Disaster has attended one after another of Schwartz’s exhibition projects over the past decade. He announces his reluctance to take on any new ones. Followed by a prophetic quotation from the 1930s, foreshadowing MAGA.

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Or rather “My four last exhibitions.” After three of the four never took place, and the one that did was curtailed to less than half of its audience, how can I take on another? Five dates for openings of the four exhibitions were planned, all of which I spent at home:

2020: June 20, October 29
2021: April 10
2022: October 19
2023: September 30

20 June and 29 October 2020

From 2010 on, and intensively starting in 2017, I worked on the large, ambitious exhibition Rembrandt’s orient: West meets east in Dutch art of the seventeenth century.

Rembrandt, Bust of an old man with turban, ca. 1627/28
Oil on panel, 26.5 x 20 cm
The Kremer Collection

The idea to hold an exhibition on this rich subject was proposed to me in January 2010 by Erik Spaans, in the Q&A following a small press presentation I gave for the Rembrandt House Museum concerning the loan to the museum, by George and Ilone Kremer, of Rembrandt’s Bust of an old man with turban. It was Erik who approached Michael Philipp, then curator of the Bucerius Forum in Hamburg, to undertake the project. It simmered until 2016, when Michael and the director of the Bucerius, Ortrud Westheider, left Hamburg for the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, still under construction, with the exhibition concept in their knapsack. In March 2017 the Barberini contracted me, with Erik’s consent, to act as guest curator. While putting a structure in place and drafting a wish list for loans, I sent mails to some befriended curators in museums with promising objects, to ask for their comments and warm them up for the loan request to come. There was real uncertainty concerning the viability of an exhibition for which first-rate gallery pieces were being requested by an as yet unopened new museum with no collection of its own. Art museums tend to think very transactionally about loan requests, asking themselves what quid pro quo the borrower has. So it was a project-changing moment when Bodo Brinkmann, chief curator of the world-class Kunstmuseum Basel, replied to my mail, still in 2017, asking enthusiastically whether his museum could come on as a second venue. This was quickly agreed on, and at a stroke our loan requests, signed by the two directors, took on great weight.

Segue to spring 2020, when the catalogue was published by Prestel Verlag in Munich.

As for the exhibition, the opening was scheduled for 20 June 2020. Then came 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the global outbreak of covid-19 a pandemic. The leading art fair in old masters, TEFAF, a super-spreading event that had been citing pussy-footing Dutch government policy as justification to open and stay open, had to be closed on the Wednesday before the planned Sunday. So were the museums of the world, leaving no possibility of launching Rembrandt’s Orient in June. Fortunately, the order of the venues could be reversed, so that Kunstmuseum Basel, with the agreement of nearly all the lenders, could take the lead, in October. The invitations went out at the beginning of the month.

Then pandemic history repeated itself. Canton Basel enforced a quarantine that would require visitors to stay locked up for ten days before being allowed out in the open. The opening was canceled. Museum visits were allowed, but only to a maximum number about a third of regular attendance, with all those restrictive conditions. I never got to see the exhibition there, except in a virtual visit, still online.

On 17 April 2021 the exhibition was opened, without fanfare, in Museum Potsdam, for a limited number of visitors with advanced booking, normal body temperature (taken at the entrance), disinfected hands, wearing medical masks, and staying a meter-and-a-half distant from each other. Quarantine regulations were still in place, so Loekie and I did not get to see the exhibition until its closing days in July. It was wonderful. While I was there the museum had me conduct an online tour. You can still take it, on YouTube.

That was the exhibition that did happen, albeit for too few visitors.

10 April 2021

The night of April 9/10, 1921, the Rembrandt self-portrait about which I wrote a book was stolen from the Weimar Museum. The evening of Tuesday, 21 July 2020 I had dinner with the director of the Weimar Museum, the director of art policy in the province of Thüringen and two Weimar museum curators. My contact with the owner of the painting would allow me, I told them, to arrange for it to be returned for a visit exactly a century after the theft. Everyone thought this was a wonderful idea, and I drafted an exhibition proposal. The opening, I thought, would also serve as the publication date for my book Rembrandt in a red beret: the vanishings and reappearances of a self-portrait. However, the director was on his way to retirement, the exhibition program was full, and covid was still kicking around, so I was not commissioned to curate the exhibition. This is the only plan I can be said to own, and I have now mounted it, provisional as it may be, for posterity. Exhibition plan for Weimar

19 October 2022

In June 2018 I and Mirjam Knotter of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam were contracted to curate the exhibition Rembrandt seen through Jewish eyes for the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. Working with the excellent staff of that museum, especially Liya Chechik, we put together a full-scale presentation, bringing in loans from well-wishing private collectors and museums from many countries. After one postponement, the opening was scheduled for 19 October 2022. On her first visit abroad after the covid restrictions, Liya lodged with us on 23/24 February 2022. During the night, she looked at her smartphone and saw to her everlasting horror that the president of her country had taken a step that, aside from its tragic destruction of human life, removed Russia from the international world of culture for the foreseeable future. We can only thank our stars that the exhibition was not in Moscow when this happened. Part of the project was salvaged thanks to a trick that I had picked up when in 2015-16 I wrote an essay for the catalogue of a Jheronimus Bosch exhibition in the Bucerius Forum. To assure prompt delivery of copy for the catalogue, the Forum invited the writers to Hamburg a year in advance of the opening to deliver paid talks on their subject. They then had a month to convert the lecture text into a publishable manuscript. For Moscow, we opted for online lectures, and were a little late. But from 24 January to 14 February 2022, every Monday three lectures by twelve speakers were streamed and recorded. See the program and links to its recordings on YouTube at “Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes: The Web Conference.”

The texts were published in book form by Amsterdam University Press in December 2023, and can be downloaded for free on Open Source. My draft for the Russian-language catalogue is gathering dust on a shelf in Moscow.

30 September 2023

Once more, after a postponement, a new opening date was penciled in for an exhibition of which I was co-guest curator, with Marten Jan Bok, my partner in all things concerning Pieter Saenredam. This was an elaboration on a newly surfaced painting by him of his birth house in the village of Assendelft, adjoining the town hall where his uncle was sheriff and the church where a cousin was minister. See Pieter Saenredam comes home again. Our plan was to show all the paintings, drawings and prints by Saenredam and his father having to do with the town. The Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, which lies twenty kilometers from Assendelft, commissioned us in October 2019 to curate the show, first for an opening in 2022, then on 30 September 2023. As 2023 came in the offing, the museum remembered that that year was the 450^th anniversary of the Relief of Alkmaar, giving rise to the imperishable cry “The Victory [over the Spanish in the Eighty Years War] Began in Alkmaar.” Of course the entire premises had to be rededicated to this commemoration, so Marten Jan and I were paid off with half of our honorarium, on condition that if we brought the exhibition anywhere else, the new venue would have to reimburse Alkmaar for whatever costs it had disbursed (which couldn’t have been much, except for our fees).

Which is to say that accepting the guest curatorship for an exhibition is a long-term commitment that runs through time spans concealing unpredictable threats of all kinds that are far beyond your own control. I therefore choose henceforth to put my efforts into projects over which I do have control, like the Schwartzlist.

Not to end all that sourly, let me show myself, in a photo by Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times, of a one-painting exhibition I curated, from 29 November 2022 to 29 January 2023, at the Escher in het Paleis Museum in The Hague. It was the first museum display of the Rembrandt self-portrait since 28 February 1967, and I had brought it back to where it hung before it went to Weimar (take that, Weimar), the former town palace of Prince Hendrik van Oranje-Nassau. The lovely opening, on 28 November 2022, was also the launching party for my book, with the owner in attendance. This is the kind of satisfying event, a few hours celebrating years of work, that I will now have to forego.

© Gary Schwartz, 2024. Published on the Schwartzlist on 30 December 2024.

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Speaking of things under control – a mishap in the course of the year has robbed me of the group mailing addresses for the New Years card Loekie and I have been sending off during the past years. The repairman who might be able to retrieve them is on holiday for another week, so at best we will be sending off a belated greeting.

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A bonus column: Schwartzlist 6: Cheese, cheerfulness…

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An echo we’d rather not hear. Writing in 1938, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was looking at an unimaginable tragedy in the making. No one wants to think that we are facing anything like the Second World War and the Shoah. But I cannot look away from the nearly one-on-one match between Huizinga’s characterization of Naziism and Fascism, which he does not name by name, and MAGA. In his Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture, Huizinga elaborated on a term he had first applied in 1936 to what he saw as the degraded social-political developments of the time:

Puerilism, as being the most appropriate appellation for that blend of adolescence and barbarity which has been rampant all over the world for the last two or three decades. It would seem as if the mentality and conduct of the adolescent now reigned supreme over large areas of civilized life which had formerly been the province of responsible adults. The habits I have in mind are, in themselves, as old as the world; the difference lies in the place they now occupy in our civilization and the brutality with which they manifest themselves. Of these habits that of gregariousness is perhaps the strongest and most alarming. It results in puerilism of the lowest order: yells and other signs of greeting, the wearing of badges and sundry items of political haberdashery, walking in marching order or at a special place and the whole rigmarole of collective voodoo and mumbo-jumbo. Closely akin to this, if at a slightly deeper psychological level, is the insatiable thirst for trivial recreation and crude sensationalism, the delight in mass-meetings, mass-demonstrations, parades, etc. The club is a very ancient institution, but it is a disaster when whole nations turn into clubs, for these, besides promoting the precious qualities of friendship and loyalty, are also hotbeds of sectarianism, intolerance, suspicion, superciliousness and quick to defend any illusion that flatters self-love or group-consciousness. We have seen great nations losing every shred of honour, all sense of humour, the very idea of decency and fair play. This is not the place to investigate the causes, growth and extent of this world-wide bastardization of culture; the entry of half-educated masses into the international traffic of the mind, the relaxation of morals and the hypertrophy of technics undoubtedly play a large part.

Neither is this column a place to investigate those causes, hesitant as I am to second Huizinga’s disdainful suggestions. But if with “hypertrophy of technics” he was talking about nothing more than stadium-filling loudspeakers, radio and film, how much larger a part have our own “social” media played in turning half of America into a club. But aside from shock, I derive relief from the comparison, in the thought that America in 2025 is really not like Germany in 1938, and that the damage Donald Trump is going to do to the world will pale next to Hitler’s.

The 1950 English translation of (the German translation of) of Homo ludens is reproduced by the invaluable Internet Archive. The Dutch original, in the second printing of 1940, is online at the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren.

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