The New Criterion

In his recent vademecum to the Metropolitan Museum’s current Rembrandt exhibition, The New York Times critic Holland Cotter opened with this statement: “‘The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’ is a straightforward title for a complicated show.”[1] It could be argued that precisely the opposite is true. Whereas the title of the show would require several further qualifying sentences to be reasonably accurate, the show is simplicity itself: essentially a hanging of the near-total inventory of the museum’s holdings in this important area of European painting. A curator could ask for nothing easier. As to the title, identifying an entire school, spanning over a century, with the name of its most important and renowned exponent says almost nothing about the temporal, geographic, intellectual, and styli ...

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