Taking thankful advantage of an opportunity to honor an old and beloved friend, the brilliant David Freedberg, I wrote an essay on one of the subjects David has claimed as his own, emotion in art. It is based on my work for the exhibition Emotions: pain and pleasure in Dutch painting of the Golden Age, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, and the aftermaths of that show.
Memoirs and tributes
373 Putting ourselves and Rembrandt to the test
For Peter Hecht, who following his retirement from a celebrated professorship in art history at Utrecht University, entered the fray of interpreters of Rembrandt’s notoriously treacherous Leiden History Painting. Schwartz reviews the state of the question, especially with regard to the emotions of three of the figures, and reintroduces into the discussion a neglected piece of pertinent evidence.
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64 The bizarre birth of a genre
A memorial installment. The following column, mailed to subscribers in October 1998, appeared in Loekie Schwartz’s Dutch translation in Het Financieele Dagblad in the issue dated 31 October & 2 November 1998. I am putting it online now in tribute to two exceptional colleagues who both died this week. Hessel Miedema was a fellow art historian and Joop van Coevorden a fellow publisher, for both of whom I have measureless respect. Together, they raised to a new level the study of the greatest single book on early Dutch art, Karel van Mander’s Lives. When I wrote “Indeed, one can no longer read van Mander at all without Miedema, whose exhaustive commentary is one of the great achievements of present-day art history,” I should have said in so many words that the appearance of that commentary was due to the entrepreneurship, the good taste and dedication above and beyond the call of normal duty of Joop van Coevorden, in his DAVACO press. Their publication was financed in part by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and Stichting Charema.
370 Dutch research naches
Schwartz muses on the Dutch research libraries he loves to visit, reminiscing about the past and worrying about the future.
365 Life as we know it
For seventy years, Schwartz has been aware that he, with the rest of humanity, is in grave danger of being wiped out. He takes account of the record and reveals his solution to the most immediate threat.
363 Saenredam and Huygens; Rubens and Rembrandt
“Saenredam, Huygens and the Utrecht bull” was Gary Schwartz’s first publication as an art historian. He looks back on how it came into being and what it meant in his life. Schwartz would like to think of the Dutch- and Flemish-speaking low countries as one culture, but circumstances keep intruding on this ideal image. Circumstances such as the lives and posterities of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn.
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My reflection in Clio’s mirror
Schwartz looks back on his beginnings as an art historian. Grad student blues and release through new loves.
362 Work for a grown man
Mutual relations among Rembrandt specialists are not always as cordial as they might be. It takes understanding and diplomacy to stay on good terms with everyone in the field. In that I have not been universally successful. One colleague with whom I have always got on well, differences not aside but included, is Christopher Brown. This is more to his credit than to mine. But I admire him for much more than that. Continue reading “362 Work for a grown man”
360 Kitaj lets it all hang out
A German art critic-editor and a German publisher have brought out one of the main ego documents of twentieth-century art in England and the US. Schwartz’s personal comments on and associations evoked by R.B. Kitaj’s outrageous Confessions of an old Jewish painter.
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355 Embassy of the Free Mind
What could be a greater honor than to be appointed Ambassador of the Free Mind? That title was bestowed on Schwartz by unrivalled champions of the free mind, the Ritman family of Amsterdam.