Joseph Mendes da Costa, “Geschiewes”

The statue depicts a scene from Amsterdam’s Jewish folk life. A female is seen admiring a child that another woman is carrying in her arms. These three figures have been bound together by the sculptor to form a lively but close-knit group, in which the three persons merge into a formal triad.

Tenderness

“Geschiewes”, the title of the group of statues, is a word from the Amsterdam Jewish vernacular and means something similar to “sweetheart”. The older woman on the right side of the group is seen bending over to caress the baby, which another woman is carrying in her arms. This gesture of inclination, of bending over, expresses complete tenderness which is the real theme of the group. The three heads, which form the crown of the group, convey this feeling even more clearly, forming a unity and connecting the three figures in a touching way. The eldest woman and child, with their heads wrapped in a cap, are seen in profile. The mother’s head in the middle binds the shapes together.

The artist used several more ways to form the group into a whole. For example, the older woman’s jacket and the child’s dress have the same dotted pattern, so that the two figures grow towards each other optically. This creates a point of focus in this group, as the artist intended: the rapprochement between old and young. The tenderness of gesture and feeling is typical of Mendes’ work from his time of artistic transition. He undoubtedly found that inspiration in the neighborhood with which he was so familiar.

Joseph Mendes da Costa

Joseph Mendes da Costa was born in 1863 as the son of a tombstone carver. He lived on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht near the Manegestraat and learned the trade in his father’s workshop. As a boy of sixteen he attended the Quellinusschool. In 1885, the year of the first publication of De Nieuwe Gids, young visual artists also joined together into a group; the Labor et Ars Association (LEA), which included Zijl, Dijsselhof, Nieuwenhuis and Zwollo amongst its members, was the center of this friendly contact.

At the heart of the change these artists advocated was the belief that sculpture and its sister arts had always lived in connection with architecture and therefore had flourished, showing that this ideal of a “community art” could be realized today. This new insight was marked in contrast to the then accepted sculpture of Rodin and his kindred spirits, in which the artists tried to exploit the possibilities of a free-standing image to the utmost with all its play of light and surface treatments.

Mendes’ art was at the beginning of the new period in the Netherlands, as as were the work of Joris Minne in Belgium and Aristide Maillol in France. During his studies, Mendes leaned towards a style similar to Impressionism, a style which was mainly represented in the Netherlands by the early work of Lambertus Zijl. From this, at the turn of the century he created his first major works in an architectural context: two stepped gables in front of an office building in Surabaya, for which the architect HP Berlage awarded him the assignment.

Geschiewes

In his book The Art of Mendes da Costa, Louk Tilanus mentions seven examples of “Geschiewes”. The one shown here comes directly from a private collector who at the time acquired the figurine directly from one of the descendants of Mendes da Costa. It is the first time that this figurine is on the market. Beyond these, there are three others which are privately owned. The rest are part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Kröller-Muller Otterlo, the Joods Historisch Museum, the Amsterdam Museum, and the Groningsmuseum.