ArtCurious News This Week: March 3, 2023

Hi there, everyone, and happy Friday to you! Jennifer here with your short-form news roundup meant to bring you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. This is Art Curious News This Week, and today is Friday, March 3rd, 2023.

It is nice to be back here with you this week, and I appreciate you allowing me to take last week off from our little news programming, and I had a lovely time in Norfolk, Virginia. So now let's get back to it. So I gotta begin this week by letting you know that this was actually a rather quiet one when it comes to art world news.

And you know what? I am totally fine with that. So this won't quite be a marathon reporting session today. It's mostly been just a lot of people laughing and laugh crying at the New York Times article this week that talked about the so-called worst job ever

that was listed on the website for the New York Foundation for the Arts. I won't go into it a ton here, but I will link this article into your podcast show notes

and on the blog for today's episode on my website, artcuriouspodcast.com. So definitely check that out if you want to shrug or cry,

or if you're just really into being a nanny, dog walker, gardener, executive assistant to the chef and more. The rest of the news this week has mainly been previews of great exhibitions that are coming up here in 2023.

And I've talked about it before, but oh man, I wish I could just travel everywhere right now because this is a really good year for shows. From the first retrospective for the amazing Simone Lee at the Hirshhorn and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, to an awesome look at Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, and get this, Elizabeth Siddall. You know I love her. I've done a whole episode on her a couple of seasons ago.

And that is going on at the Tate Britain. There's also a big Hokusai show that will be both in Seattle and the MFA in Boston. So it is really a great time to get out there into the world and see some incredible art. Of course, you all know that I have been fawning over the big Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,

and I am definitely counting the days to see it. But that doesn't mean that this show hasn't already struck up some big questions. This week, the art newspaper published a brief report about the ongoing interest in nine quote-unquote missing Vermeer paintings, speaking with several scholars and identifying works that were included in historical records but have not yet been made known publicly.

Or perhaps they are works that have been misattributed to other artists. To date, there are between 35 to 37, so that might be 36, I don't know, works that have been listed as being known Vermeers throughout the world. And 28 of those are currently on view in the Amsterdam show. But one of the exhibition's co-curators, Peter Rolofs, believes that there might actually be more that just haven't yet come to light.

So that perhaps Vermeer's total output was something closer to 45 or 50 paintings. Now, this is not a ton, and Vermeer is thought to have worked extremely slowly and very methodically. But still, the rarity of Vermeer works just means that any further ones that come to light are going to be special. They are going to be big news.

And that would be incredible to see. In the meantime, the hunt is still on for those nine works referenced in historical documents, ones that have been confirmed as, at least at one point, being in existence. These have included pieces like a potentially lost cityscape, a portrait of a man washing his hands,

a Roman mythological scene featuring Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, and, best of all, if it comes to light, a potential self-portrait by Vermeer. All of this has begged a question, why have Vermeers remained so elusive? Well, the art newspaper reports on a couple of different theories.

The first, of course, is that it's pretty typical of a lot of artists in that people change and develop new styles and new interests in different subjects. Next, only about half of Vermeer's known works are signed. So, you know, that's hard. So always sign your works, you guys.

But lastly, Vermeer's reputation didn't extend beyond his home country of Holland until the late 19th century, which was a couple of centuries after the artist's death. And that distance, both metaphorical and physical, combined with everything else mentioned above, just makes it all the more difficult for art historians to locate and authenticate the real deal. Yet I am always an art optimist, and I suspect a bunch of folks out there are too,

and the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum just points to how special this artist truly was, and that the search for missing or unknown Vermeers is a worthy cause. Speaking of Vermeers, I know, you're probably getting tired of it. But I do have one more interesting Vermeer-related story for you.

So this one was actually published a couple of weeks ago, but I just read about it this week. So I am going to include it here. In the exhibition catalog for the Vermeer show, scholars have announced that they believe that they've previously gotten the details of Vermeer's main patron all wrong. Instead of claiming Peter van Ruyven as Vermeer's top backer, as previously thought,

historians now think it was actually his wife, Maria de Noyt, who was Vermeer's number one fan and patron. Now, this is cool, because when I say number one fan, I really mean it, because this is the person who most likely purchased at least half of the artist's entire artistic output, which is stunning. Van Ruyven and de Noyt had at least 20 Vermeer paintings in their household,

and 14 of those are on view currently at the Rijksmuseum. So why the switch from focusing on the husband to the wife? Well, curators of the Vermeer show have stated that Maria simply had a longer and closer connection to Vermeer himself. Because Maria was raised in Delft and was a close neighbor and would have, in Peter Roloff's words,

quote, seen Vermeer playing in the neighborhood as a young lad, unquote.