The special exhibition “Rembrandt’s Orient” at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, which runs until July 18, 2021, uses 110 works to examine how the painters of the Dutch Golden Age responded to influences from the Near, Middle and Far East The current special exhibition “Rembrandt’s Orient” at the Museum Barberini once again demonstrates the importance of this building on the Alter Markt in Potsdam. This […]
Until July 18, 2021, the special exhibition “Rembrandt’s Orient” at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam uses 110 works to examine how the painters of the Dutch Golden Age reacted to influences from the Near, Middle and Far East
The current special exhibition “Rembrandt’s Orient” at the Museum Barberini once again demonstrates the importance of this building on the Alter Markt in Potsdam. This subject, which is so important for art, is now being honored in an exhibition for the first time. The show at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam was created in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Basel, under the patronage of H.E. Wepke Kingma, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Germany.
The show was planned for summer 2020 in Potsdam, but was postponed to spring 2021 due to the pandemic. In Basel, the exhibition was on display from October 31, 2020 to February 14, 2021. The museum is located in the Barberini Palace, which was reconstructed between 2013 and 2016 and whose architectural model and namesake was the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Under King Frederick II, Georg Wenzelslaus von Knobelsdorff rebuilt the city palace as one of the main works of Frederician Rococo in the context of the surrounding buildings.
The world view of the 18th century was reflected there, on the Alter Markt. Seen clockwise from the north-east, its buildings embodied Amsterdam, Vicenza, London, Rome, Pompei, Verona, Ancient Rome and finally Egypt in the obelisk on the square. Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner is the founder of the reconstruction and the art business.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is considered one of the most important and best-known Dutch Baroque artists. His work coincided with the Golden Age, when the Netherlands experienced a period of political, economic and artistic prosperity. Rembrandt and his contemporaries were fascinated by distant lands whose goods were imported to the Netherlands in large numbers. Enthusiasm for foreign countries became a fashion that gave rise to a new kind of art.
Rembrandt’s paintings with an oriental feel reflect the fascination with the exotic. Here, artists combined realism in painting with wishful thinking and fantastic projections. Lifelike and at the same time alienated, they represented an alternative world to everyday life in the Calvinist Netherlands. The exhibition focuses on the images of the foreign of the time. The Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region, and Asia were still called the Orient in Rembrandt’s time. The Barberini is therefore concerned with the ideas associated with this term at the time.
Structure of the special exhibition “Rembrandt’s Orient”
The exhibition is divided into seven sections, three of which focus on the context of contemporary history and four of which reflect art historical themes. The works of art on display are evidence of the first globalization and show the influence of Far Eastern cultures in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Rembrandt, his collection of exotic objects and the exotic enthusiasm associated with them, is the starting point.
His pupils, such as Isaac de Jouderville and Jan Victors, used fanciful turbans for scenes from the Bible, just like their teacher. In portraits histoirés, they even dressed the sitters in orientalizing costumes. Self-dramatization in such clothing and in front of oriental carpets was a status symbol of wealthy citizens, examples of which are also shown by Michiel de Musscher and Ferdinand Bol.
Global trade in exotic objects
The exhibition also focuses on the global trade that brought exotic objects such as coral, porcelain and nautilus shells to the Netherlands, such as those painted by Willem Kalf and Jan van der Heyden in their still lifes. While the Orient was present in Dutch bourgeois homes in the 17th century through exotic objects and clothing and countless reports on journeys to the East were published, hardly any artists explored the distant lands on site. As a result, the Orient and the Oriental remained a mixture of imagination and dream world, paired with set pieces, stereotypes and fantasy. However, the West-East encounter did not take place at eye level.
The unknown foreign was an attractive contrast to the known cosmos. This was no different for Rembrandt than for his contemporaries. To this day, this attitude has not changed much in large parts of the western world. The exhibition therefore offers the opportunity to question this Eurocentrism, which persists to this day. The more than 50 international lenders include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, the Prado, Madrid, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the National Gallery London and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.
The conservators commissioned by the lending museums have been monitoring the artworks remotely due to the pandemic in order to avoid traveling. Whether this is a novelty of the Rembrandt show or is already part of general lending practice is an exciting field for further research.
Analysis platform of the Hasso Plattner Foundation
Tickets for “Rembrandt’s Orient” are released two days in advance and are only available online as a time slot. The Hasso Plattner Foundation’s new analysis platform, which we reported on in RESTAURO 3/2021, is being used to guide guests through the current special exhibition.
