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“In Praise of Painting” contains a Brazilian landscape by Frans Post that shows members of an Indian tribe gathered in a clearing. Few seventeenth-century Dutch paintings treat of “colonialism, slavery, and war,” and fewer still approach the technical mastery of the Dutch canon. Colonialism, slavery, and war-major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history-are scarcely visible here.” It is hard to know who is more at fault, in the Met’s view: the artists or the art lovers who collected their work. Thus, the commentary accompanying “In Praise of Painting” wearily notes that “of course” there are “blind spots in the story these particular acquisitions tell.
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The antiracist museum, however, understands that it is not just Western art that needs deconstructing the collecting and donating of art does, too. The Dutch Baroque formed the cornerstone of the Met’s first holdings subsequent bequests created one of the world’s great assemblages of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their peers. (The content of those categories is sometimes hard to discern underneath such mannered academic rhetoric as “Contested Bodies.”) Highlights of the show include Franz Hals’s portrait of Paulus Verschuur, a bravura performance of spontaneous brushwork and psychological acuity that captures the Rotterdam merchant’s modern irony, and Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, which anticipates Paul Cézanne in its treatment of decorative pattern and geometry. The first show, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” arranges the Met’s own seventeenth-century Dutch canvases in thematic categories, such as still life and landscape. The Met will lay bare European art’s alleged complicity in the West’s legacy of oppression, while Third World violence and inequality will be chastely kept off stage. Double standards will govern how the museum analyzes Western and Third World art: only the former will be subject to the demystification treatment, while the latter will be accorded infinite curatorial respect. They suggest that the museum will now value racial consciousness-raising over scholarship and historical accuracy. What such a political mandate means for an art museum may seem puzzling, but two exhibits currently running at the Met provide an answer.
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Like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has redefined itself as an antiracist “agent of change.” In July 2020, its director Max Hollein and CEO Daniel Weiss announced that the museum will henceforth aim to overcome the racism still perpetrated by our “government, policies, systems, and institutions.”