One in so many Western works of art contains an image of a person we would call black. The phenomenon attracts relatively little attention in art history. The Menil Foundation went after it seriously, in a project now inherited by the Warburg Institute. An exhibition in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam offers a sanitized view of the black in Dutch and Flemish art. (more…)

In 1942, in fulfillment of an essay competition announced in 1936, the Teyler’s Second Society in Haarlem published the winning study on the spread of Dutch painting throughout the world: Horst Gerson, “Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts” (The diffusion and after-effect of Dutch 17th-century painting). Written in German-occupied Holland by a German immigrant of Jewish extraction, the “Ausbreitung” documents the Dutch artistic conquest of large parts of the world. The longest single section in the book are the 153 pages on “Das Deutsche Reich.”

Willem Schellinks, Baptism in Nantes, 1646 Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig Museum
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I would not go as far as my travel companion and say that I am sorry that I ever saw the exhibition. But it comes close. In December, at the Sackler Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we went to “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity.” To shock and awe you unprepared, here is an impression of what greeted us.

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Israeli-Dutch Artist Joseph Semah’s Full Moon Project

Five years ago next month I ran into a buddy of mine at Café Luxembourg in Amsterdam. The Israeli-Dutch artist Joseph Semah and I had been through challenging times together. In 2001 he had challenged me to come up with an adjunct to his performance Full Moon II on Lucien den Arend’s Saenredam Island in the town of Barendrecht. The project was part of the program for Rotterdam as cultural capital of Europe. Semah and Felix Villanueva staged a performance on land, water and sky giving musical and physical form to the bond between the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem. While Semah chanted the Song of Songs on the shore, bridal couples swam, sunk and screwed their way to and on the island. Preceding which, on that memorable June 7th, I gave a rather personal lecture, for hundreds of Barendrechters, a town known for its strict Calvinism, on the kabbalistic meaning of the full moon. (more…)

The Rijksmuseum has published the first volume in a series of scholarly catalogues of its collection of Dutch paintings of the 17th century. The two books, one of text and comparative illustrations, the other of color plates, are not only a model of collection catalogues, they are also an unguarded kaleidoscopic self-portrait of Dutch society in the early years of the Republic.

Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Volume 1
A pair of art catalogues worthy of the artists and the times they illuminate (more…)

Is there or is there not such a thing as “the Dutchman?” My fellow immigrant Princess Maxima thinks there is not, but since she dared express that opinion in public last September, she has been subjected to an ongoing barrage of reprimands. Indeed, since the brief era of Pim Fortuyn, public discourse has been dominated by the love-it-or-leave it school of Dutchness. Anyone who does not know what the “it” is that should be loved, is a candidate for reschooling if not expulsion from the country.

Princess Maxima doesn’t think there is such a thing as “the Dutchman”

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On October 26th an unusual painting was sold at a country auction house in the Cotswolds, Moore Allen & Innocent. The subject looks for all the world like a fanciful self-portrait of the young Rembrandt, a laugh on his face and a gorget of the kind he never had to wear in real life around his neck. The painting, in oil on copper, is totally unknown in the literature on the master.

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