by Jon Lackman | 15 February 2008 | Museums
In caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings:
… Timed to coincide with Rembrandt’s four-hundredth birthday (2006) and the publication of [curator Walter] Liedtke’s masterful two-volume catalogue, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this impressive exhibition puts on display every one of the museum’s 228 Dutch paintings produced from 1600 to 1800. Since normally only about a third of the collection can fit in the galleries at any one time, many of the Met’s “lesser” Dutch pictures hardly ever appear in public …
The significance of The Age of Rembrandt lies also in its unusual system of organization and scholarly focus. Rather than adopting a conventional scheme—chronological development, geographical origin, or genre—Liedtke grouped the pictures largely according to when and how they came to the Met, that is, by benefactor and collector… Liedtke’s scheme for presenting the museum’s vast collection has multiple virtues. Not least among them, it draws welcome attention to the intricate process of collection formation … The show’s developmental format also has the merit of illuminating the tastes of the collection’s principal organizers and benefactors, revealing how those preferences changed over time … Liedtke’s chosen system of presentation has yet another asset: it plays to the strengths of the collection better than any of the likely alternatives. Despite impressive size and splendor, and key recent additions, the Met’s assemblage of Dutch paintings is notably uneven … For all of its adeptness, The Age of Rembrandt also possesses some less adroit attributes. One of those features, it seems to me, is an underlying ambiguity about its fundamental objective. Is the main intention of The Age of Rembrandt to allow for the dispassionate examination and scrutiny of the Met’s Dutch holdings and the growth of the collection? Or is its aim to glorify the museum’s Dutch asset and to extol those benefactors and others who have participated in amassing it? The exhibition’s comprehensiveness—putting on display every Dutch painting in the collection—speaks clearly in favor of the former option. Other features of the hanging, however, suggest the latter to have been the operative concern … Also troubling is the exhibition’s near absence of information or argument concerning the nature of Dutch painting per se. When did the entity that we call Dutch painting begin to take shape? How did it change over time? Was it conceived differently in different Dutch towns? Was it the product of rising national consciousness? What role did religion play? These questions and others like them receive little attention here …
To be sure, the matters raised in the preceding few paragraphs have had no adverse affect upon the show’s popularity. Visitors have been mobbing The Age of Rembrandt from day one, and almost everybody seems to leave happy. What accounts for the exhibition’s enormous appeal? Surely not its comprehensiveness. My guess is that the show’s developmental structure is playing a primary role here. By presenting Dutch paintings as commodities highly desired by generations of wealthy consumers rather than as expressions of a remote, hard-to-grasp foreign culture, the current show recontextualizes the art under discussion in terms both familiar and comforting to modern Americans.
