Leesfragment: The Upside-Down World

Een van onze cadeautips voor de komende feestmaand: Benjamin Mosers nieuwe boek The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters. Lees een fragment en koop dat boek!

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer turns his eye to the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age

Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of this new place, he threw himself into the Dutch museums. Soon, he found himself unearthing the strange, inspiring and sometimes terrifying stories of the artists who shaped one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity, the Dutch Golden Age.

As he explored the hidden world of the Dutch Masters (and one Mistress), Moser met a crowd of fascinating personalities: the stormy Rembrandt, the intimate Ter Borch, the mysterious Vermeer. Through their art, he got to know their country, too: from Pieter Saenredam's translucent churches to Paulus Potter's muddy barnyards, and from Pieter de Hooch's cozy hearths to Jacob van Ruisdael's tragic trees. Over the years, Moser found himself on increasingly intimate terms with these centuries-dead artists, and found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions he was. Why do we make art? What is art, anyway - and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?

The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. It is a brilliant, colourful and learned book for anyone, whether lifelong scholar or curious tourist, who has ever felt the lure of the Dutch galleries. It shows us art, and artists, as we have never seen them before.

• Lees ook een fragment uit de vertaling door Toon Dohmen: De wereld op zijn kop. Ontmoetingen met de Hollandse meesters
• Lees ook een fragment uit Mosers Pulitzerprijswinnende biografie van Susan Sontag,
• Lees de bespreking door Miriam Rasch van Sontag
• Lees een fragment uit zijn biografie van Clarice Lispector

Part I
Where to start

Shortly after I got to the Netherlands, I bought a book, or rather a series of books, by the American historian John Lothrop Motley. It was a nineteenth-century edition, printed on thick rag paper that was still bright and unspotted after 150 years, but these books were not collectibles: they were ratty when I bought them, and falling apart by the time I reached the end. I was surprised, in fact, that I reached the end—but the books were so momentous, so resonant, so full of incident and color, that I read them with as much pleasure as I have read anything in my life.
Born in 1814, a Bostonian of a generation that produced so many fascinating eccentrics, Motley—among whose interesting attainments was having been Otto von Bismarck’s college roommate—published the three volumes of The Rise of the Dutch Republic, followed by the four volumes of The History of the United Netherlands, before and during the Civil War. They told the story of the Dutch Revolt, which began in 1566 as a local rebellion—really no more than a riot—in terms designed to appeal to Americans. He called William of Orange, who reluctantly led the Revolt, “the Washington of the sixteenth century.” He described the story of Dutch independence as “a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon race—essentially the same, whether in Friesland, England, or Massachusetts.”

The maintenance of the right by the little provinces of Holland and Zeeland in the sixteenth, by Holland and England united in the seventeenth, and by the United States of America in the eighteenth centuries, forms but a single chapter in the great volume of human fate; for the so- called revolutions of Holland, England, and America, are all links of one chain.

Motley emphasized Dutch characteristics that Americans saw as their own. The Dutch wanted to be independent politically, to practice their own religion, to shake off tyrannical kings. They were a nation of traders and shopkeepers who rose to unprecedented power; and through their revolt, they had stubbornly refused to be enslaved: no American reading this amid their own Civil War would have failed to note the resonance. The books, and the heroic story they told, were popular for decades. The story was couched in a style as majestic as nineteenth- century writing can be, and that style, the prose equivalent of the grand operas that were its contemporaries, propelled me through volume after thrilling volume.
And they had another use. They gave me a place to start getting to know the history of the country where I had ended up.
In the fi fteenth century, the Netherlands—what we now know as the Netherlands, alongside Belgium, Luxembourg, and chunks of Germany and France—were attached, by a series of inheritances, to the Habsburg rulers of Spain. It was an immensely unwieldy construction, and it was not yet cemented when, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg church.

[…]

Copyright © Benjamin Moser