The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Stadel Museum at the Guggenheim I

From October 7, 2010 to January 23, 2011, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Städel Museum, a splendid selection of masterpieces from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, one of Europe’s most important institutions. The Museum owns a unique collection of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings from the so-called Golden Age, the period of greatest Dutch hegemony.

Installed in the galleries of the Museum’s third floor, and sponsored by Fundación BBVA, the exhibition offers visitors a journey through 130 masterpieces from the period, most of which have never been on display in Spain before. Through historical painting and portraiture, as well as genre painting, landscapes, and still lifes, these works showcase the Dutch elite’s specific taste and particular ideals.

Curated by Jochen Sander, Deputy Director and Head of German, Dutch, and Flemish Painting at the Städel Museum, the exhibition includes masterpieces by over 80 artists, including the most prominent ones from this period: Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Peter Paul Rubens, the Brueghels, Jordaens and Teniers, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Jan van Goyen, Cornelis de Heem, Karel van Mander, Dirck van Baburen, Abraham Mignon, or Adriaen Brouwer, among others In the decades after 1568, when the Netherlands revolted against Spanish Habsburg rule, the United Provinces in the north successfully became a decisive power in world trade. A sense of identity and national pride was formed against this background and the bourgeois business elite, who were accumulating vast fortunes in those years, wished to capture their values and ideals in the paintings that adorned their halls. From the standpoint of historiography, this period of economic bounty, reflected in the quality of Dutch artwork, was called the Golden Age.

The seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings that played a central role in the collection of merchant and financier Johann Friedrich Städel (1728–1816) make up a large part of the Städel Museum collection, which was created in his hometown, the commercial metropolis of Frankfurt, after his death in 1816. The contents of this collection, which has been built up for almost 200 years through donations, as well as planned purchases of outstanding individual works, offer an overview of European painting from 1300 to the present. Specifically, the collection of Dutch and Flemish painting from the Golden Age garnered fame in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, ranking among the world's foremost collections thanks to extraordinary acquisitions that continue to enrich it even today.

Scope of the exhibition
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents an extensive selection of Dutch paintings enhanced by significant and representative Flemish Baroque works in a thematic tour of five major sections that correspond to the major painting genres in which the artists of the day specialized: still lifes, history, landscape, portraiture, and genre painting and interiors, which attest to the Dutch elite’s tastes.

The achievements of the so-called Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish paintings, a period that spans from approximately 1580 to the early eighteenth century, are exceptionally represented in The Geographer , a masterpiece by the great Dutch painter Jan Vermeer that is on display in Spain for the first time. The colorful pictorial elegance, optical delicacy, fusion of levels of consolidated genres, and union of art and science combine to make this painting a symbol of Dutch painting of the period and thus, one of the exhibition’s pivot points. For the first time since it was inaugurated, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is welcoming a work by this great master, a pioneer in the use of optical tools, such as the camera obscura, who produced just over thirty works during his career and whose relevance to art history was not recognized until two hundred years after his death.

Still lifes
The exhibition of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the Städel Museum collection starts with a magnificent selection of still lifes in gallery 304. Still life painting was established as a separate pictorial genre for the first time in the late sixteenth century, almost simultaneously in the Netherlands and Italy. Still life painting occupied a secondary place within the hierarchy of genres in seventeenth-century art criticism because it depicted inanimate objects. However, still lifes from the Golden Age more than offset the lack of human interaction though a realistic reproduction of detail that fascinated collectors of the day. In fact, many of these works were coveted on the international art market and automatically became status symbols for their owners.

Still life paintings in the seventeenth century had nothing in common with mere reproductions of the visible world. The sumptuous subjects by the acclaimed Jan Brueghel the Elder contain allegorical or moral interpretations, as well as a famous staging of luxury and the refinement of the plants exhibited. One example is Bouquet in a Glass Vase, located in the section of cabinet paintings in gallery 303 because of its small size. However, the floral pieces by painter Rachel Ruysch, the most widely recognized and successful female artist of the day, give precedence to an interest in botanical and zoological accuracy over moral evocation. Still Life with Bunch of Flowers in a Glass Vase is a magnificent example of her remarkable talent for painting. In turn, the vanitas ostensibly evokes the perishable nature of earthly goods and represents the quintessence of the Baroque sense of life, as demonstrated in the splendid Vanitas Still Life by Peter Willebeeck, a master of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp.

Still lifes also served to demonstrate their owners’ pretensions to status. As Dutch trade companies came to dominate world trade and the bourgeois elite amassed huge fortunes, the objects depicted became more exotic and valuable and their arrangements increasingly sophisticated, as shown by Sumptuous Still Life with Copulating Sparrows , a masterpiece by Cornelis de Heem. In the monumental Fish on a Kitchen Bench by Jacob van Es from Antwerp, the objects depicted also reflect Holland’s rise as a world trading power that exported local goods such as fish, cheese and beer.

This exhibition of local products was soon replaced by luxury goods—glassware and tapestries from the Mediterranean, spices and shells of exotic marine animals from India and Indonesia and luxury china—which became common motifs in still life painting. Still Life with Fruit, Pie and Drinking Vessels by Jan Davidsz de Heem is a virtuoso display of high table culture through sumptuous dishes and expensive imported goods.

It is not surprising that in the wealthy Dutch middle class’ gradual shift towards the aristocratic lifestyle, still lifes would incorporate hunting motif in the second half-century. Still Life with Dead Hare and Birds by painter Jan Weenix from Amsterdam is a magnificent example of the wealthy class’ pretensions.