The grand prize winner in our hotel essay contest is a story about Pillows Maurits at the Park in Amsterdam. Written by Anna von Kuhn, it’s called “The Picasso Nobody Photographs”.
Featured hotel: Pillows Maurits at the Park
Written by Anna von Kuhn
Fitz’s Bar, 11pm on a Tuesday. In the low light of this speakeasy-style cocktail bar, two guests sit beneath a Picasso (Tête de Femme: Dora Maar, 1943) debating another round. Single malts on the table, her elbow rests inches from the frame. Above them, Dora’s fractured face stares out with the eyes Picasso gave her during the Spanish Civil War, when she became his muse for the Weeping Woman series. They never look up.
It isn’t a reproduction. The night before opening, owner Alex Mulder, who grew up in Amsterdam-East, drove home to Belgium because he realized the bar needed this one painting. He brought it back and hung it himself at Pillows Maurits at the Park. No placard, no rope, no museum energy.
Tomorrow morning, Instagram will flood with pictures of the Rijksmuseum’s line. People waiting hours to see Vermeer’s Milkmaid, not always because they want to, but because they’ve seen it online and need proof they came. The same painting from school art class, now a checkpoint.
Meanwhile, here tonight, equally rare art is ignored simply because it’s available.
Mulder wants people to see his collection: the Picasso in the bar, the Matisse aquatint in the Grand Suite, the Klimt sketches in The Living. When someone mentions the Picasso, the usual response is disbelief. “A real one?” Once they find out it is, some rush back to photograph it. Others shrug and finish their drinks. The art stays the same. What changes is the framing.
The Klimt drawings might say more. They’re not minor works, but in a lounge they’re wallpaper. Dozens sit beneath them without looking up.
Then there are the exceptions. Late Thursday, one guest stands alone in The Living, drink in hand, just looking at the Klimt. Not rushing a selfie, not jostling through crowds, but taking seven unhurried minutes. She leans in. Steps back. Tilts her head at the minimal lines Klimt used to suggest an entire woman. No one’s timing her visit.
This is what Mulder gambled on: that removing ceremony might let people actually see.
The guest who stops mid-sentence to check if it’s real. The woman who quietly asks if that’s really a Matisse in her suite. They recognize something without anyone telling them to.
Most guests hit the Rijksmuseum, dutifully posting proof. The same people walk past a Picasso every evening unnoticed. Maybe that’s fine. The art doesn’t care who’s watching. People are taught that art matters more with museum lighting and crowds. Mulder stripped that away. Does it make the art more visible, or easier to ignore?
Back at Fitz’s, the couple from earlier has decided on one more round. They’re laughing, leaning into each other, still inches from the Picasso. Dora Maar watches from the wall, patient as she’s been for eighty years. At least here, she’s in good company. The cocktails are excellent, and occasionally, someone looks up.
Read all of the award-winning stories in our hotel essay contest.
