Frans Hals, Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House.1664. Frans Hals Museum, HaarlemIn collaboration with the
Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the
Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung presents its first ever exhibition of masterpieces from the Dutch Golden Age.
Frans Hals and Haarlem’s Masters from the Golden Age will be on display from February 13 until June 7, 2009. According to the press release, Haarlem artists played a decisive role in the new development of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.
More than 120 works by artists like Hendrick Goltzius, Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruysdael, Pieter Saenredam, Jan Steen and many others are testimony to the dynamic nature of the free art market that emerged in that period. They demonstrate how Haarlem artists achieved international recognition by specializing in specific subjects, such as portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, marines, still-lifes and genre painting. Apart from a terrifically generous selection of loans from the Frans Hals Museum, masterpieces of the Haarlem school from many other public and private collections in Europe and the United States are presented in Munich. A special treat are the two famous group portraits by Frans Hals of the male and female regents of the old men's alms house, which have never before been exhibited in Germany .
Hals is a central figure in this exhibition. He revolutionized the art of portrait painting, setting the tone for the entire genre by perfectly expressing movement and the individuality of the sitters. He was particularly a master at capturing a fleeting expression of mirth, as is apparent in his renowned
Merry Drinker.
Frans Hals, The Merry Drinker. c.1628-1630. Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamIt has often been suggested that Hals, who was born in Antwerp, was a happy-go-lucky artist, seldom out of debt, but always cheerful and apparently beloved by his fellow Haarlemmers. Historians have erroneously reported that he mistreated his first wife, but Seymour Slive pointed out that the Frans Hals in question was not the artist, but another Haarlem resident of the same name. Moreover, at the time of these charges, the artist had no wife-beating to do, as his spouse had died during labour earlier in 1616. Similarly, accounts of Hals' propensity for drink have been largely based on shaky anecdotes and tall stories of his early biographers. But there was indeed some laxity to his character when it came to money matters: his creditors took him to court several times, and to settle his debt with a baker in 1652 he sold his belongings. Ironically, this obvious lack of pecuniary talents did not prevent Hals from functioning as an art tax expert for the city councilors throughout his career. Nor from being the blue guy in the hat gracing the Dutch 10-guilder banknote (until Mr Euro came along, that is).
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