Centuries Apart, But Hung Together
HAARLEM, the Netherlands — Frans Hals, a Dutch Golden Age portraitist of wealthy merchants and jolly rogues, was popular and successful in his lifetime, but before he died, he fell out of fashion. His loose, bold brush strokes were too rough for the 18th century. But the Impressionists rediscovered him in the 19th century, and resurrected Hals as a modern master.
Nowadays, Hals ranks with his compatriots Rembrandt and Vermeer in the pantheon of art history, but Ann Demeester, director of the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, prefers to see him as a “transhistorical” figure whose influence leapfrogs across time and into contemporary art.
That is why she has hung highlights from the museum’s permanent collection of Hals works and other Golden Age art alongside the works of living artists such as Nina Katchadourian, Shezad Dawood and Anton Henning for “Rendezvous with Frans Hals,” on display through September. She hopes to demonstrate that today’s artists are still inspired by Hals’s 350-year- old legacy.
“Transhistorical” is a buzz word in curatorial circles these days, as museums seek new ways to ignite interest in older art. The blending of old and new has drawn interest from collectors at art fairs, and auction houses are doing it, too: Christie’s sold Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” in a sale of contemporary art last year for $ 450 million.
“What it is trying to do is to say that history lives,” Sheena Wagstaff, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said of the transhistorical trend.
“With a blending of history and contemporary art, we can reveal some of the puzzles at the centers of great art,” said Ms. Wagstaff, who oversees the Met Breur, the museum’s modern- and contemporary-art branch.
The Breuer’s “Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body ( 1300Now),” on view until July 22, takes a nonchronological look at 700 years of sculptures of the human body.
Including not only fine art but also wax effigies and anatomical models, the show opens with a hyperrealistic sculpture by Duane Hanson from 1984, jumps from a 15th- century Donatello sculpture to a Spanish Renaissance work by El Greco, and juxtaposes a modern android with a 19th- century effigy of Jeremy Bentham, made with the British philosopher’s bones.
“The idea with this show was to open it up and to expand the canon more, with work that could be seen in a more populist way,” Ms. Wagstaff said.
James Bradburne, director of the Brera Art Gallery in Milan, said the transhistorical trend was just a new term for what curators have always done: “Try and bring people back to the moment when the art was contemporary.”
“We are always obliged to re-perform the art we have in our collections in a contemporary way,” he said, “just as an actor, when they perform Shakespeare, has to re-perform it for a contemporary audience, whether in mafia costumes or in drag.”
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, whose permanent collection features art from ancient Egypt to 1800, borrowed 22 works of contemporary art for “The Shape of Time,” which runs through July 8. A nude partially covering herself by Peter Paul Rubens in 1636-38, for example, is presented alongside a full-frontal nude portrait from the early 1970s by Maria Lassnig.
“I’d like to think that we are teasing out all of the ideas and concerns and dreams and nightmares that are buried in all of the historical works that we have,” said Jasper Sharp, who curates the museum’s program for modern and contemporary art.
But some choices proved risky. Art lovers responded on Instagram to the museum’s juxtaposition of a Rembrandt self- portrait next to a Mark Rothko color field painting. “Half of them were saying ‘ this is absolutely abysmal,’ or ‘Rembrandt must be turning in his grave,’ ” Mr. Sharp said. “Some of the connections knit together instantly; others reward more sustained looking.”