Renovated Rijks

The Rijsksmuseum in Amsterdam recently completed a ten year renovation, which cost almost half a billion dollars.  The results are both spectacular and odd.  Every surface has been lovingly and resplendently restored or reinvented.  A grand, glass-enclosed entrance atrium has been added, and every painting, with the exception of Rembrandt's Night Watch has been relocated.  The museum presents a sweeping history of Dutch art, and the building itself has become one of the central attractions; it stands up to the masterpieces in the collection, but doesn't compete with them.  In some ways, however, the new organization is odd.  Works by Rembrandt appear in different rooms, instead of united, chronology is broken, decorative arts are intermingled with paintings, and older foreign works --including paintings from the Italian Renaissance-- are jammed haphazardly in a dark lower gallery.  The later decision seems woefully editorial: the Renaissance was a gloomy time compared to the golden Dutch baroque, which is the central focus of the collection.

One interesting and welcome consequence of this new organization is that much of the museum now feels like a giant cabinet of curiosities.  Classic paintings are juxtaposed with curios (like the skull above), raising questions about what counts as art.  Museums, including this one, are recent inventions (the Rijksmuseum dates to the 1880s), and they often impose modern standards about what art media deserve our esteem.  The collection interrogates those standards and serves as a corrective.

The most conventional space is the main upper gallery, which contains greatest hits by famous Dutch painters.  The Night Watch--a highly overrated work--is the centerpiece (above), which lies as the end of wide corridor a paintings, sucking in tourists who have been told by guidebooks to pay their respects.  En route, we find exceptional paintings by the usual suspects, Hals, Pieter de Hooch, and Vermeer (below).  My favorite is St. Odulphus Church by Saenredam (top), a master of interiors, which can be seen as formalist abstraction.

The selections for this central gallery are not always easy to understand.  It's not surprising that they included the spectacular and crowd-pleasing Vermeer, on the right, but the equally wonderful Mestu, showing a woman with a plague-ridden son (right), is quarantined to a missable outer gallery.

There are also some wonderful Rembrandt's in quarantine, including the fascinating early painting of musicians above.  We can see that the juvenile Rembrandt had a broader palette and an almost mannerist approach to anatomy.  One wonders why the Rembrandt collection is divided across distant rooms rather than presented together for easy comparison.

There are other odd divisions as well.  The superb still-life, above, by Floris van Dyck, is in the main central gallery, but equally wonderful still life paintings can be found in other parts of the museum, rather than treating viewers to a cohesive presentation of the genre.

The outer galleries, as noted, are not restricted to paintings.  Mixed in, visitors will find furniture, decorative works cast in metal, and sculptures in various media, including the three wooden examples, reproduced here (a man with rats, a shrieking baby with an insect on its head, and a sporting dog).  The collection also contains some interesting polychrome sculptures, such as the handsome Baroque and Renaissance upper-body images reproduced below.

Among the more appealing oddities in the collection are two antique doll houses, with several dozen exquisitely appointed rooms.  Here is an example from each:

The paintings in the collection include some exciting surprises.  For me, the two unexpected highlights were a multi-panel painting by Otto van Veen and a new acquisition by Jan Mostaert.  Van Veen was a Flemish painter who influenced Rubens, but the miniature scale and gentle posture of his figures contrast with Rubens' comic-book dynamism.  Van Veen plays with the picture plane, and most panels show figures clustered at various depths.  He also contrast romance and violence.  In the first example below, we see multiple couples gently embracing, with vibrant colors and a geometric mis-en-scene.  In the second example, we see a great battle.  Notice how the slouching figures in the foreground of each panel echo each other.  The painting cycle celebrates the Batavians, an early Dutch people who made successful attacks against Rome -- they are romanticized here, without concealing the brutality of their assaults.

The newly acquired Mostaert painting was, perhaps, my favorite in the whole museum.  It is described as a landscape with an episdode from the conquest of North America.  Indeed, it is reputed to be the earliest fanciful painting (form the mid-16th century), depicting European interactions with indigenous people in the New World.  Unlike many subsequent works, which show friendly encounters, this picture seems to show something horrific.  A long row of naked figures prepare to encounter armed invaders, with the implication that these innocent and ill-prepared people will soon be conquered.  The impending battle is set against a magical background with rolling hills, and strange rock formations.  Paradise will soon be lost.

The Rijksmusem contains many other treasures.  Moving into modern times, we find a superb Van Gogh self portrait and collection of works by COBRA artist Karel Appel.  The highlights, however, are the older works.  What stuck me, and what I've tried to convey here, is that the most interesting pieces are oddities: works by anonymous artists, lesser works by famous masters, or works by second-tier artists who deserve to be better known.  Pride of place is given to familiar masterpieces, but a careful tour of the museum's many branching chambers rewards visitors with wonderful works that fall far outside the canon.  I end with one more -- a Renaissance etching by an unknown master that would make expressionists, surrealists, and other masters of modernism green with envy.

Fine Specimens

Art enthusiasts regularly seek out art museums when traveling.  For the rest of the world, the word "museum" has a broader meaning, which includes military and maritime collections, waxworks, natural history, historic houses, various technologies, and, of course, medicine and science.  Medical museuns can be of special interests to fans of fine art because the objects  they display often relate to long-time interests of artists, such as human anatomy.  They also tend to recall a time when artworks and medical items were intermingled, as in the cabinets of curiosities of old.  There are some fascinating medical collections around the world, including La Specula in Florence, the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, the  Museum of the History of Medicine in Paris, and the Semelweis Museum in Budapest.  If you are attracted to any of these, you might want to make a stop in Leiden to see the Boerhaave Museum.

Officially a museum of both science and medicine, the Boerhaave collections includes interesting and important artifacts pertaining to chemistry and astronomy.  But, for me, the medical collection was  most exciting.  Consider the macabre items collected by the Albinus brothers in the 18th century, which includes unusual skulls, a child's arm in formaldehyde, fish skins, a fetal elephant displayed next to a human fetus for size comparison.

Of equal interest are the medical models of Louis Auzoux, and 19th century anatomist who innovated techniques for making extremely fine medical models out of papier-mâché.  This was an advance over wax models, which were fragile and more expensive to produce.  The paper models include insects, snails, and humans, including an exquisite sequence showing fetal development, and models depicting the reproductive systems of both men and women.

The museum is named for Herman Boerhaave, a contemporary of Spinoza, who is regarded as the father of the modern academic hospital, and his students included Linneaus and Voltaire.  Appropriately, there it contains a surgical theater, which is occasionally put to use for animal dissections, open to the public--a kind of performance art.  The museum also hosts innovative exhibitions, which integrate medical artifacts and art.  On my recent video, there was an outstanding show on body image that documented obsessions with weight, both past and present.  The show includes works by Vanessa Beecroft, who does group photos of naked models who have lost their individual identity, Ivonne Thein, who alters photographs to make models look shockingly anorexic, and Kurt Stalhaert, who transforms children into muscular monstrosities.  The inclusion of contemporary art was welcome, but hardly necessary, for making the Boerhaave a worthwhile stop.

Reflections on Vermeer

Vermeer is justifiably heralded as one of greatest painters in the Western canon.  While visiting his hometown of Delft, I decided to stop in on the Vermeer Centrum, a museum located on the site of his workshop.  The museum owns no paintings, but they exhibit life-size reproductions of all 32 known works in chronological order, as well as some limited information on the artist's techniques.

Vermeer is known for a number of things: his elegant lighting, his preoccupation with music, his use of pairings within paintings, his repoussoir or recessing of figures deep into the picture plane, and his softly rendered women who often stare back at viewers hauntingly (above). 

Vermeer is also known for his unprecedented naturalism.  He achieved this by using a camera obscura (above).  Thus, his paintings are joust reflections of life; they are paintings of reflections. 

It is not surprising, then, that reflection is a theme in the Artist's work.  The detail at the start of this post is the city of Delft, reflected in the water.  In the one above, we see a music lesson; the student's back faces the viewer, but her face is revealed in a reflection from above.  Vanity is theme in the detail below.  A woman with a pearl admires herself in the mirror.  We can't see the reflect she sees, but we admire the painting, which also reflects her.  It is the inverse of the music lesson, where we see the reflection and not the reflected.

In a third example, we see both reflected and reflection.  A woman reads a letter, while standing by a window.  Letters and windows are pervasive themes in Vermeer's work.  Letters express interiority: we are invited to wonder what she is reading, thinking, and feeling.  Windows, in contrast, hint at an exterior world that we almost never see in these paintings.   Vermeer also makes extensive use of maps hung on walls, which hint at the fact that Delft was the home base of the Dutch East India company, and also contrast dramatically with the intimacy of these works.  Like windows, maps both refer to the external world and defer it--the ultimate repoussoir.

Windows are also, of course, a metaphor for art. And this brings us back to reflections.  Like Valazquez in Las Meninas, Vermeer makes paintings about painting.  They are voyeuristic, they are illusionistic, and they experiment with flattening, texture, and light.  Vermeer's portraits of figures staring out at the viewer invert the viewing relationship, and turn paintings into mirrors.  Except, in art, it is not always easy to recognize our own reflection.

Vermeer's most direct painting about painting shows the artist creating a portrait (above).  The face of the sitter does not yet appear on the artist's canvas, and the artist's face is also hidden, anticipating Vermeer's own obscurity.  The secret joke of this work is that the woman has not yet been painted, but she has also already been painted.  The painting within the painting is unfinished, but the painting itself is finished.  The sitter also closes her eyes, unlike so many of Vermeer's women, refusing to view the viewer, or the painter who is also viewing her.  So in this painting about being viewed, the viewing in concealed from view.  It is noteworthy as well that the sitter holds a book (another form or representation) and an instrument (a non-representational mode of expression), as if to locate painting as one art among many.  This painting can be read as a comment on painting as a form of reflection.  Painting reflects reality, but it never captures it.  Even this highly mimetic work, like any image, leaves out far more than in includes.  It is finished, but of necessity incomplete.  We are thus reminded that every painting and reflection is a case of repoussoir.  Such images appear to bring us closer to what they represent, but they do not.  Vermeer's naturalism coyly asserts that images are not nature.  He exemplifies naturalism while undermining it.