Nytimes Vidoe Art Transforming Still Life Rob and Nick Carter
Art Review
That Head Turner's Dorsum, With an Old-Schoolhouse Posse
Afterwards almost 30 years, she'due south back in town, that gal with the turban, the Christmas-bulb precious stone, and the over-the-shoulder, did-you-say-something glance. Johannes Vermeer'south "Daughter With a Pearl Earring" last visited New York in 1984, and much has happened since to brighten her allure.
In the 1990s, fine art conservators cleaned her up and smoothed out cracks that had come up to mar her flawless peel, leaving her looking fresh-minted. More than important, subsequently existence the bailiwick of a hot novel, a tony picture show and, well-nigh recently, a stage play, she's now a media sensation, one of the most famous faces in Western fine art.
So she's certain to pull a crowd when she goes on view, starting on Tuesday, at the Frick Collection every bit role of a traveling loan prove, "Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis." Anticipating a crush, the Frick has placed her alone in its Oval Room. But as the exhibition title implies, she comes from her habitation in The Hague with celebrity company, fourteen other fabulous pictures, all installed in an adjoining gallery. Taken together, they are a gold-standard remnant of the Dutch Golden Age.
And I do hateful a remnant. Historians estimate that during the 17th century, the Northern Netherlands turned out in excess of 5 one thousand thousand paintings, of which a tiny fraction — betwixt ane and 10 percent — survive. And this heavy production was in function due to the beingness of a new art-hungry audience.
Paradigm 
In 1648, afterward a protracted war of rebellion, the Dutch Republic was finally costless of Castilian rule, which meant information technology was free of monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. This might accept posed a financial crisis for art. But a different clientele had developed: a population of merchants and burghers, dedicated venture capitalists who had scads of discretionary cash and were looking for somewhere classy to park it. Art was the place.
And information technology was a new kind of art, the opposite of king size, scaled to conservative parlors. No longer faith jump, it had secular subjects: portraits, landscapes, however lifes, domestic scenes. Even religious paintings were religious in a inverse way. No more rosy celestial fantasies; cherubs and Calvin didn't mix. Heaven looked like world, and the other manner around. A fall of light on a face up, a spill of flowers in a vase, embroidery thick on a gown were acceptable miracles in fine art.
There are many in the paintings that the Mauritshuis has sent out on the route while its own quarters in The Hague are under expansion. New York is the terminal stop on a three-city American tour that included San Francisco and Atlanta. And although the Frick show, organized by Margaret Iacono, is smaller than that seen elsewhere, the selection is still beyond choice.
Fifty-fifty in a metropolis as rich with Rembrandts equally New York, the 4 Mauritshuis examples are worth lining up for, peculiarly for two narrative pictures that illustrate his Shakespearean gifts as a dramatist.
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The small picture called "Simeon'southward Song of Praise," dating from 1631, earlier he had left his native Leiden for Amsterdam, depicts an episode from the Gospel of Luke. An sometime priest named Simeon had been bodacious by God that he would not die earlier seeing the Messiah. In the flick, this moment has come. Simeon holds the infant Jesus in his arms and howls out a hymn of cheers. The child'due south parents and other worshipers in the temple look on, baffled.
But some other anile devotee, the prophetess named Anna, understands what'southward happening. Night robed, her face shadowed, she looms over Simeon like Death finally arrived.
A second biblical painting, titled "Susanna," washed five years later, is psychologically more than troubling. Taken from the Volume of Daniel, Rembrandt depicts the story of the sexual harassment of a immature woman past older men, community elders, who spy on her equally she bathes and publicly accuse her of infidelity later she rejects their advances.
Susanna'southward virtue will eventually win the day, though Rembrandt doesn't tell us and so. He shows her at the instant she first senses that she is being watched. Terrified, she awkwardly, cocky-protectively, clutches a towel to her nude body. She's an paradigm of stricken innocence. We see it in news photos every day.
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The ii other Rembrandts are half-length male figures. One, a middle-anile keen in flouncy beret, is an instance of a Dutch genre known as a "tronie," a painting of an exotic grapheme rather than a specific private. ("Girl With a Pearl Earring" is thought to fall into this category.) The second picture, of an old homo, is clearly a portrait. In that location'south zilch the least exotic about his slumped shoulders and blotchy confront, though the slash-and-dab brushwork is ahead of its time. We're looking at Manet in the making here, as nosotros are in the Frick'south bang-up Rembrandt late self-portrait, which hangs in a nearby room along with the collection's 3 excellent Vermeers.
By the 17th century, portraiture, in one case a trophy fine art, was considered a low-prestige genre; Rembrandt's former man suggests why. However, it could be made to rise to grandeur, as in the Frans Hals portraits of the beer brewer Jacob Olycan and his wife Aletta Hanemans. Dressed in their all-time — her bodice is stiff with gold thread — this Haarlem power couple looks positively regal.
Domestic scenes can also run high and low.
The figure in "The Old Lacemaker" by Nicolaes Maes is as hushed every bit a nun at her devotions, while a family party in progress in January Steen'south "Every bit the Sometime Sing, So Pipe the Young" is as raucous equally a frat-house bash. Notwithstanding lifes can read every bit mortal warnings: In a tabletop painting past Pieter Claesz a human skull seems to be devouring the moldering book information technology rests on. Or they can be celebrations of appetite: Apricots in a still life past Adriaen Coorte, glowing orange like sunsets, wait ripe, unspoilable, Edenic.
1 of the most beautiful paintings of earth, on earth, is hither: Jacob van Ruisdael's 1670s "View of Haarlem With Bleaching Grounds." With its distant view of long bolts of material spread out in fields information technology is, on ane level, an advertisement for this artist's linen-producing hometown, seen in silhouette on the horizon. Merely it's also a painting almost sky and deject-filtered light, and near the earth perfected and seen from a bird's-eye, God's-eye perspective.
A portrait of a bird, Carel Fabritius's "Goldfinch," is the evidence's rarest slice, ane of but a dozen or so surviving pictures past an artist who studied with Rembrandt, inspired Vermeer and died at 32 in a gunpowder explosion that leveled much of Delft, including his studio, in 1654. His alert petty feathered beingness perched on a feed box may well be on the verge of popular fame, thanks to its starring function in Donna Tartt's new novel, "The Goldfinch." Merely what makes it feel and then modern, and then ours, is the style it answers to a hunger for the cloth world that nosotros share with those Dutch burghers.
Fabritius gives the states no bird of paradise. He gives us the equivalent of a common New York City sparrow, but created from scratch in paint past a faultless manus and loving center, and that'southward divine enough.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/arts/design/that-head-turners-back-with-an-old-school-posse.html
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