Dutch and Flemish masterworks at Legion of Honor
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Realism has fulfilled itself willy-nilly at various moments in Western visual culture, from ancient Roman portrait sculpture to the invention of photography. Seventeenth century painting in the Low Countries marks one of those moments.
Doubters have only to see the dazzling "Dutch and Flemish Masterworks From the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection," which opens today at the Legion of Honor.
Seventeenth century Holland may rank as the first premodern society to foreshadow our own.
Historian Simon Schama summarizes what made Holland stand out then in Europe: "The Dutch state drew power from federalism when absolutist centralization was the norm. Its population had trebled from 1550 to 1650, when most others stagnated or regressed under the onslaught of plague and civil and foreign wars. What contemporaries called the 'mother trade' - in Baltic grain - had provisioned their packed towns with dependable regularity while other urban centers in Europe had suffered from high prices and intermittent supplies. Dutch fleets covered the surface of the known world, and their navigators were restlessly extending the boundaries of that knowledge in the antipodes . . . (T)he Dutch polity had proved remarkably resilient under stress, effective in administration and ingenious at sustaining the minimal consensus needed to contain discord ..."
The exhibition includes a "pen painting" - a panel treated to resemble an engraving - by Willem van de Velde the Elder that depicts a fleet of Dutch merchant vessels with guardian warships setting sail to import Baltic grain.
During this time Dutch cities were renowned for their tidiness during what some historians consider Europe's dirtiest century.
Also, an ascendant Dutch middle class, eager to see its likeness and its private and civic wealth commemorated, gave rise to an art market - the ancestor of today's - that supplanted court and church patronage.
The exhibition accordingly divides into sections devoted to the artist's status in the newly bourgeois society, the mercantile - particularly maritime - basis of Netherlandish prosperity, portraiture, still life, landscape, genre and allegorical pictures, as they reflected the sometimes inconsistent values and customs of the Dutch republic.
Nearly all the pictures in "Golden" have implications beyond the stunning impressions their realism, or stylizations, make.
Adriaen Coorte's arrestingly direct "Still Life With Sea Shells" (1698) speaks not only of revived fascination with the natural world but of the global reach of Dutch seamanship, the painting compiling specimens of far-flung origins.
Numerous pictures celebrate the Dutch mastery of boat building and naval skills, which enabled the northern provinces finally to throw off Spanish rule in the 1620s.
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