounds.

One of the biggest immigrant groups was the Jewish community,

fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal,

they brought new cultural energy to the city.

I'm really impressed by the scale and grandeur of this synagogue.

In 1675, it was opened -

all of the members of the council came along to celebrate this event.

I mean, this shows the Jews not just being tolerated

but actually being embraced by the people of the city.

For nearly 400 years, the Jews thrived here,

but at the outbreak of the Second World War,

Amsterdam's tolerance came to a brutal end.

There's a startling statistic.

There were 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands

and 75% of those were killed.

People were informed on, people were turned over to the police.

The Nazis were doing a very thorough job of wiping out Jewish buildings,

Jewish artefacts.

But amazingly, this synagogue survives.

Fortunately, another important treasure here

also escaped destruction.

Founded in 1616,

Ets Haim is the oldest functioning Jewish library in the world.

With 560 manuscripts and 30,000 printed books,

the library holds a diverse selection of text,

including the Koran

and works by Erasmus and radical philosopher Spinoza.

This rare collection offers an insight into the city's history of

tolerance and integration.

Curator Heide Warncke has selected some highlights for me.

-Hi, lovely to see.

-Good to see you.

I'm so excited.

I'm never happier than when I'm with an old book.

-That's wonderful. Good news.

-This is very exciting.

-Yeah.

What you will see in this congregation

is that they were always very open-minded

because they had to convert to Christianity.

And when they came to Amsterdam,

it was possible for them to be Jewish again,

but they had such an open mind about things.

So in this library you will find a lot of different books

with a lot of different content in it.

So this is actually a unique collection for that reason,

that it is this cosmopolitan

international collection of Jewish text.

-Absolutely.

-This has caught my eye.

It's incredibly colourful, isn't it?

Yes, it's beautiful, isn't it?

It's the Pesach Haggadah

and this is read in every family, every year,

with the Passover feast.

Printed in Amsterdam.

What is interesting about this one is that the one who put the copper

engravings in it, he used the copper plates of Matthaus Merian,

and Matthaus Merian used the copper plates for Protestant Bible.

How...? How Amsterdam is that?

How Amsterdam is that?

You've got the Protestant Bible

being printed with the same copper plates

that the Jewish texts were then reused for.

That's fantastic.

Can I just say, though,

I'm so surprised to see bright colours, painting,

visuals, in Jewish manuscripts.

-Yes.

-Because, on the whole, they're not illuminated, are they?

That's right. You're absolutely right with that.

The Haggadah is the one manuscript or printed book that is illustrated

and you will see a lot of Christian influences here.

-Yeah.

-For example...

-Ah, my word.

It is very much Christian with the beams of light coming from heaven.

They're taking inspiration

from a long tradition of Christian manuscripts,

-aren't they?

-That's right.

-What else can you show me here?

I found, well, you know...

I've been looking at this on the table.

We found this in our collection yesterday.

We're cataloguing all the books here. So, book by book,

we're taking them out and having a look at them.

Yesterday you pulled this out of the collection?

-We found this yesterday, yes.

-So this is a true sleeper.

-Yes.

-This is one of those books in a box, waiting to be documented.

Yeah, yeah. It's a book of psalms from 1538, but look at this...

SHE GASPS

Oh, my goodness!

-I've just got goose bumps.

-It's the parchment that...

-I know what this is.

-..to reinforce the binding and this is,

I think it's a Latin text, isn't it?

-It most certainly is.

-I would like to know what you think about it.

This is what's known as endpapers and this is a Christian,

probably biblical manuscript.

This sort of transmission of Christian manuscript material

into another religious group's scriptorium,

-it's really, really unusual.

-Wonderful.

-Oh, my goodness!

By the 17th century,

one third of all books published in Europe

were produced here in Amsterdam.

An unofficial publishing house for the continent's radical thinkers,

the city had a long history of spawning ideas that challenged

the authority of church, monarchy and state.

I'm going to meet one of the Netherlands'

foremost designers, Irma Boom,

who continues to uphold Amsterdam's belief in the printed word

with her own bold ideas of what a book can be.

An international graphic design star,

Boom's known as the "queen of books"

and her work has been shown at MoMA in New York

and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

-Hello, hi.

-Hi.

-Hi.

This is your studio, is it?

Yes. It's always a bit messy

and I always try to clean it, but it always happens to end up like this.

And, look, there are loads of examples

-of the books that you've designed.

-Yes.

Presumably it's stretching back quite a few years.

Yes. I've made over 300.

You've made over 300 books?

-Yes.

-Which made your name, if you like?

Yeah, so we have here the SHV book.

It's a Dutch multinational.

The brief was, make something unusual.

They wanted to make a book based on the notion

of browsing through the internet. A book which you cannot get hold of,

so that you have to browse through.

And is the idea you can approach this from any point

and take something from it?

Yes, exactly. It's not the idea that you read it from A to Z.

It just starts somewhere, maybe at a question.

So, a very simple thing, but there are no page numbers.

-No. There's no...

-Presumably, there's no index at the back.

-No.

-This was essentially a corporate commission,

but it's the opposite of a boring, corporate manual.

You've created something that does feel

more in the territory of a work of art, really.

What are some other examples of things you've worked on?

I know there's a very famous commission,

-which is the Chanel book.

-Yes.

Which sounds to me, well, practically perverse,

-because there's no printed words in there at all.

-It's embossed.

They gave me carte blanche, like the SHV book.

It's just the same, basically.

-You've given them carte blanche.

-And they got blanche, oui!

-The whole idea is you're invited to touch...

-Yes.

..each page in order to understand.

For me, it was quite obvious to do it like this,

because a perfume you can smell

but you don't see and it's the same concept.

This is the ultimate book. Imagine a PDF of this book.

-It's the ultimate... It's an anti-book.

-It's white!

No, it is the ultimate book.

It's... For me, it is the ultimate book.

-Why do you say that?

-Because it only exists as a book.

It doesn't exist as a PDF or as any file.

Only the plates where it's made from is visible.

Boom frequently collaborates with other Dutch designers

like Rem Koolhaas and Viktor & Rolf.

And she recently created the new logo for the Rijksmuseum.

Have you ever had a book rejected?

-Oh, yes.

-That must be quite difficult.

Pfft, I don't care.

I really think, then, I find another victim.

I will do my thing.

-It has to...

-Another victim!

Yeah. So there has to be... It has to happen.

What I have in my mind at some point...

..it happens.

I just feel blown away after meeting Irma.

I thought she was the most inspirational woman,

because her approach to bookmaking is like nothing anybody has really

attempted before, just total freewheeling scope and imagination.

There's a reason I now understand

that she's known as the "queen of books"

and thank God that there is somebody

who's preserving the great tradition of printed matter for the future.

The next stop at the heart of the old centre is a real treat for me.

The Oude Kerk, whose bells have rung out since 1306.

BELLS RINGING

MAN PLAYS TRUMPET

BELLS RING THE SAME TUNE

HE PLAYS THE TRUMPET

BELLS RING

HE BLOWS A CONCH

I'm being serenaded by a conch.

Yeah. Your husband's never done that, has he?

Never done that, no. Thank you.

We've no time to waste if we want to explore

the full glory of this building.

It's not just a shrine that marks the birth of Amsterdam.

It also stands as a document of the battles against church authority

that would shape the nation's destiny.

This place makes me very excited.

It's a parish church, not a cathedral,

although it looks magnificent and grand.

It actually has the largest

surviving medieval timber roof anywhere.

The church is only here because of a miracle which took place in 1345,

when Amsterdam was just a small Catholic settlement

on the banks of the Amstel.

And it all began with a miraculous host or communion wafer.

According to this miracle,

an old man lay dying and he was given the communion host

as part of the last rites.

He vomited this up and the vomit went in the fire,

but the host didn't burn in the fire.

They took the host out, kept it as a relic

and what then happens is, repeatedly,

this old man's house is subject to fire, but it doesn't burn down,

so it was seen as a truly sacred object

and this church was built around that miracle, that relic.

The Oude Kerk became a famous pilgrimage site,

drawing crowds from across Europe and fuelling the growth of the city.

The ceiling was richly adorned with paintings representing

the city's guild members.

Up here, you can see this was a side chapel

that was used by one of the guilds of sailors

and it's a beautiful image of the Virgin and Christ.

It's known as a pieta.

It's the moment where the Virgin

holds her dying Christ child in her lap,

but it's all taking place on a boat

and you can see the masts, the sails,

and either side, two bags of money, where the coins are dripping out.

It's acting as a reminder that these sailors,

these Amsterdam traders,

who are going to the edges of the known world - yes,

keep one eye on your wealth, one eye on what you're trading and selling,

but ALWAYS keep an eye on your spiritual wellbeing.

Meanwhile, I've got access to parts of the church

that the public rarely gets to see.

I think, as city breaks go, this is starting to feel genuinely intrepid.

I'm now quite far up the roof of the old church.

This is the largest slate roof in Europe, apparently.

And, of course, what you get,

as well is a sense of vertigo and slightly being unsure on your feet,

you have tremendous panoramas of the city,

so you have an entirely different and new perspective on Amsterdam.

Over the centuries, as this place was enlarged,

it was essential to keep a building of this scale maintained

and, in order to do that,

you needed to have these fairly secret passageways, ladders,

staircases, workshops hidden away in the eaves.

I feel like I've really entered the territory

of the hunchback of Oude Kerk.

So if you come up towards the east end of the church,

there's an inscription here that records a really important moment in

Amsterdam's history.

They realigned themselves from Catholic to Calvinist Protestant.

In the Netherlands, the Reformation is known as the Alteration.

This was the moment in 1578 when Amsterdam mounted a peaceful revolt

against the Catholic authorities.

The errors of God's church that took place are being basically corrected

in the year '78.

So it's saying that the Catholic church had slipped

into some really bad practices.

They were seen as corrupt, as overreaching in their power.

Protestantism was about righting those wrongs.

The Oude Kerk bears the scars of this conversion.

Most of the church's stained-glass windows were pulled out.

Ornate decor ripped down and the colourful ceiling painted over.

One of my favourite things is that, if you walk along,

it feels like you're in a galleon at sea.

You're in one of those

famous ships that the Dutch East India Company

sent out to the Far East

and came back laden with riches, because it's so bumpy.

It feels as though you're moving. And, of course, you're very,

very high up and you get a reminder every now and then of the

precariousness of the situation, because...if you see these little

squares of wood that are on top of the floor.

If you open them up...

I didn't realise I had vertigo until I came to do this.

..you are about 100 feet directly above the floor of the old church.

You can see it down there.

And, in fact, I think that might be Nina.

Nina!

Genuinely looked up.

This rare survival, I really wasn't expecting to find in this church,

are original medieval misericords.

Have a look here. This is where the carving,

the secret carving lies underneath.

Now, what's interesting is that they often feature

less religious imagery.

That realm, the heavenly realm,

that is where all the sacred images go.

But if you're sitting on something, this is the earthly realm.

The imagery you get in misericords relates to day-to-day events

and, sometimes, a fascination with the scatological.

This character is bending over and excreting.

And the woman is very carefully pulling out the excrement

and winding it around this device.

What is going on here?

Why is this image in a church?

Well, it's a moral message, really, that if you pull too quickly,

you'll break the thread.

And so, it's encouraging patience.

Just a few steps away from the Oude Kerk

is the city's red-light district,

which has drawn in travellers and traders since medieval times.

And I think it's only in Amsterdam that you'd find a statue dedicated

to sex workers standing right in front of its oldest church.

I'm going to meet former prostitute Mariska Majoor,

who commissioned this sculpture, at the Prostitute Information Centre.

Hi, Mariska.

Hi.

-Nina.

-Nice to meet you.

So lovely to meet you.

-Welcome.

-This is a great place.

-It is.

-You were involved in Belle.

Yeah, I feel a bit like her mummy.

While I didn't make her, she's made by the younger sister of my mother.

I asked her to make a powerful statue of a strong sex worker

-standing in her own doorway...

-Yeah.

..with her proud body language, telling the world,

"Yes, I'm a prostitute. So what?"

Amsterdam has a uniquely pragmatic way of preserving its

tradition of tolerance in the face of complex social issues.

Having legalised prostitution,

the Dutch also have their own way of accommodating soft drugs,

called "gedogen",

roughly translated as "technically illegal, but officially tolerated".

To me, it's really amazing how the red-light district in Amsterdam is

right up against the church.

I can see that on the faces of people.

You see them looking from the church to the window.

Then you explain to them

-that there's also a kindergarten on he same square...

-Oh, no!

..and they go crazy!

Especially Americans, they go completely crazy.

People always focus a lot

on Amsterdam's red-light district and Amsterdam is so evil,

that they legalise and facilitate visible prostitution.

-Well, I mean, it's happening everywhere in the world.

-Exactly.

Having worked as a prostitute from the age of 16,

Mariska now runs workshops to make people think about what it's really

like in the red-light district windows.

Oh, I sit here, do I? OK.

What you have to practise now

is you have to think a little bit sexy,

you have to pick a guy that you potentially like,

not to get married with,

but you feel quite comfortable with.

This is quite difficult.

You don't have to feel physically attracted to somebody, but you must

think, "OK, I think I can do this with him."

I've been married for so long, Mariska,

I think I've forgotten how to flirt! It's virtually... It's impossible!

Flirting is... It's nice.

He gave a wave.

You should not wave like Santa Claus is doing.

-No.

-Not... No.

Not like that.

-Not wave at all.

-Not wave at all.

Just say, "Come in."

We're running short of time. I've asked Nina to meet me

at another of the city's cultural highlights

back in the Museum Square.

I've had a very interesting experience

-in the red-light district.

-I'm sure you have, Nina.

Yeah, it's really opened my eyes, actually.

But it did make me wonder a little bit

about what this means for the culture of Amsterdam

because, when you remove all barriers, where anything goes,

how are you supposed to create something

that's pushing against the boundaries?

But the two things always exist side by side in Amsterdam,

don't they? You have that, you have that interest in the illicit,

if you like, but you also have that sense of orderliness,

that more bourgeois quality and I think, in cultural terms,

that can produce some fascinating results, as well.

I really want to take you inside this building, the Stedelijk Museum.

This is the museum of modern and contemporary art and the things

we're going to find in here have an unruliness and an excitement

-which feels quite illicit, as well.

-Hmm.

The Stedelijk celebrates Amsterdam's special relationship

with ground-breaking art and design.

It holds one of the world's largest collections of De Stijl.

This influential abstract art movement

was founded at the start of the 20th century.

Everybody knows about Mondrian, but they don't know about, so much,

his friend and fellow founder of the Style Movement,

a man called Theo van Doesburg.

There's a painting by him over here which you can see is very similar in

terms of Mondrianesque, same interest in abstraction, geometry,

a sense of rippling variety of quite simple forms.

As far as I can see today,

that's the only work by him hanging on the wall.

People just don't know about him and, instead,

it's kind of obscured, anyway, by the Rietveld chairs underneath,

which are classic De Stijl furniture.

Essentially, it's like you're sitting on a Mondrian.

Rietveld was a furniture designer round about 1918.

He designed these slatted chairs and then, in the early '20s,

when De Stijl was fully up and running,

he decided to paint them with these primary colours.

And it is still interesting to look at this,

because it feels almost like a pixelated image.

There's something very much of the future about furniture like this and

that's why it was considered so successful.

There's a great installation in this gallery which is the only surviving

De Stijl interior by the designer Rietveld and it's a bedroom,

but it's a bedroom like no other I've ever seen.

The red of the carpet, the yellow of the wardrobe,

there's a red eiderdown cover over there and blue.

Such a vision of clean living.

The only thing I feel here

is that it's hard to imagine anything exciting

taking place in a room like this.

I'm getting to grips with the flipside

of 20th century Dutch design,

the Amsterdam School, which was a contemporary movement to De Stijl.

Curator Ingeborg de Roode

has come to show me the first-ever survey of its interior pieces.

I am absolutely enamoured with the pieces I've been walking past.

Oh, those beautiful purple velvet chairs in there are wonderful.

Yes, they are great, aren't they?

Can you tell me a bit about the Amsterdam School?

It was a new architecture and design style

with a lot of Expressionist details.

The interiors were very colourful,

with beautiful decorated furniture and lamps.

So it's a full conceptual movement in a way, isn't it?

It's the architecture of the buildings,

but it goes right down to not just furniture

but, as you say, the fabric, the wrought iron.

Yes, everything, everything.

Wow! And it's very, very flamboyant, I think.

Yes, and very much so for the Netherlands,

because we're always known for our very severe style.

But this is not severe at all.

Green and purple and orange

were THE colours of the Amsterdam School.

Not the reds and blue and yellow of the Style Movement,

which was contemporary.

I love the little details,

things like the heart accent that's appearing.

Those very sculptural decorations,

that is really one of the items of the Amsterdam School.

I think I've just spotted my favourite piece over here.

This looks like the most glorious armchair.

It's one of two.

So one is decorated with a female, which you see here.

And the other one, a male person.

Could you still buy them now?

Well, yes, sometimes they are on show in auction houses.

I'll have to keep my eyes peeled,

because I would love to pick up some Amsterdam School furniture.

Oh, you can.

It just leaves me feeling really cold.

It's like its kept in aspic.

This is history. It doesn't feel very vibrant.

I really can't leave the Stedelijk

without taking a moment to savour one of my

favourite 20th-century Dutch artists, the flamboyant Karel Appel.

Well-known for the childlike forms he created

in the wake of World War II.

I'm bringing Nina to see Appel's famous mural,

commissioned for the Stedelijk restaurant in 1956.

-I've really enjoyed my trip here.

-I'm glad.

I've really enjoyed this museum.

I thought, as a medievalist, you might be a little bit sceptical.

I am not opposed to modern art.

I love modern art. The rapid developments,

the rapid changes in taste and style.

What about the Amsterdam School?

I am in love with the Amsterdam School.

-Right.

-I'm not exaggerating.

I was lusting after half the furniture in that exhibition.

I did think, I saw some sort of plush velvet pieces of furniture,

-they had a slightly Gothy vibe.

-Yeah, yeah.

I thought they might be up your street.

You thought that was up my street. What did you think?

I was a bit more lukewarm.

I thought it was fine. I mean,

it felt very, very historical to me.

So you cannot, in any way, disrespect the way they've done it.

It's a magnificent exhibition.

It's really comprehensive. There's a lot of scholarship there.

But I did walk through thinking a little bit like,

"Hm, not that excited."

-It didn't grab you.

-I mean, look at this. Have you seen this?

-I have.

I've seen some of the Appel stuff and I have to say,

I know he doesn't have a great reputation,

and I can kind of see why.

Is this the best that art can offer?

This does look slightly like a child's drawing, no?

I've got kids. There's no way they could paint this.

Oh, I don't know. Mine could knock this off in an hour.

-Maybe they're very talented.

-Ha-ha!

The future Appels of tomorrow.

This, to me, feels boisterous and bohemian.

Amsterdam School is very respectable,

a bit bourgeois

and a bit Art Deco ocean-liner decor.

Oh...

Well, we've obviously pitched our camps, Alastair, but you're in...

-Yeah, we have. Yeah.

-..the bohemian, boisterous end of the spectrum.

I've always thought so. No-one else has, but I have.

Amsterdam is much more than the charming old centre.

So, as we near the end of our visit,

we're crossing over the IJ to the north bank

to see the city's continuing legacy

of innovation and experimentation.

This is the waterway that all the ships gathered in

-to bring the wealth into the city.

-Yeah.

And it's interesting that we're leaving the city

on that same waterway.

It's almost a relief to see some modern architecture

after being in the middle of the city.

Yeah, this feels very cutting-edge out here,

but we've left a lot behind

and there is a lot more that I would have loved to have seen.

We're going to this exciting, vibrant new zone of Amsterdam.

The NDSM.

The NDSM wharf was the largest shipyard in Amsterdam

until it closed in 1984.

A gateway to the seas that brought the city new ideas

as well as its forward-looking spirit,

it was eventually redeveloped, fittingly,

as a home for artists and artisans.

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that this place is vast,

given that it's a huge shipbuilding warehouse, formerly,

but the scale of this place is awe-inspiring.

I can see why, if you're an artist, you'd want to come and set up shop.

This 20,000 square-metre hanger is known as an art city.

Creatives working here design and build their own studios out of old

shipping containers, investing their own time and money.

It's another example of Amsterdam's successful approach to city planning

that promotes community and creativity.

I'm meeting designer Eibert Draisma.

-Hi, there.

-Hi.

-You've created a whole new world in here.

-Yeah.

I like to have, like, my own secret world.

-It does feel secret.

-Nobody can see what I'm doing.

This is all so diverse.

-Are you responsible for this piece of glass?

-Yeah.

I thought it would be interesting to develop a cake stand

based upon a jellyfish.

That is extraordinary.

Most of the things I do are functional.

It's not just a glass jellyfish, it's a jellyfish cake stand.

I'm the operator, with my pocket calculator.

Of course! I'd find this completely compelling.

Well, thank you.

Finally, we're going to catch a burlesque theatre show

on a boat in the former shipyard.

Before it starts, I'm going to catch up with Alastair on our thoughts

about the city.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-It's been great.

-My goodness.

Amsterdam has exceeded my already very high expectation.

Come, come, come to the Semaphores. Come, come.

I think you started thinking it was all about stag dos, coffee shops -

that slightly more cliched view of Amsterdam.

-But we've found quite a lot of other stuff, as well.

-Oh, we did.

And what's really impressed me is the history of the place,

the sense of it being so self-made,

so entrepreneurial and forward-thinking.

I think, also, I've been very impressed

by the way that Amsterdam seems to understand itself.

It seems to have a strong sense of what makes it unique.

It's got a good sense of humour. It understands its underbelly.

You looked at those amazing Steen paintings,

the idea of a chaotic society. I looked at misericords.

It's going right back to the medieval period

and, yet, they still have this sense of humour about things.

CROWD CHEERS

We keep on finding the tension that is Dutch identity

seen writ large in Amsterdam.

-Liberalism versus that really Dutch sense of orderliness.

-Mm.

And, to begin with, I felt that this was irreconcilable.

But, actually, gradually, I think that you need to have both.

You can't have a sense of designing for the future,

you can't have revolutionary modern art

if you don't have something to bounce off, to react against.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

And I think that sense of an openness to the outside world,

a sense of tolerance, of course,

means that they've always been looking for ways

to think about the future.

Amsterdam exploded onto the world stage in the 17th century and it was

at the vanguard of that phenomenon of urbanisation

that took over the world.

Birthplace of modern life.

That's what this place is.