ArtCurious News This Week: March 3, 2023
Hello and how are you, ArtCurious listeners! This is ArtCurious News this Week, our new short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. Today is Friday, March 3, 2023.
This week’s stories:
New York Times: High-Profile Art Couple Offers Worst Job Ever
The Art Newspaper: The must-see exhibitions in 2023: from the biggest ever show of Vermeer paintings to a history of hip-hop
The Art Newspaper: The hunt for as many as nine elusive Vermeer paintings continues
The Art Newspaper: Revealed: Vermeer's patron was, in fact, a woman—and she bought half the artist’s entire oeuvre
ArtNews: New Moai Statue Found on Easter Island, Opening the Possibility of More to Be Discovered
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Episode Transcript
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 ArtCurious News This Week and today is Friday, March 3, 2023. It’s 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. I had a lovely time in Norfolk, Virginia, and now we’re back at it.
Now, I’ve gotta begin this week by letting you know that this is actually a rather quiet week when it comes to art world news. And you know what? I’m okay with that. So this won’t quite be a marathon reporting session today. It’s mostly just been 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 here, but I am linking this article in your podcast show notes and in the blog for today’s episode on my website: artcuriouspodcast.com, so check that out if you’re 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 still coming up in 2023—and oh man, I wish I could travel everywhere right now, because this is a good year for shows, from the first retrospective for the amazing Simone Leigh at the Hirschhorn and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, to an awesome look at Daniel Gabriel Rossetti and—get this—Elizabeth Siddal—at Tate Britain, a big Hokusai show in Seattle and the MFA Boston, it’s a great time to get out into the world to see some art. Of course you all know that I’ve been fawning over the big Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and I am definitely counting down the days to see that one, but that doesn’t mean that the show hasn’t 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 been made known publicly, or perhaps have been misattributed to other artists. To date, there are only 37 known works by Vermeer in the world, and 28 of those are currently on view in the Amsterdam show, but one of the exhibition’s curators, Pieter Roelofs, believes that there might be more that have yet to come to light, so that perhaps Vermeer’s total output was something closer to 45 or 50 paintings. Sure, this is not a ton (and Vermeer is thought to have worked extremely slowly and 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. How amazing would that be?
In the meantime, the hunt is still ongoing for those nine works referenced in historical documents—ones that have been confirmed as being in existing. This includes works like a potentially lost cityscape, a portrait of a man washing his hands, a Roman mythological scene featuring Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, and—the biggest of all, if it comes to light—a potential self-portrait by Vermeer.
Why have Vermeers remained so elusive? Well, The Art Newspaper reports on a couple of different theories. First, of course, is typical of lots of artists: they 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. (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, a couple of centuries after the artist’s death. And that distance, 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’m always an art optimist—and I suspect a bunch of folks are, too—and the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum just shows us how special this artist truly was, and that the search for missing and unknown Vermeers is a worthy cause.
Speaking of Vermeers, one more 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’m going to include it here. In the exhibition catalogue of 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 Pieter van Ruijvan as Vermeer’s top backer, as typically thought, historians now believe that it was actually his wife—Maria de Knuijt, who was his 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 half of the artist’s entire artistic output, which is stunning-- Pieter van Ruijvan and Maria de Knuijt had at least 20 Vermeer paintings in their household. 14 of them, at least, are on view at the Rijksmuseum currently. Why the switch from focusing on the husband to the wife? Well, curators of the Vermeer show stated that Maria simply had longer and closer connections to Vermeer himself. Maria was a close neighbor in Delft and would have, in Pieter Roelofs’s words, quote, “seen Vermeer playing in the neighborhood as a young lad.” Unquote. Roelofs further notes that it would have been Maria’s duty, as a 17th century Dutch lady, to be in charge of all the home goods and decorations, and paintings and their purchase would have most certainly fallen under her purview. Finally, there’s the interesting fact that Maria and Pieter began collecting Vermeer’s paintings around 1657, whish is noted in the Rijksmuseum catalogue as being the turning point from Vermeer’s earlier, more traditional religious and mythological subjects to what we now think of as quintessential Vermeer: those beautiful, quiet interiors, especially featuring the domestic lives of young women. If that change was supported, even partially funded by sales to a female patron, that just makes the story of Vermeer’s career that much more interesting. I, for one, can’t wait to hear more about Maria de Knuijt.
It's commercial break time, everyone! Feel free to mash that fast-forward-thirty-seconds button a couple of times, or to listen straight through to help us continue to make good with our advertisers, who pay our bills. We’ll be back to more ArtCurious News This Week in just a minute. Meanwhile, if you like this show but not the ads, join us over at Patreon.com/artcurious to grab an ad-free feed and show me that you care! That’s patreon.com/artcurious. I’m pleased to welcome aboard a new spate of patrons this week: hello and thank you to R.W. L., Angie C., Joan W., and Deanna C. Ongoing thanks to my VIP patrons Flamestress, Gaston, Stephanie, John, JL, Rhonda, Lance, and Robin, and welcome to the fold, Andrew! You’re rare, beautiful, and priceless to me: just like a Vermeer painting. Want your name read here every week? Become a VIP for just $25 a month—and know that you’re helping us so, so much. We’ll be right back. Thanks for listening!
Welcome back to ArtCurious, and our News this Week. For our final story today, let’s talk about a discovery that is indeed new and equally awesome: this week, ABC News reported that a new Moai statue was discovered on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, which is part of Chile. You know these statues: the iconic stone heads that were made over 500 years ago from volcanic tuff, of which almost 1,000 have been discovered on the remote island. Most of these carvings, made by a Polynesian tribe, are large—usually weighing about 3 to 5 tons, though some of the bigger ones, climbing up to 33 feet in height, weigh in closer to 80 tons. That’s 160,000 pounds. The discovery of a never-before-seen Moai is big because it hints that—like those potential unknown Vermeers—there might be more Moai out there. This one, smaller than most of the Easter Island sculptures, was found in a lakebed that had recently dried up due to climate change. But archaeologists are taking climate change with a silver lining. As one archaeologist, Terry Hunt from the University of Arizona, noted, quote, “They [meaning the Moai sculptures] have been hidden by the tall reeds that grow in the lakebed, and prospecting with something that can detect what’s under the ground surface may tell us that there are in fact more Moai in the lakebed sediments. When there’s one Moai in the lake, there’s probably more.” Unquote. And every new finding of Moai means further objects to study and further opportunities to learn about this most fascinating and mysterious peoples from this distant and isolated corner of the globe. Neat, right?
That’s all I have for you today for our weekly roundup—ArtCurious News This Week. Thank you so much for listening to ArtCurious News This Week! I’ll be back with you next week for another round of art news, and only a little more than a month and you’ve got all-new episodes of our show. Yay! So I’d like to thank you all for your support and for listening today—and until next time, stay curious.
