AT EASE

When viewing art, less can be more

By John Vinocur

Published: June 6, 2008

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AMSTERDAM: There's something exhausting about the great traditional art museums, encyclopedias that you can never get through and wouldn't want to, except on a bet or propelled by a massive intellectual conceit.

Bless the moderately sized Frick Collections of the world that take the task and the trek out of looking at pictures. They turn a couple of hours at a museum into exquisite, brain-opening intervals that retain impressions rather than diluting or turning them to mud.

The big, great museums, like five-story department stores in my mind, have crash barriers into which you plunge at any moment, either lost in a room full of halberds, exhausted by paintings of midget court jesters or gone claustrophobic in the press of bodies, and mumbling gotta-get-outta-here-NOW.

Unkindly, it could be said, this was the case of the Rijksmuseum, housing vast Dutch treasures, a million items probably best reached and viewable - especially what you wanted to see - by satellite guidance system.

Until something happened. When the museum's renovation began in 2003, it was decided that 400 exceptional works would be brought together from the overall collection for exhibition in a single wing, the equivalent of one-tenth of the Rijksmuseum's normal space.

The museum was scheduled to be reopened this year, but a dispute with contractors led to an announcement in February that it would be delayed until 2012 or 2013.

That sense of the longer term has led to this conclusion:

People enormously like the down-sized collection called The Masterpieces. They come to see it in numbers close to the level of all the other wings combined before their closure. And the visitors' level of satisfaction has put possibly subversive ideas in the heads of some of the Rijksmuseum's directors about how the public wants to look at art in a great, traditional museum.

Admit it: as much the Prado or the Louvre are daunting, there's something déclassé about the idea of saying you did each of them, Goyas or Mona Lisa included, and in 90 minutes (the average visiting time for The Masterpieces), re-emerged revivified. It's more than just a little like the old Reader's Digest Condensed Books - four literary classics or best sellers abridged into one volume for your personal pleasure and convenience!

Someone has surely called today's Rijksmuseum speed-dial, mini-golf culture, or a Best Of spinoff of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals and Jan Steen, or a dumbed-down compilation of Greatest Dutch Hits.

I went inside for €10, about $15, and the answer to all the contempt is no way.

With only 650 people allowed onto the wing's two floors at any one time, the forced-march and I-climbed-Mont-Blanc accomplishment aspect of the usual visit is gone. No walls of fatigue descend that say enough and out. Instead, there's the comfort and nonrush of reasonably small spaces.

Here's a terrific thing about The Masterpieces: Because the visitor's head and body are not crushed, great individual discoveries and surprises emerge that go beyond what's most renowned from the Dutch Golden Age.

I especially wanted to see the Vermeers and Jan Steens. Simple. Done.

But I knew nothing of C.C. van Wieringen's painting of the Dutch naval victory over the Spanish at Gibraltar. A Spanish ship explodes, and in the joy of the Dutch victory - the 17th century knew no shame about military success - a drum, a broom, a ladder and plenty of bodies are blasted into the sky.

Beyond the familiar composure and contentment of the burghers in black, I had no sense of the horror of the era: look at the brothers, Johan and Cornelis de Witt, hanging upside down like meat from a gallows, their bodies hacked to the guts. Jan de Baen, painting in 1672, got there with awful power three centuries ahead of Francis Bacon.

Another first sight: the exceptional strength and excitement of Jan Asselijn's threatened swan, legs spread, white wings unfurled, the muscles of its chest and neck taut. And the cool daring of Bartholomeus van der Helst's portrait of the 20-year-old son of Amsterdam's mayor, dressed in salmony pink, fat and futile, but with cruel little eyes. It's a picture to get the man who did it in big trouble, or perhaps one painted on the instructions of the powerful father.

Best of all the discoveries - the tolerant Netherlands respects even the least qualified opinions, right? - could be a still life by Johannes Torrentius. A metallic flagon, a wine glass of perfect roundness and an earthenware jug - stunning grace (and, if you read the accompanying explanation, a message about measure's triumph over excess).