National Gallery of Art Taking Dutch Art Seriously: Now and Next? Author(s): MARIËT WESTERMANN Source: Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 74, Symposium Papers LI: Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century (2009), pp. 258-270 Published by: National Gallery of Art Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42622727 Accessed: 11-04-2020 11:41 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42622727?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms National Gallery of Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in the History of Art This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:41:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms /';-=09 )(8* =-0/'] This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:41:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARIËT WESTERMANN New York University Taking Dutch Art Seriously : Now and Nextl vative, staid, respectable discipline, some- posium with mounting anxiety. We were thing pursued by nice girls from the sub- I posium read invited invited to speak the toabout invitation "current with debates speak in themounting about to participate "current anxiety. debates in We this in were sym- the urbs, girls not unlike myself. history of art77 in our various fields of exper- The gauntlet was taken up by many, both tise. Current debate in seventeenth-century inside and outside the history of Dutch art, Dutch art, I thought - what debate? But Dutch and a quick sketch of the debate and the art studies today could use one, and I thought heady controversy that ensued may indi- my pairing with Světlana Alpers as propi- cate why, for a spell, it made Dutch art stud- tious as it was daunting. She would make ies central to art history at large. The Art of sure there would be some. And the twenty- Describing took Dutch pictures seriously fifth anniversary of the Center for Advanced as visual art, that is, as works that make Study in the Visual Arts struck me as an aesthetic and epistemological claims on our appropriate venue, for the most pressing ocular attention rather than merely con- debate about the character of seventeenth- densing and transmitting a prior textual century Dutch art rose, waxed, and waned knowledge (fig. i). The book proposed that during the span of the center's existence. the quiddity of Dutch pictures is their Because then is usually easier to assess descriptive impulse and their concomitant than now, let alone next I, I will start around refusal to narrate. This, Alpers argued, makes 1980, and with Světlana Alpers7 work. Her them fundamentally unsuitable to the sort feisty interventions of that period - I refer to of iconography perfected by Erwin Panof- her articles on the comic character and nos- sky for a classically based Italian art, and talgic generosity of Pieter Bruegel's peasants transposed by him onto early Netherland- and to the more famous Art of Describing - ish religious painting under the paradigm were in large part responsible for converting of " disguised symbolism." This argument me from a political historian into a historian was pointed, for the reigning, still-young of pictures.1 Like many, I had my doubts protocol for the analysis of seventeenth- about Alpers7 claims about Bruegel and about century Dutch pictures was an iconography the character of Dutch art, even though I that considered disguised symbolism, flipped lacked the knowledge to assess them. What over as "apparent realism/7 the operative Gerard de Lairesse, Apollo excited me was their daring and ambition, principle of the ostensibly secular art of the and Aurora, i6yi, oil their interdisciplinarity at a time when that Dutch Republic.2 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Manuel E. and Ellen G. word had hardly begun to exercise the acad- The tight hold of iconography on the inter- Rionda, 1943 (43.118); photograph emy, and their status as gauntlet, thrown pretation of these kinds of painting in the © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York down before what I thought of as a conser- 1960s and 1970s may now seem curious. 259 This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:41:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Iconography's explanatory model was com- pelling because it challenged a stale habit of seeing such paintings as unvarnished, un- selective transcriptions of contemporary life. In the position articulated by Jan Emmens, Eddy de Jongh, and Hessel Miedema, Dutch pictures could literally be read as reposito- ries of culturally determined meaning, a meaning that was grounded in textual gen- res outside painting, most seductively those of the emblem combining word and riddle. To art historians trained in the Warburgian tradition, this method would seem as old as art history itself, but it was a novelty for the historiography of Dutch painting, which had been strongly conditioned by Eugène Fro- mentnťs influential view of this painting as essentially subjectless transcription, as an art for art's sake. The insight that these paintings might function as analogues for high literary texts and staunch moral tracts turned the paintings into quite sophisticated works in one sense - but into simple and decidedly nonvisual puzzles or sermons in another. It was this neglect of style, or, rather of representational aesthetics, I think, that The Art of Describing argued against, demand- ing a return to the visual in an art with an unparalleled commitment to opticality. Many, particularly in the Dutch academy, were unwilling to relinquish the hard-won intellectual status and moral agency of seventeenth-century Dutch painting for what struck them as a return to Romantic ortho- doxy. To others, most notably Peter Hecht, Alpers7 views overintellectualized painting and painters. On the basis of market evi- dence and scant art criticism of the period, they argued that painters such as Gerrit Dou simply recycled motifs geared to the dis- play of virtuosity. He frequently prefaced scenes of vastly different character with a telltale pile of armor, for example - a motif he had borrowed from the young Rembrandt, who was his teacher (figs. 2 and 3). This view disallowed Dutch art the capacity for articulating moral precepts, protoscientific thought, or forms of subjectivity - or at least saw any such functions as secondary or ter- tiary to competitive market interests. Yet others who were sympathetic to Alpers7 views, including myself, objected to the encompassing character of her model of Dutch picturing. They worried over the 260 WESTERMANN This content downloaded from 85.72.204.160 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:41:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms i. David Bailly, Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, 1651, oil on panel Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhai, Leiden; photograph Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York 1. Gerrit Dou, Painter Writing by His Easel , c. 1630, oil Private collection 3. Rembrandt van Ri jn, History Painting, 1626, oil on panel Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhai, Leiden standing of Rembrandt and Jan Steen, cen- and product innovations.5 Not all of this tral and successful Dutch painters not eas- exciting productivity through the 1980s and ily accommodated in a nonnarrative, anti- early 1990s was precipitated by The Art of textual pictorial regime (fig. 4). It was in Describing , but Alp er s 7 arguments and their Steen, in fact, that I found my problem, in reception encouraged many younger as well this painter for whom meaning seemed so as established scholars in the field to tackle much on the surface, on the one hand, but fundamental questions about the character whose painting could not well be consid- of Dutch painting. ered to be all about describing, either. Steen Taking stock now, I regret that these robust appeared to me a deliberate, latter-day discussions lacked a dialectic that yielded a Bruegelian, and just what that meant for his position from which the field might tackle painting is what I set out to study, taking my anew a central problem raised in different initial cues from Alpers' articles on the his- ways by Alpers, De Jongh, Hecht, and oth- torical situation of Bruegel's comic stance.3 ers. That problem is the status and func- All these public disagreements stimulated tion of the art image in the Netherlands much new research and insight through the after the iconoclasm of the 1560s and the 1980s and early 1990s, yielding valuable political rise of a Calvinist church that was studies of art and science in Vermeer, of foundationally suspicious of the seductive Rembrandt's self-portraits, of a Netherlandish powers of the image. Although the Calvin- slant to Karel van Mandeťs art theory, of ist proscription of images was doctrinally Hendrick Goltzius and the competition limited to their uses in devotion, in popular between older and newer media, of Samuel tracts it extended to all manner of paint- van Hoogstraten's illusionism.4