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.
Schwartzlist columns
6 Cheerfulness, Cheese …
A 1996 column in which I bent too far backward to do justice to the critics of an art historian for whom my respect knows no bounds, Eddy de Jongh. One unfair, wise-guy comment has been excised.
432 Christmas meshugaas in the movies
Watching Hollywood movies on tv has turned into a stalking expedition for Schwartz. Having discovered a while ago that most movies contain gratuitous allusions to Christmas, he has been calling Bingo!, hitting pause and taking pictures of the frames where Christmas shows its spots.
4 Jan Steen’s sister Duifje Havicksdr
Jan Steen straddled too many fences for his own good. Making critics uncertain about where they stand is probably never a good idea. His reputation paid the price, but the fee is fortunately being reimbursed.
3 Cupid’s testes
In 1996 Schwartz waxed skeptical about the attribution of a sculpture to Michelangelo. Followed twenty-eight years later by an apology to the attributor.
1 Vermeer’s frenzy
Something about Johannes Vermeer you would rather not know, but now will never forget.
2 The tale of the bear that turned into a bull
Delving into the sunken resources of the Schwartzlist, a column on the undying marriage of the market and modern art (next year is the 110th anniversary), followed by a cry of pain.
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431 The transparent connoisseur 9: Keeping an open mind
Gary Schwartz, with Edward Rosser
From a mail of 1 September 2024 from Otto Naumann: “The safest position as a connoisseur is that of a Naysayer. In this position, one doesn’t have to explain oneself, only say something like ‘I know this artist, and this object is not by him.’ But to say that an item can be attributed to a particular artist is quite another proposal, one that needs a lot of explanation.” A case in point. (Not the one Otto was writing about.)
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430 Isaac van Ostade and me
For a general book on Dutch seventeenth-century painting, yesterday I wrote a text on the winter landscape, represented by a painting by Isaac van Ostade in the National Gallery, London. I’m afraid it reads more like a column than part of a survey. It may not make its way into the book, but I don’t want it to vanish, so I have expanded it into … a column.
429 How to convert indigenous Formosans to Calvinism
A buildup for a lecture that I gave online for the National Museum of Taiwan History, now on YouTube. It’s about an extraordinary painting of a Dutch minister who in the 1630s and ‘40s converted thousands of Formosans to the true Christian faith. The painting shows 121 men and boys and 110 women, children and infants in the thrall of the teachings and ruthless ministrations of Robertus Junius.
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