Before the Old Masters, there were Older Masters.
Rembrandt and Vermeer and others who have defined Dutch painting for the generations and centuries that followed had teachers too. The painters who influenced them were responsible for a major and quite marvelous contribution to the glorious epoch known as “The Golden Age” of the Dutch Republic.
On Jan. 11, Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery will open an exhibition of 74 of their works, the first comprehensive collection of Utrecht paintings from the first half of the 17th Century ever staged in this country.
Called “Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht During the Golden Age,” it promises to be as illuminating and affecting a show as the much smaller Vermeer exhibition–which produced long lines in Washington, D.C., two years ago–but far more accessible.
Two paintings by Hendrick Ter Brugghen (1588-1629) are worth the trip in themselves: “Saint Sebastian Attended by Saint Irene” (1625), a religious painting saintly in aspect but glowing with the life of realism, and “The Musical Group” (1623), whose figures are as amiably inviting as any of Vermeer’s.
One of the most memorable exhibitions of Dutch art will be on view at the Walters, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore (410-547- 9000), through April 5.
The virtues of youth
New York’s National Academy Museum has opened an exhibition that takes visitors back to a different age: childhood. Called “Fair & Free: Images of Childhood, 1827-1992,” it’s an artistic excursion through the more delightful notions of the most blessed stage of life, from Dickensian England to modern America.
Taking its title from 19th Century American writer Henry Tuckerman’s 1867 descriptive essay on the virtues of non-adulthood, the show presents 65 paintings, watercolors, drawings and sculptures–many of which have not been on display in decades.
The artists include a number of notable American painters–
Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Eastman Johnson, whose mid-19th Century “The Art Lover,” with its little girl absorbed by her book of prints, is an achievement in charm without kitsch.
The show is embellished with wall panels of prose and poetry from the pens of Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Elizabeth Akers Allen, among others, as well as with a suitably charming collection of antique toys from the Museum of the City of New York. It closes March 8.
The National Academy Museum (1083 5th Ave.; 212-369-4880) is a part of the city’s landmark National Academy of Design.
Around the nation
– Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock are remembered as gigantic figures on the explosive landscape of American Abstract Expressionism in the decades after World War II. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is giving one of their colleagues his place among them with “Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992),” an exhibition of 30 paintings and drawings by a bold yet spiritual painter who used his art and long career to explore the universal nature of energy and connection. The show runs through Feb. 22 at the Metropolitan, 1000 5th Ave. (212-879-5500).
– Virginia is known as the heart of the Eastern Horse Country. It was in Virginia that horse racing was first introduced to America, and it is a place where steeplechase continues as an almost sacred tradition. All this, and the role of the horse in the Civil War, is being celebrated at the Virginia Historical Society, Kensington and Boulevard, Richmond (804-358-4901), with an exhibition called “The Horse in Virginia,” now through Feb. 28.
– The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired the incomparable 1,800-work Bernard and Edith Levin collection of modernist Mexican art. Among the representative pieces now on display are paintings by three of Mexico’s most renowned 20th Century painters, Jose Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo and muralist Diego Rivera, including the latter’s only known portrait of his equally famous wife, artist and feminist icon Frida Kahlo. The museum is at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (213-857-6000).
– A very major new addition to America’s cultural and architectural landscape is Los Angeles’ Getty Center, a sprawling hilltop complex housing the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and the Getty Information Institute. The buildings and views are almost worth a visit in their own right as urban phenomena, but the art collection is one of the world’s finest, incorporating a wealth of Italian Renaissance painting, works by Van Gogh and photographs dating from France’s Nadar to California’s David Hockney.
The complex, 1200 Getty Center Dr. (310-440-7300), just opened last month. It has an exit off Interstate Highway 405, just north of Sunset Boulevard.
– The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Pl., S.W., Washington, D.C. (202-488-0400), has opened “Hidden History of Kovno Ghetto,” a three-year compendium of the horrors of the holocaust recorded by the victims of the ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, in diaries, drawings and photographs that were kept in secret archives until the ghetto was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. The show will run through October 1999.
– “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” costumes, models and other neat stuff from George Lucas’ “Star Wars” trilogy movies, continues at the National Air and Space Museum, 6th Street and Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C. Advance tickets are a must for this hugely popular show. Call ProTix at 800-529-2440.
