Dutch fields

Hollandse Velden (Dutch Fields), Hans Van Der Meer’s collection of photographs of Dutch football, includes several poignant landscapes. The photographs are discussed in David Winner’s engaging book about the ‘neurotic genius of Dutch football’, Brilliant Orange, in which he links the spatial awareness of Dutch teams to national creativity in land use and landscape. For example, with the birth of Total Football in the late sixties: ‘just as Cornelis Lely in the nineteenth century conceived and executed the idea of creating giant new polders and altering the physical dimensions of Holland by dyke-building and exploiting the new technology of steam, so Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff exploited the new breed of players to change the dimensions of the football field.’

In seeking connections between the spatial awareness of footballers and artists, Winner talks to Rudi Fuchs, then director of the Stedelijk Modern Art Museum in Amsterdam. Fuchs argues that the Dutch have a natural instinct for measuring distance and selecting details – something that can be seen in their landscape painting and football. He says “there is a Dutch way of seeing space, the landscape. Cruyff sees in that Dutch way and he is admired for his innate understanding of the geometry and order of the pitch.”

Of course this may seem rather far-fetched, particularly given the Dutch team’s recent exit from the World Cup in an ill-tempered game that demonstrated little Dutch artistry (in Brilliant Orange Rudi Fuchs likened Marco Van Basten to Jan Vermeer – but that was Van Basten as a player, not a coach). Nevertheless this kind of argument reminds me of the way Michael Baxandall, for example, has sought to explain the art of Piero della Francesco in relation to the relatively sophisticated understanding of volume among the people of fifteenth century Florence.

In his career as director of the Stedelijk Rudi Fuchs was known for making interesting juxtapositions (as this article explains), so was no doubt open to the idea of considering Cruyff alongside other Dutch artists. Fuchs is also, incidentally, the author of a book about Richard Long, an artist whose straight-line approach I am tempted to compare to some of England’s “route one” play when they seem too nervous to pass the ball around and use space creatively.