WTF, Met-style

"VANDERBILT??!?!!!" Was he a painter? The size -- and capitalization -- of the text above a painting in the first gallery of the Met's The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art would sure lead you to think so. But no, he was just a rich guy who liked the Met.

Donors are more important than art, or at least that seems to be the message of the Met's stupefying presentation of its remarkable Dutch Golden Age collection. In gallery after gallery the Met has chosen to spotlight when the museum acquired art and the donors who gave it, essentially depicting paintings as society trophies. (The second most inane installation in America is the Hedge Fund Shark as presented by Gary Tinterow, a dual monument to a curator's apparent belief that a museum should only wow audiences if it provides 'appropriate' context. Which actually isn't.)

The Met's installation is mostly a parade of missed opportunities to spotlight connections between subjects, artists, places, and scenes. Instead the show is hung chronologically by when the museum acquired the work, an act of institutional self-worship that presents the museum as more important than the art it has collected.

The best moment in the exhibition is the installation of this Vermeer (above), with a related ter Brugghen visible down a hallway to the left. The Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith, includes oodles of Catholic imagery, including a painterly sampling of Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens' The Crucifixion. The Met doesn't own the Jordaens (the Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne does), but it does own ter Brugghen's The Crucifixion, which is closely related to the Jordaens. It's a great art-centric moment, the kind of pairing that few museum collections allow.

Think of the connections that a smart installation of such a deep collection could have made. Take art about religion and consider Dutch religious tolerance: Vermeer was a quiet Catholic and Rembrandt might have been. During their lifetimes Europe and the Netherlands were awash in religiously motivated and tinged wars, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation raged, and the mostly Protestant United Provinces were a prime destination for European Jews who were fleeing other countries. Both Vermeer and Rembrandt had deep familiarity with minority Catholics and both almost certainly had contact, even friendships, with Jews. At a time in the U.S. when religious tolerance has often been replaced with religiously-motivated suspicion, imagine what the Met could have shown us about the Dutch and religious tolerance -- or lack thereof -- in their Golden Age? And how would that have led us to think about our own?

Consider, say, an installation that included the Baroque ter Brugghen, the referential Vermeer, and the Met's only two Dutch church interiors. (Yes, only two! The one here is bad-boy Emanuel de Witte's Interior of the Old [Protestant, of course] Church in Delft.) Surely the Met has a Golden Age print or three that shows a synagogue or a scene from Jewish life. (Dutch artists, including de Witte, painted synagogues. And artists such as Luiken and Veenhuijzen made prints of scenes from Dutch Jewish life.) The Met's failure to own one may reveal something about the Met that Calvin Tomkins discussed at length in his history of the museum: Its history of not necessarily welcoming Jews.)

Such an installation would provide lots of opportunities to compare the works, the approaches, and the reverence that Dutch artists did and didn't have for their religious subjects. I mean, you might not be able to see it in the tiny JPEG here, but de Witte got away with this... (Imagine how the president of the Catholic League would respond if an artist showed that in a painting of a Catholic church in 2007 America.)

One of the great things about great art is its timelessness. The Met's installation forces its Dutch paintings out of timelessness, and into the time of their acquisition.

Related: Holland Cotter's NYT review has a devastating final sentence.