When asked how museums should compete with today's overwhelmingly visual culture, Rudi Fuchs remarked, 'I once said that the museum fulfills the old-fashioned idea of a school. You go there to learn to look at things you know nothing about. Paintings can have a certain slowness about them. They are created gradually. You have to view them patiently. Many people may find that difficult [...] I can get really excited when I look at a painting."
And he's not the only one! I can testify to that after having visited Praise of Ships and the Sea, together with father and son Hoogsteder and Jeroen Giltaij, curator of Old Master Paintings at Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, the man who initiated and
organized the exhibition. All three are 'professionals', but with the sincere enthusiasm of the true art lover and that refreshing thrill when they see a good painting. Now and then, whenever something grabs their interest, they point out a significant
detail, or a characteristic that typifies the style and the work of a particular artist, or they mention a solution the artist found to a theoretical problem.
The viewer's concern is generally with the subject and the story being told. But there's surely no harm in looking at a painting in the light of the artist's own criteria. For a painter, the question is how to make a composition original, how to inject rhythm and how to arrange the colours, how to convey tension and how to reach the emotions and feelings of other people - generations later. One of the enjoyable aspects of viewing a painting, is to appreciate all these factors and to assess them. It is for the observer to test a painting. In fact paintings should actually be viewed without knowing who the artist is. (Lesson i: Never start by looking for the name on the textboard.) There's no such thing - agree father and son, and Giltaij too - as a good or bad artist, there are only good or bad paintings. 'For example,' says Willem Jan Hoogsteder, 'you cannot appreciate a seventeenth-century painting without examining the detail'. He points at the rowing boat in Adam Willart's Yacht on the Coast. 'Look at how the planks move forward and the superb effect of shadow achieved with just a few suggestive strokes of the brush'. Having let his enthusiasm get the better of him he offers the rather bold conclusion that seventeenth-century painters had already mastered the elements of abstract (that is, autonomous) art, with their splendid use of colour and fine compositions.
For Willem Jan they are close to what one might term perfect art, since after the seventeenth century few innovations in the actual technique of painting were made. 'These chaps have already done it all: every subject, every technique, down to and including the impressionist brushstroke!' But what intrigues both professional and layman is the tension between logical analysis, the discussion of relevant points - often the highlights of a painting - and the intuitive absorption of m hat thc artist has created. That is what makes looking at paintings so exciting. It is the discovery of a balance betwcen art and technique. Adam Willarts is a painter who manages to produce a synthesis between the depiction of reality and the rendering of atmosphere.
For Porcellis, a painting was a window to the world, often accentuated with an emphatic frame that becomes part of the painting. He limitcd his palette to silver grey and grey brown tints that beautifully suited the wide expanses of water and sky. Characteristic for Porcellis is the affection with which he portrays atmospheric details. Highlight Some painters may appear rather inaccessible. Along with Simon de Vlieger, Jacob van Ruisdael is a good example. 'Ruisdael is difficult, because he invents things. But what an inventor! Where would Constable and Turner have been without Jacob van Ruisdael?' His nocturnal maritime view is, for both Hoogsteders, one of the most beautiful paintings in the show. It is poetry in paint. And yet you could easily pass by this dark and sombre picture. Van Ruisdael proves his supreme mastery of the art of painting. Everything he does with his paints is aimed at one thing above all else: creating atmosphere. His virtuoso brush, the dramatic composition, the ominous light. When you look at the painting, you hear the black water splash, you feel the cold, wet wind and you stand rigid in the ferocity and power of the thunder as it shakes the very floor you stand on. This vigorous painting overwhelms and leaves the viewer feeling humbled.