“We would like to continue with it,” said Van Rossem. “The producer too. The dates are planned, the budget is there. The first episode had just aired. The will is there, and I believe in the authorities too. But you know how consultation works in Hilversum. To say that this is a special process is an understatement. We had to wait more than 2.5 years for the decision to make the program at all.” The form of the program should be slightly adjusted, Maarten agrees. “If we continue it in the same form, people will certainly say: what a pity that Sis is no longer with us. And rightly so.”
The plan now is to do something different with paintings. “That was the only point where we sometimes had a fight with each other,” Van Rossem told presenter Özcan Akyol. “My sister was an art historian. And so she was influenced by the misconceptions that exist in art history about what are beautiful paintings and what are not. Art historians don’t know beautiful paintings, they only know interesting paintings.” Van Rossem calls this view a puppet show.
In the candid conversation, the historian called the influence of his sister’s death “a shed. It’s a bit like seeing a cyclist fall and slide a long way down the road. It looks awful and it sure hurts a lot. But they almost always get back on their bike afterwards: they put a bandage around it and they keep going.”