2014 HNA + AANS International Interdisciplinary Conference
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JUNE 5-7, 2014 BOSTON 2014 HNA + AANS International Interdisciplinary Conference PAPER ABSTRACTS 2 THURSDAY, JUNE 5 10:00-12:00 Re-installing, Re-hanging... What’s Next? ........................................................ page 3 Art Beyond Painting in the Northern Renaissance ................................................... 6 Rembrandt: Meaning and Interpretation ................................................................. 11 2:00 (AANS) Instructors of Dutch Workshop, part 2 (including one paper) ................ 15 FRIDAY, JUNE 6 9:30-11:30 The Netherlands and the World, 1500-1750, part 1 .............................................. 16 Dutch Classicism Revisited ........................................................................................ 22 Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Art, Open Session ............................................. 27 (AANS) History of the Low Countries I, 1575-1700 ................................................ 32 1:00-3:00 The Netherlands and the World, 1500-1750, part 2 .............................................. 34 Technical Art History, part 1 ...................................................................................... 39 Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion in the Low Countries, 1400-1700, part 1 ........................................................................................... 44 Portraits and Politics, part 1 ...................................................................................... 49 (AANS) History of the Low Countries II, 1700-1900 .............................................. 54 4:00-6:00 Technical Art History, part 2 ..................................................................................... 57 Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion in the Low Countries, 1400-1700, part 2 ........................................................................................... 62 Portraits and Politics, part 2 ...................................................................................... 66 Inside, Outside: Environments of Netherlandish Visual Culture........................... 69 (AANS) Society and Literature .................................................................................. 73 SATURDAY, JUNE 7 1:00-3:00 The Production of and Market for Cheap Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Holland ............................................................................................................ 76 Image Theology and Art Theory in the Low Countries ........................................ 80 Rubens and His Legacy ............................................................................................. 86 Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Art, Open Session ............................................ 91 (AANS) The Dutch in the Americas .......................................................................... 95 3 Re-installing, Re-hanging...What’s Next? Chairs: Sasha Suda, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Yao-Fen You, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Albert Godycki, National Gallery, London Limitations/Possibilities: Displaying Dutch and Flemish Painting at the National Gallery, London The National Gallery in London houses a renowned collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings, a collection as vast in its quantity as in its scope of subjects, styles, schools and periods. With the exception of oil-sketches, it is a collection of finished paintings, and only paintings. As the repository of the national collection of Old Master paintings, the Gallery is obliged to display the majority of its holdings at any given moment. Simultaneously, scholarly custodianship over the collection must stay current with, if not lead, new research, translating discoveries and new interpretations to the public in an accessible manner. This is not a task always easy to achieve in the face of ever-increasing spatial limitations and a single-medium collection. This paper will present a series of past and present displays in the Dutch and Flemish galleries as case studies that reveal the challenges and possible solutions in displaying a coherent, informative and hopefully innovative history of Dutch and Flemish culture through the medium of painted images only. A chronologically and geographically ordered hang is perhaps the most immediately associated characteristic of the NG’s display. Historically, this model reflected both contemporary taste and the type of art historical narrative which, to some extent, it also informed. The ability to alter this format, to break “the canon” as it were (without constantly re-installing the entire Gallery), becomes the main prerequisite for introducing new displays. Hence, international artistic exchanges and influences between southern and northern Europe and between local regions can be presented explicitly in a single room as can stylistic continuities over several centuries. An active loan program, which seeks not only to showcase high quality objects but also to introduce into the collection seemingly atypical examples of artistic productivity, can expand conventional thinking about art historical narratives while maintaining traditional connoisseurial approaches to attribution and technique. Themed displays such as “The Dutch Interior” and “Architectural Painting in The Netherlands,” which featured both trans-historic and international objects, aimed to redistribute public awareness about the “historical context, function and display” of such objects and images. In addition to temporary 4 exhibitions, certain contemporary scholarly debates can stand as the impetus behind new displays and vice-versa: established displays feeding into scholarly debates. A recent example is the museological reaction at the National Gallery to a series of lectures hosted by the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2012/13 that examined the relationship between art and knowledge in the early modern Netherlands. Such events and corresponding visual presentations created an expanded forum for scholarly discussion and continue to foster new ideas and object-based research. Jack Hinton, Philadelphia Museum of Art “A Room worthy in its quality and dignity of the country and its wonderful masters of art of that period”: Contextualizing the Dutch Golden Age in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Room from Het Scheepje, Haarlem An early seventeenth-century room from a brewery complex in Haarlem, known as Het Scheepje (“The Little Ship”), counts among the most complete and appealing period rooms within the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The room is associated with Dirk Dirick, a retired ship’s captain who became the owner of the brewery and eventually rose to the rank of burgomaster. It is notable for its quality and rarity among American museums. Enjoying a significance recognized long before its acquisition in 1928 by museum director Fiske Kimball, with the financial support of the Dutch-born Philadelphia publisher Edward Bok, the room was carefully installed with a mix of furniture, metalwork, ceramics, textiles, books and pictures designed to invoke seventeenth-century Dutch interior scenes. Plentiful documentation in the museum archives reveal Kimball’s thinking behind the acquisition of the room, not least its integration within a series of period interiors intended to provide a historical and atmospheric context for the collections, through which visitors would circulate and more easily grasp the significance of chosen artistic styles and bygone periods. In the case of Het Scheepje, the presence of the highly important collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings given by John G. Johnson to the city of Philadelphia and displayed at the museum would lend further weight to the room’s significance within Kimball’s broader museological enterprise. If Het Scheepje can be considered an early predictor of evocative display techniques intended to foster conversations and linkages between object categories and historic contexts, can an interrogation of its re-creation in Philadelphia (and subsequent re-installations over the past eighty years) be used to weigh the value of “new” mixed-media presentations? At the same time that 5 its evocative, integrated display of seventeenth-century Dutch art suggests the innovative nature of Kimball’s approach, we can also trace the room’s roots to an idealized—or romantic—notion of the past and identify inaccuracies and compromises that belie its authenticity and completeness. Or in the light of the imposition of interpretive and logistical challenges that rendered the room a static display, is Het Scheeje, if understood within the tradition of the period room, a less germane model to present considerations, despite the goals of its early twentieth-century advocates? If so, and in any case, how could we apply new interpretive models to create mutable and engaging encounters with seventeenth-century Dutch art, history, and culture for the contemporary visitor? Lloyd DeWitt, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Beyond Kunstkammern and Period Rooms: Recovering the Pasts of Dutch and Flemish Art in the Museum Many museums are contemplating shifting to thematic installations of art, and elsewhere installation is increasingly assigned to education or “learning” departments. The very existence of museums and their encyclopedic collections are, in some cases, threatened as well. This presentation will review the history of, and meaning invested in encyclopedic installations of Dutch art in American museums through select examples in major cities, including the Johnson Collection, the Corcoran Gallery,