Cloud Maker Berndnaut Smilde

Nimbus II, 2012

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has been creating clouds! (This gets a exclamation point because I love these in a very geeky way.) These temporary, artfully lighted bits of smoke and moisture are installations that the artist produced first in 2010 and earlier this year. In an statement about Nimbus (2010), the artist said: 

On the one hand I wanted to create an ominous situation. You could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. You could also read it as an element out of the Dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall. At the same time I wanted to make (for once) a very clear image, an almost cliché and cartoon like visualisation of having bad luck: “Indeed, there nothing here and bullocks, it’s starting to rain!” -Interview with Smilde.

Watch Nimbus II in action in this video to see how the artist prepares and sets off the cloud in the above photo. More of the Smilde's work can be found on his website.

Nimbus, 2010

Dutch Winter Landscapes are full of skaters

Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Scene on a Canal

Pieter Breughel, Winter Landscape with Skaters

Johannes Pieter van Wisselingh, Skaters in a Dutch Winter Landscape

These lovely ideals make me long for a world where winter is playful, joyful, and beautiful. Not to mention full of some of the most gorgeous trees. Then, however, for comparison's sake, I google "new york city winter." 

It looks like some ideals persist.

Hero Worship is Passé

Falcon Hunting in Algeria, Fromentin

Eugene Fromentin's The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland sounds more like a textbook than memoirs of an artist's 1875 trip to Holland to see Dutch paintings, which is why I borrowed it from the library. I quickly discovered my mistake. It might sound charming, but this book is actually full of long-winded, vague descriptions and similarly long, vague rhapsodies over the genius of Rubens and Rembrandt. (With some sleights to the new Impressionist school in France.)

Fair enough, you might say. Rubens and Rembrandt are generally thought to be great and important painters. But when I say rhapsodies I mean full-blown, adulatory praises ala:

that morose and witty dreamer, who without living apart had no relation with any of them; who seemed to be painting his epoch, his country, his friends and himself, but who at bottom painted only one of the unknown recesses of the human soul. I speak, as you must know, of Rembrandt.

[Rubens] fills the last division of the gallery, and there sheds abroad the restrained brilliancy, and that soft and powerful radiance which are the grace of his genius. There is no pedantry, no affectation of vain grandeur or of offensive pride, but he is naturally imposing.

Hero worship of this sort if dead. In every artistic field, we practice new forms of criticism that analyze structure or context or socio-political aims. Anything but pure, old fashioned worship. We use more naunced words that genius, and we certainly don't assume the great art stems from souls of great moral worth, as Fromentin does. He sees valour and searching wit and genorosity of spirit in the lines of Rembrandt's drawings. I see lines--and maybe it is my loss.

Arabs, Fromentin

Fromentin was no great critic, not like Matthew Arnold or Baudelaire who practised and preached. But when it the last time you read a review that put the artist on a pedestal? We treat artists as cultural specimens to be dissected. The only critic not afraid of the term genius is annoying Harold Bloom, and I suspect that's only because he wants to be able to include himself in his self-defined pantheon. I wouldn't mind hearing a little simple admiration. I don't mind the damming reviews, as they tend be better written and more intersting. Yet with all the snark floating about, earnestness can seem almost too exposed, too simple.

Maybe more appreciation would be appropriate. That is what moves us to write about and talk about these things in the first place.

That Girl With a Pearl Earring

Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1662

Remember her? I know you know her, if only from that beautifully still 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring starring the beautiful Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. Tracey Chevalier also wrote a light novel of that name. Why nobody could think up another title, I don't know.

But as my lovely avidly artsy readers are aware, both movie and book springboard off the gorgeous portrait above, whose subject is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa despite the touching intimacy with which she is portrayed.

Most people think of her when they think of Jan Vermeer, that moderately successful Dutch provincial whose interior scenes are infused with incredible light. They think of women near windows or reading letters. Within his works exists an intangible beauty that is not rooted in the woman or her pose or the room but in the quality of the painting that makes me assume that Vermeer had a beautiful mind and painted his simple genre scenes with great love.

So imagine my surprise when I found that the Rijksmuseum listed the painting below as a Vermeer. Referred to as The Little Street, this painting from 1658 is the only outdoor scenes by Vermeer. On second thought, it looks exactly like what Vermeer would paint if he painted the outdoors. A quiet little street with women and children happily employed. His version of the everyday is full of peace and light.