If you've ever taken a stroll through Leiden, an adorable and ancient city in the Netherlands about 30 minutes by train south of Schiphol Airport; you may have seen poems and quotations like this one painted on the houses in the alleys and side streets.
We'll have to take a bit of a detour to get to the origins of this initiative.
Remember the Dutch art movement called "de Stijl" of Piet Mondrian fame? It was founded in 1917 by a number of artists and architects on the principle of "neo-plasticism"; best explained by Mondrian as "this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour". De Stijl was also the name of a journal – published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, poet and critic Theo van Doesburg – that propagated the group's theories.
Now we return to our main course.
1992 was the 75 year anniversary of the magazine "De Stijl", and to honour that, artist Ben Walenkamp suggested to showcase some of van Doesburg's poems publicly on local walls. This initiative expanded through collaboration with his friend and painter Jan-Willem Bruins as project "Dicht bij de Muur" and the foundation of the organization "Tegen-Beeld", and now at least 110 murals in some 30 languages.
P.S. The Dutch are very very fond of word play, and "Tegen-Beeld" literally means "Counter-Image" and would be best translated as "counter-argument". "Dicht bij de Muur" would literally mean "close to the wall" but 'dicht' is also short for 'gedicht' meaning poem. Oh, those Dutch.
Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_poems_in_Leiden
https://tegen-beeld.nl/over-stichting-tegen-beeld
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