Rembrandt: The Met's Embarrassment of Riches

Alexandra Peers writes: The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its big fall blockbuster, "The Age of Rembrandt," Tuesday (Sept. 18), but the unusual show has a lot more to do with saluting New Money than Old Masters.

The exhibition pointedly glorifies donors of great Dutch art to the museum over the decades. In the first room of the show, now in previews to members, names in golden letters float high above each artwork. They read. "Vanderbilt, Friedsam, Nelson." (Rembrandt and Franz Hals get second billing.) The show is organized not chronologically, or by subject, but by when the donor gave each painting to the Met or paid for its purchase, as if Vermeer's proper place in art history was when Henry G. Marquand thought he was worth buying.

If potential donors don't get the hint that philanthropy may win them immortality (the Met's board of trustess includes collectors Henry Kravis, Annette de la Renta, Shelby White, and Bruce Ratner), the pitch is unmistakable when the viewer gets to Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. On the museum's audioguide, the listener is told that Aristotle "is thinking about his career, his fame, his fortune and perhaps saying to himself 'Will I be remembered in 500 years like Homer?' "

This is a somewhat revisionist interpretation of the masterpiece. The Met's former curator of European paintings, Theodore Rousseau, wrote in 1962 that Aristotle's thoughts are "drawn into a distant world of dreams and melancholy."

The Met's press release is clear: "Broadly outlining how the collection was formed, the exhibition reflects the taste for Dutch art in America and among New York's great collectors of the past two centuries." And ultimately, the show is a triumph, if only because a half-turn away from the brooding Aristotle is Vermeer, juxtaposition as breathtaking as if the artists strode into the room together. But the show's organization gives double meaning to the term "embarrassment of riches."

Of course, donors might take a different lesson from the show--the value of investing in art. That portrait of Aristotle was bought by the Met at auction in 1961 for a now-paltry $2.3 million.