Art History News: Frans Hals and the Moderns

Frans Hals Museum

13th October 2018 - 24th February 2019

Hals meets Manet, Singer, Sargent, Van Gogh

Frans Hals was rediscovered as a modern idol two hundred years after his death. He was admired, even adored by late 19th-century artists such as Édouard Manet, Max Liebermann and Vincent van Gogh. They were all impressed by his loose touch and rough painting style, which came across as ‘Impressionist’.

This exhibition shows Frans Hals’s immense impact on these modern painters. For the first time, paintings by the famous 17th-century portrait painter are being shown alongside reactions to his work from other major eras of painting.

Seeing works by Frans Hals alongside virtuoso work by the artists whom he inspired gives insight into how modern Frans Hals was in in their eyes: ‘Frans Hals, c’est un moderne’.

Rediscovering Frans Hals

Exactly 150 years ago – in 1868 – Frans Hals was rediscovered by the influential French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger. Art critics had disregarded Hals for most of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. His innovative painting style with his lose touch no longer chimed with the prevailing academic style. This loose painting style was associated with his ‘licentious’ lifestyle and presented as a poor example. This meant that his paintings were worth little in the art market and Frans Hals’s name did not feature in most works about the Golden Age.

Thoré-Bürger (who was also instrumental in rediscovering Vermeer) discussed Hals’s work in various publications, but it was two articles for the influential art magazine Gazette des Beaux-Arts, in which he extolled the artist’s virtues, that had the most impact. Thoré-Bürger specifically cited Hals’s virtuosity and daring brushwork as an example to modern artists. The articles sparked renewed interest in Hals’s paintings and a reassessment of his style among contemporary painters. The price of his works skyrocketed, and every respected museum and collector was eager to acquire a Hals. Many painters – to begin with mainly French, but soon German, English and American too – travelled hundreds of miles to Haarlem, which became a veritable place of pilgrimage for artists, where they could admire Hals’s work in the recently opened Gemeentemuseum (1862).

Frans Hals and the Moderns

The 150th anniversary of this rediscovery is an opportunity to stage an exhibition about the grand master of the portrait. Frans Hals and the Moderns: Hals Meets Manet, Singer Sargent, Van Gogh reveals the strength of Hals’s influence on painters in the second half of the nineteenth century. Frans Hals was admired, even worshipped by late nineteenth-century artists like Edouard Manet, Max Liebermann, John Singer Sargent, James Ensor, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Courbet, McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Henri Fantin-Latour and Vincent van Gogh. They were impressed by his lose touch and rough manner, which they saw as ‘impressionist’.

This exhibition, which runs from October 13, 2018 to February 10, 2019 in the Frans Hals Museum, in the Hof, features some eighty loans reflecting the impact Hals had on these modern painters. For the first time in the history of art, paintings by Frans Hals will be placed alongside works and artists he inspired.

THE MASTERPIECES I.A. MALLE BABBE AND JOSEPH ROULIN

The museum has so many special works on loan of other great painters from national and international museums and private collections. The following paintings have, for example, never been on view in the Netherlands before:

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Postman Joseph Roulin , 1888
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

• Postman Joseph Roulin (1888)

Madame Roulin and her Baby (1888) by Van Gogh;

• Corner of a Café-concert (1878/80)

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and Boy with Pitcher (1862/72) by Manet;

• A lost copy by Manet of a group portrait by Hals has recently been recovered. The museum will closely examine the rediscovered Manet in the months to come;

• A special work on loan from the Van Gogh Museum, Head of a Prostitute by Van Gogh;

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• Other works by Hals have also returned to their hometown, such as The Smoker,

Laughing Boy and Malle Babbe.

For the first time in history, two Malle Babbes will be shown together:

the original by Frans Hals (1633/35)

File:Gustave Courbet Malle Babbe.JPG

and the copy made by Gustave Courbet (1869).

The last time Hals’ Malle Babbe (from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin) was on view was during the major Hals exhibition in 1995.

GLOSSY

The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful glossy magazine featuring a varied mix of articles that combine detail with art appreciation. This inspiring magazine includes contributions by well-known Dutch journalists such as Merel Bem, Arjan Visser, Elma Drayer and José Rozenbroek and art historian Griselda Pollock. The magazine was designed and produced by Studio Room (known from LINDA magazine) and is available at AKO, the better bookstores (Haarlem and Amsterdam area) and the museumshop.