Art history from Holland
Between the 1610s and 1650 an enchanting form of painting was produced in Antwerp and Antwerp alone: the kunstkamer painting, an evocation of an art collection in which actions of various kinds take place. Love of art is not the only kind of love expressed in these paintings. In one of the very earliest examples … Continue reading “311 Love in the huiskamer”
A sequence of fortunate circumstances put Schwartz and his Loekie into one artistically rich environment after another.Sheer non-committal enjoyment, giving birth to reactions he does not have to defend in the court of art-historical responsibility.
Do you feel kin to people who lived in your house in the past? Schwartz indulges in the exercise, finding out that he is the successor to members of an intertwined Sephardi clan of jewelers and merchants in diamonds and pearls, members of which were Rembrandt’s next-door neighbors, while another commissioned a staggering Antwerp painting … Continue reading “408 The iconophile Sephardi in me”
On four successive Mondays, from 21 January to 14 February, I moderated a webinar on the theme “Rembrandt seen through Jewish eyes,” in preparation for an exhibition of that name in the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. One point of disagreement among the speakers was how welcoming the Netherlands was to Jewish immigrants. … Continue reading “403 Good Jews and bad Jews in 1620 and 1630”
The New York art gallery of Nicholas Hall asked me to contribute to a series of online writings called Food for Thought. My own thoughts went back to the 1990s, when I brought myself to pick up a research project I had abandoned in the 1960s. Impacted by current events, the memories are fraught with … Continue reading “382 Counting back from the end”
In the 1950s death lost its sting in The New Yorker. As in the opening line of Albert Camus’s novel L’Etranger, mothers – and others – keep dying without anyone shedding a tear over them.
Three spectacular current exhibitions set out to restore the look and content of past displays of art. Antwerp Cathedral in the sixteenth century, an Antwerp merchant’s house in the seventeenth and the greatest English collection of the eighteenth have been endowed with their historical look and contents. Schwartz is deeply content.
In 1997, Schwartz described a way in which museums could provide visitors with highly personalized digital information and imagery to enhance their viewing of original objects. In 2010 the means to make this technically feasible came within reach. The first concept and its latter-day form are sketched in and made available to anyone or any … Continue reading “310 Augmenting art”
The exhibitions that take place in Kassel every five years (initially four) since 1955 under the name documenta have a powerful founding myth. They were initiated in response to two forms of totalitarianism: they rehabilitated German artists who had been banned by the Nazis as “degenerate” and they showed up the repressive cultural policies of … Continue reading “284 Being where?”
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, … Continue reading “154 The transparent connoisseur 1: Free advice to the Van Gogh Museum”