In 1971 the teenage Peter Klashorst, together with a childhood friend, rode his motorized bicycle into the center of Amsterdam from nearby Haarlem, where he grew up. Telling his parents that he would stay with a cousin, Klashorst instead went straight to the Vondelpark, the central park of Amsterdam that had become a hippie campground in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The two teens wanted to get a taste of the counterculture life by sleeping out in the park among the young people who had flocked there from all over the world. Thanks to the Provo movement of the 1960s, Amsterdam had earned a reputation for liberalism and tolerance, as a center for youthful playfulness and hedonism. The romanticism of the time left its mark on the next generation; the punk era kept the hedonistic playfulness while discarding much of the idealism of their predecessors. Klashorst, who dubbed himself a “New Dutch Master”, would go on to become one of the most infamous celebrity artists of the Netherlands. He was part of the Nieuwe Wilden painters (“new wild,” after the German Neue Wilden), a short-lived neo-expressionist movement in the Netherlands from approximately 1980 to 1983.