'Dutch prints' provides timely history lesson

Art exhibits can be like history books, and as the maxim goes about not being doomed to repeat the past, they can provide lessons in how to shape a better future. The current show at the Yale University Art Gallery, "Holland of the Imagination: Dutch Prints and Drawings of the 16th and 17th Century," though somewhat flawed in its approach, provides a valuable history lesson, and one that informs the current problems of our nation's capitalist system.

Holland became the preeminent power of Europe in the 17th century through the invention and spread of an international, finance-based capitalism, though artists responded to their country's new role by ignoring and misrepresenting the system's accompanying problems. We now speak in terms of global markets and media outlets, but the underlying attitudes of 21st-century America and 17th-century Holland seem frighteningly similar.

But what were the problems that Holland faced, and how did artists respond? Holland had the highest standard of living and literacy rate in the world—they still have higher literacy rates than we do—but faced serious religious, regional, and class-based conflicts. The small exhibit, not more than 50-odd pieces divided into small sections that address the marketplace, the worker, the agricultural landscape, and the invention of a national mythology, is entitled "Holland of the Imagination," referring exactly to how these problems, according to the show's description on the first wall, "evaporated in the work of Dutch artists." The works show a Holland of "what people wished it to be," where the nation was somehow "richer" for its drastically disparate classes; the vast lower classes—many immigrant—are uniformly depicted as a happy, domesticated peasantry.

The exhibit cites Simon Schama, eminent historian and art historian, who often writes for that `leftist rag,' The New Yorker, for his work in examining the intense social conflict represented by the competing financial institutions of the time, the Bourse and Wisselbank. The Bourse was the equivalent of Wall Street—a huge, modern, commodities market—while the old-fashioned Wisselbank valued "probity over profit." Instead of images that addressed the complications of this new capitalism, Dutch artists made prints of fish markets and locksmiths. From the desire of the new, richer middle class to comfortably distance itself from—rather than feel responsibility toward—the lower classes boomed an art market for paintings of idyllic peasant families sitting around the hearth. The Family, an etching by Adriaen van Ostade, looks like it could have come from Williamsburg (Virginia, that is) except that everyone has an enormous, crooked nose. Those crazy, ugly immigrants!

The reason I haven't mentioned much of the actual art is that there isn't much to say: with the exception of the eight or nine Rembrandt etchings, the prints and drawings themselves are rather undistinguished. And with the extensive description of their historical background and `significance,' it's hard not to quickly see them, agree, and move on. Where you might at least have had an interesting ideogram, as many illustrative prints can be, the curators' words drone through your head.

The Rembrandts transcend this criticism as effortlessly as they seem to have been made. Seeing any one one of them, The Rat Catcher from 1632, for example, is alone worth going to the exhibit, though many of the prints are in Yale's permanent collection. It does what I wish each of the works in the show did—meaningfully substantiate the exhibit's interesting thematic, historical commentary, but also transcend that rationality and concept of art as a `product,' with incomprehensible artistry. The show made me wistful for the recent Pieter Breugel exhibit of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where every dot and line-stroke created ineffable meaning. Is there a better defining characteristic of great art?

As I jump to profess my ignorance of artists with work in galleries downtown, and how they have responded to our present war, for example, I realize that the time periods' differing artistic environments are not readily comparable: for one, the divisions between high and low art were not nearly as strong then. They were, however, growing rapidly as a result of the commodities mentality: according to the exhibit, many farmers would liquidate their assets into oil paintings, and the art market was so competitive that landscape painters had to choose specialties, like dune landscapes or winter landscapes.

The parallel is in the different time periods' similarly expansive economic systems and the type of citizen they seem to breed. The urge to decry critics who challenge the current war's historical "why" is borne from the same guilt as that of the Dutch middle and upper classes, who demanded art that gilded over class conflict and regional instability. Perhaps we could use more of Jasper Johns' flags (though the works are largely formal) than flags stuck to cars, and more of Jeff Wall's photographs of people mopping, rather than television commercials of people winning a million dollars from McDonald's, buying people's dogs from their limo, and not having to work again.

The art exhibit is an important history lesson that should be taken as a warning. It speaks of man's natural complacency and desire to ignore responsibility, and how this is especially dangerous when you're the artist, or anyone responsible for challenging the public's perceptions. That conception of artistic responsibility is a modern invention, but we are lucky to have it, because so are weapons of mass destruction and the distancing effect of the television screen.

Open until February 3, 2002.

Back to A&E...