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.
Eddy de Jongh is an art historian who stands for something. For thirty years he has been exploring Dutch seventeenth-century art from a fixed, well-defined perspective. As he puts the thesis in his new collection of essays, Kwesties van betekenis (Matters of meaning): “The fundamental idea is that many seventeenth-century Dutch paintings […] contain more than what the representations offer on the purely visual plane.” To uncover these meanings, he compares seemingly realistic paintings with similar images in other sources which indisputably convey a clear message. Usually these are moral injunctions or warnings. In this way, de Jongh has demonstrated the moralistic associations of hundreds of genre paintings, portraits, still lifes and landscapes.
De Jongh’s approach, which was canonized in the 1976 Rijksmuseum exhibition Tot lering en vermaak, sparked the imagination. Curators of Dutch painting in museums throughout the world re-examined their holdings and saw meanings they had never seen before. Art historians looked for the “real” meaning behind the most innocent-seeming details.
In the hands of others, the choice of comparative material too often seemed questionable while the results tended to strain credibility. As his method caught on, de Jongh was forced time and again into the ungracious-seeming position of admonishing those who admired him the most.
De Jongh’s “fundamental idea” has also been challenged. Over and against the built-in but invisible moral meanings that for de Jongh are the main point of Dutch paintings, other scholars have argued for the primacy of more obvious properties such as descriptiveness (Svetlana Alpers) and technical mastery (Peter Hecht). Jan Baptist Bedaux questioned the viability of de Jongh’s approach at a more basic level. “If symbols are so well concealed as to be perfectly congruous with reality, it is impossible to prove that they were ever intended as symbols.” De Jongh’s defenses have not been able to invalidate all the points made by his critics.
Now a lance has been broken for yet another candidate for top priority in the intentions of the Dutch painter: not moralism, not description, not technique, but “cheerfulness.” A spirited book-length pamphlet by the Belgian-American historian of comparative literature Oscar Mandel, The cheerfulness of Dutch art: a rescue operation, lashes grimly into what the author calls (in English) the “betekenis [meaning] critics.” He accuses them of deliberately setting out to spoil the pleasure in simple things that Dutch painters wanted us to enjoy. After thirty years of de Jonghianism, he writes, “We are all but predetermined to expect, even to demand menace, gloom, decay or at least obscenity.” Can’t an artist paint a candle for the pleasure of it without referring to the brevity of life? Why should Rembrandt’s self-portrait with Saskia on his lap and a glass of wine in his hand have to stand for the Prodigal Son? The betekenis school, says Mandel, “spellbound by symbol anxiety” and attracted to Puritan gloom, is the proclaimed enemy of fun.
One might have expected vindication for de Jongh in a Festschrift presented to him last month on the occasion of his 65th birthday: Ten essays for a friend: E. de Jongh 65. Not so. The book has no preface, as most such volumes do, lauding the qualities of the recipient. Only one essay deals with a de Jonghian interpretative subject, Josua Bruyn’s “Dutch cheese: a problem of interpretation.” As it happens, Bruyn is Mandel’s particular bête noire. His earlier moralizing interpretation of Dutch landscape as hell on earth (except for churches, which stand for heaven) was called “nearly caricatural” by Mandel. The critic would presumably be inclined to remove the adverb with respect to the cheese article, in which Bruyn attempts to prove, on the basis of a handful of examples, that cheeses in perfectly descriptive Dutch still-life paintings were images of decay, putrefaction and death.
Begrudging one’s ancestors the pleasure of sharing a drink with a girl on your lap is one thing; but a bite of cheese? The reputation of de Jongh’s method may have been damaged more by his friends than by his critic. But his own reputation as an art historian is firmly established, and rightly so. Whether they are repeatable or not, the experiments in Kwesties van betekenis: thema en motief in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw are as fruitful as any work that has ever been done on Dutch painting, and are elegant and enjoyable to boot.
Published in Dutch in NRC Handelsblad, 20 September 1996 and the Schwartzlist on 30 December 2024.
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