FOGG ART MUSEUM PRESENTS AN EXHIBITION OF NETHERLANDISH PRINTS

Cambridge, MA—November 1999—The exhibition Lifeworld: Portrait and Landscape in Netherlandish Prints, 1550-1650 features eighteen Van Dyck etchings, as well as several of Rembrandt’s most intimate landscapes. This exhibition opened October 30, 1999 and continues through January 23, 2000 at the Fogg Art Museum.

Lifeworld explores a variety of representations of a person's world, understood in the most comprehensive sense, through the medium of prints. In the one hundred years that is this exhibition's time frame, printmaking in the North and South Netherlands – territories that became the separate countries of The Netherlands and Belgium – was undergoing a rapid evolution in technique, style, and focus. Aspects of personality, of people and places, their public and private presence, and the range of representational style from ideal to vernacular and naturalistic are all matters that were in a state of flux. This style can be recognized in the prints by anonymous artists, professional printmakers, and the very greatest masters, including Rembrandt and Van Dyck.

"This is precisely the kind of exhibition the Harvard Art Museums do best," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums. "It is small but rich in ideas, comprised of beautiful and important works of art, and accompanied by a thought-provoking publication. It is a cabinet exhibition, really; yet one that, with imagination and curiosity, one can get lost in, as one revisits the world of 16th- and 17th-century Netherlands."

The exhibition’s centerpiece is certainly the complete set of Van Dyck’s portrait etchings, but the guest curators, rather than isolating them in their splendor, have given these rare masterpieces a context. They are joined by prints from Rembrandt and anonymous artists and together these prints demonstrate the revolution in technique and interpretation accomplished by Dutch and Flemish printmakers over the course of a century.

"The Viennese philosopher Edmund Husserl termed this world observed in the ‘how’ of experience ‘lifeworld’," said Joseph Koerner guest curator and professor of the history of art and architecture, at Harvard. "Our use of Husserl’s term as title for this exhibition, though, was occasioned by our attempt to join together the two great worldly genres – portrait and landscape. Portraits, it would seem, portray the living from life, while landscape captures the world. Yet as Rembrandt’s Abraham Francen already reveals, portraits and landscapes, lives and their worlds, find a curious meeting point in the historical culture and artistic medium here on display."

Related Programs
Three gallery talks will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition:

Sunday, December 12
Lifeworld: Portrait and Landscape in Netherlandish Prints, 1550–1650
Michael Zell, assistant professor of art history, Boston University, Fogg, 2 p.m.

Sunday, December 26
Lifeworld: Portrait and Landscape in Netherlandish Prints, 1550–1650
Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Fogg, 2 p.m.

Saturday, January 8
Lifeworld: Portrait and Landscape in Netherlandish Prints, 1550-1650
Odilia Bonebakker, Philip and Lynn Straus Intern, Department of Drawings, Fogg, 11:30 a.m.

Sunday, January 23
Lifeworld: Portrait and Landscape in Netherlandish Prints, 1550-1650
Odilia Bonebakker, Philip and Lynn Straus Intern, Department of Drawings, Fogg, 2:00 p.m.

Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums is one of the leading arts institutions in the United States and the world. It is distinguished by the range and depth of its collections and its groundbreaking exhibitions and original research. For more than a century it has been the nation's premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars, and is renowned for its seminal and ongoing role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

The three Harvard University Art Museums – the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum – are all outstanding institutions in their respective fields. The Fogg also houses the Straus Center for Conservation, a leader in the research and development of scientific and technology-based analysis of art. The 150,000 objects in the Art Museums' collections range in date from ancient times to the present, and come from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Each Museum also has an active program of special exhibitions that promotes new scholarship in its respective areas of focus.

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