Rembrandt Comes of Age
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“The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a lavish and magnificent display of 229 pictures (mostly 17th-century), is not an exhibition in the usual sense but, rather, a celebration. And the Met has pulled out all the stops. The show, in members’ previews this week, opens to the public on Tuesday, and will no doubt be one of the most-attended events in the Met’s long and glorious history, and deservedly so. What it celebrates is the Golden Age of Dutch painting, the collectors and donors who made the Met’s collection of Dutch pictures the greatest and most comprehensive in the Western Hemisphere, and the Met itself. The exhibit also commemorates, belatedly, the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth (he was born in 1606, but who’s counting), as well as the publication of a handsome, heavy twovolume catalogue raisonné. The boxed set, “Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (Yale University Press, 1,083 pages, $175), was written by the Met’s curator of European painting, Walter Liedtke, who also organized the exhibit. The books serve as the show’s catalog; yet, like the exhibition itself — which almost certainly was a scholarly labor of love — its function is manifold.
The Golden Age of Dutch painting continues to be one of the most popular in all of art, and pictures by that period’s masters were especially loved and sought after by wealthy New York collectors of the Gilded Age — the founding fathers of the Metropolitan Museum. “There was money in the air, ever so much money,” Henry James wrote about the collecting craze in New York in the 1880s, “and the money was to be for all the most exquisitethings.”Inart, thismeant Dutch painting.
Dutch painting’s secularization and humanization ofreligious subjects, its humble presentation of realism, passed down from Jan van Eyck and Caravaggio, and its expressiveness, especially in the pictures of Rembrandt, continue to be especially appealing to Americans. In the late 19th century, when European aristocrats were forced to sell their most prized pictures in order to keep their estates, New York quickly became one of the greatest repositories of Old Master paintings outside of Europe.
The Met began, in 1871, with a purchase of 174 European Old Master paintings, many of which were Dutch. The museum has since deaccessioned 110 of those pictures. Of the 64 that remain, 23 are from the Dutch school. Yet, from the 1880s to the 1950s, many more Dutch paintings entered the collection. Today, the Met owns 20 paintings by Rembrandt, 11 by Frans Hals, seven by Nicolaes Maes, five by Pieter de Hooch, and
five of the 35 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer. It also has a formidable cache of Dutch landscape paintings by Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meyndert Hobbema.
A museum-within-a-museum, “The Age of Rembrandt” is a staggering show. Don’t expect to take it in all at once. Too large to fit in the temporary exhibition space, the exhibit, like added tables at a Thanksgiving feast, spills into the European Paintings Galleries. Even after repeated visits, it would be next to impossible to absorb the impact of so many masterpieces in one setting. And the fact is you don’t really have to.
The show is basically made up of paintings from four areas of the Met: the Lehman Collection, the Linsky Collection, the permanent collection, and storage. It is mostly a reminder — if not an embarrassment — of riches already available. And the cream of the crop — all but approximately 100 of the pictures, some of which are by followers or are forgeries or misattributions — are permanently on view, albeit spread throughout the museum. The difference here — and the absolute joy of this show — is that everything, organized in the approximate order of acquisition, can be viewed, relatively speaking, as a whole. More importantly, the pictures can also be compared to one another more readily and in quick succession. This is an essential aesthetic act that reminds us why Rembrandt — whose portraits are more solid, penetrating, and ethereal than any of the others on view — and Vermeer — whose light is more present and spiritually weighted than that, say, in the pictures of Hals or de Hooch — deserve to be at the head of the table. “The Age of Rembrandt” begins like a volley of cannon fire at close quarters. Hung in a modest first gallery are three portraits by Rembrandt, “Man in Oriental Costume (‘The Noble Slav’)” (1632), “Bellona,” and “Portrait of a Young Woman With a Fan” (both 1633), and three masterful landscapes by C u y p , v a n R u i s d a e l , a n d Hobbema.
An early work, “Man in Oriental Costume” is a veritable solar system in which the figure’s turban, head, and hand all revolve around his mountainous, glistening gold cape. In”PortraitofaYoungWoman With a Fan,” Rembrandt has made her body into an apparition: the sitter, holding the fan, actually reaches into her abdomen, as if she were stabbing herself or extracting an organ.
From here on, with pomp-andcircumstance, the show marches forward like a parade of dignitaries. Rarely have the Met’s temporary exhibition galleries, decked out in period colors, looked as elegant and refined. The show reminds us of the lure of Dutch painting: the Dutch artists’ ability to convey a myriad of light, weights, and textures — from young flesh to old flesh; from porcelain, armor, flower petal, and lace to the pile of fine carpet, the density of fur, and the sheens of satin and velvet.
In “The Age of Rembrandt,” you will see old friends and make new acquaintances. In every gallery some works will greatly outshine others. There will also be newfoundtreasuresandsurprises. Still, I found that I was inevitably drawn to the same works — such as Vermeer’s “Study of a Young Woman” (1665–67), which pulled me from across the room, as it always does — that I visit regularly in the museum. Even so, the picture was fresh. Almost all of the paintings, no matter how familiar, feel new. Vermeer is still unquestionably godlike — still Vermeer. Rembrandt is still Rembrandt. Yet together, the show’s pictures — portraits, still lifes, landscapes, marines, religious and genre scenes — create a charged, almost hyperrealist, yet serene atmosphere in which relationships magically, exponentially unfold. For the first time in the Met’s history, the Dutch pictures, allowed to be Dutch, feel of a kind — more familial. They add up to much, much more than their individual strengths and weaknesses. And they offer much to celebrate.
September 18 through January 6 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).