©2011 magyarmuzeumok.hu Minden jog fenntartva.

The end of an era

The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest will be closed for three years, but before that it has put together an exhibition no other Hungarian museum has ever been in a position to create.

Only the insurance costs sneak up to hundreds of millions of HUF for the 20 Rembrandts and three Vermeer paintings (among others) which constitute this splendid exhibition to illustrate the Dutch Golden Age. The visitors can see battle paintings with the defeated Spanish Armada, and genre paintings which cemented the bourgeois values and practically lay down the intellectual cornerstone of modern Europe. All these are enriched by the stylish, yet modest installation in order to help the spectator to focus on the most important message: turning the bourgeois life into a spectacle.

The museum most often creates exhibitions along some clever PR lines and a standardised concept: a couple of works form the headliners plus several second league artists. However, the “Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age” is indeed a super production, since besides Rembrandt, the Netherlands produced and fed 5000 first-class painters during the great century of Dutch painting. This was the time when the great tradition of European landscape painting started, when renaissance portrait painting was revisited, and the genre of the tableau created. This was also the time when the allegory got filled with life, and biblical themes were approached from new angles: all in all, this epoch contributed enormously to the creation of modern art. What is more, the costs of this outstanding achievement were burdened on the bourgeoisie, which, at the same time, was fighting a political, social and cultural revolution.

This exhibition is not about Rembrandt, and not about the painter-teacher who was continuously analyzing himself and his age, it is not about the princes of Orange lined up in the first half of the exhibition and not about the colonial tradesmen with their rapidly accumulated wealth. This is about the ordinary burghers who are playing music, rummaging under the dresses of tipsy and overenthusiastic girls. It is about ordinary people observing shells in silver settings or turning pages of a book. They were the ones who commissioned the Dutch painters to decorate their rooms with portraits of people wearing lace cuffs, and they ordered the still lifes in silver tone, and the landscapes with the abandoned wind mills on the river bank. This is a significant moment in social history, as brilliant as the other grateful encounter: Rembrandt standing in front of his self-portrait.

Ildikó Ember, the head curator, created an exhibition which has become instant success. Instead of the analogies offered by art history, she placed in the centre the taxpayers’ confident taste which focuses on the beauties of life. As each part of the exhibition is progressing from history to the intimacies of private life, an order of importance is appearing, which, certainly, does not coincide with the preferences of art history, but offers a practical framework for the painters’ work. Commissions were given for portraits, tableaux, landscapes, scenes from the Old and the New Testament, and painting became a lucrative business, however, at the same time, extremely open to surprises. The less representative but more humanistic form of Baroque painting reached its climax in the oeuvre of those painters whose pictures are on display now. We see this in Frans Hals’s blurred portraits, in Jan Lievens historical scenes, in Jan van Steen’s genre painting and in Gerrit Dou’s unparalleled chiaroscuro shades. Willem van de Velde’s marine paintings depict the battles of the War of Independence, the suspense before these clashes, but instead of the joy over the triumph, they talk about the doubts related to this absurd, but highly successful adventure. For the effect of Rembrandt’s psychological depiction and for the entire painting school based on this, it was necessary to have an open-minded and flexible audience such as the tradesmen, burghers, travellers and soldiers of the newly born republic. And it was also necessary to display a level of religious tolerance which was unique at that time in Europe: the exhibition boasts with several church interiors, which is especially remarkable, if we know that at that time in the Netherlands the Church almost never commissioned such work from painters. Besides this, other factors like the flow of colonial treasures into the country or the appearance of alternative forms of life also ensured a thriving environment for this art.   With all this came the shift of the attention to the personality, to introspection and nothing reflects this better than Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Out of which this exhibition comprises four, nevertheless, at the end of the exhibition Péter Forgach’s video installation lines up all of them re-interpreting the meaning of New Testament’s “ecce homo” in a profane, but proud and elevated version.