Two critics locate themselves in seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting
THUNDERCLAP A memoir of art and life and sudden death
LAURA CUMMING 272pp. Chatto and Windus. £25
THE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD Meetings with the Dutch masters
BENJAMIN MOSER 400pp. Allen Lane. £30.
ATA DISTANCE Mike Kelley’s “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid” (1987) might be an abstract painting: a rectangle busy with arguing colours. Hover closer and the “paint” is revealed as knitted or crocheted yarn, and the surface as a bumpy amalgam of stuffed animals and craft objects stitched tightly together. “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid” is about taste and connoisseurship, but it also asks what it takes to create a work of art. Not just the labour of stitching and knitting, but also the “love hours”: the acquisition of skills and experiences, the restless preoccupation in the blue zones of the night, the doubt and self-loathing. The late American artist’s work points to the asymmetry between all that goes into making art and what is received in return. With a few starry exceptions the world is in debt to its artists.
I pondered this at the National Gallery’s recent Frans Hals exhibition after reading Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life and sudden death. Hals, who animates the human face with the most fleeting expressions, whose paintings are now handled like jewels, was once just another artist struggling to afford the basics of life in Haarlem. There’s a sly and voluptuous young woman in the show, thought to have been commissioned for a local brothel, where portraits were perused like an illustrated menu. Cumming describes Hals enduring “the humiliation of having his possessions bailiffed from out of his own house because of an unpaid baker’s bill”. He bartered paintings for food and to cover debts. In his eighties Hals “was granted a pathetic one-off payment of 50 guilders from the burgomasters of Haarlem, plus an annual pension of 150 guilders: so small it was less than the baker’s bill.”
Both Cumming’s Thunderclap and Benjamin Moser’s The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch masters explore the authors’ passion for Netherlandish art of the seventeenth century. Art histories told through the lens of autobiography (an emerging genre that I can’t bear to call artobiography), they pursue questions of what it means to create and the unpredictable turns of legacy. Their love of Dutch art becomes a lens through which each writer explores another relationship: in Cumming’s case with her late father, the Scottish artist James Cumming; in Moser’s with the Netherlands, the adopted home in which, after twenty years, he still feels out of place. Each book is an offering for the love hour
