One of Europe’s greatest historical print collections is turned into an exhibition hall.
Continue reading “The Albertina two-thirds out of commission”
Schwartzlist columns
154 The transparent connoisseur 1: Free advice to the Van Gogh Museum
The Van Gogh Museum did not take kindly to my column of January 19th (“The saga of Bouwe Jans”). The museum feels that I criticized it unfairly for the way it handled a request for an expert opinion on the authorship of a possible van Gogh painting. I promised the museum, by way of response, to elaborate on the recommendations in my piece. I do this in print because my remarks were not intended only for the Van Gogh Museum – which I am sure behaved in all good faith in this matter – but for any body, museum or not, that proffers expert opinions on sensitive subjects to the public. Continue reading “154 The transparent connoisseur 1: Free advice to the Van Gogh Museum”
153 Exception is the rule
This morning I picked up a few rolls of film I shot in the past few weeks. The photos were taken in Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Amsterdam, Moscow and Archangelskoye. What’s the use of pretending that I am together enough to write a normal column? I don’t have the distance. The distance has me. The best I can do is ponder the most memorable things I saw in each place.
152 Rehabilitating Rembrandt
A confidently negative judgment of the original Rembrandt Research Project concerning a painting in Kassel has been reversed by the new leader of the Project. However, the arguments advanced by the Project have not been answered.
151 I’m not an art historian, but…
A tribute to a beloved and boundlessly respected colleague.
150 Three Parisians and the value of art
Thoughts on Pierre Bourdieu, Souren Melikian and Krzysztof Pomian and their ideas of the nature of value in art.
149 The saga of Bouwe Jans
The Van Gogh Museum has the good fortune of having acquired a tenacious, articulate, unforgiving critic with enough right on his side to teach it a valuable lesson. Whether the museum sees it that way I do not know; I‘m sure that I would not enjoy reading about myself the kind of things that the Dutch-English art dealer Bouwe Jans has published about the museum in his cantankerous book Artquakes and van Gogh. Yet the Van Gogh Museum and other arbiters of authenticity do have much to learn from his report. Continue reading “149 The saga of Bouwe Jans”
The idiosyncratic mid-life career change of Michael Montias
Not more often than once in a lifetime does it happen that a senior practitioner of a given field can move to another and revolutionize it. That was the achievement of the later Michael Montias.
Continue reading “The idiosyncratic mid-life career change of Michael Montias”
After I win the game I’ll tell you what the rules were, or A new Rembrandt from 1632
A painting that is ignored in the first three volumes of the Corpus of Rembrandt paintings has now been attributed to Rembrandt by the leader of the Rembrandt Research Project. His arguments give Schwartz reason to investigate his methods and ask what criteria should be addressed in judging the authorship of old master paintings. He first tells the story of how the painting was bought and sold since 1970.