Art November 2007
Dutch treat
On “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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 stylistic ingredients that, together, constitute...
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