Introduction

In 1981, my late teacher H. W. Janson, in a lecture at the university of Groningen, took on a problem that had been nagging him for half a century: does form really follow function, as the credo of the Modernist school has it? In his student years the saying had the power of dogma, but Janson was never able to come to grips with it in his own work on the art of sculpture. It may make sense to analyze the form of works of applied art and architecture in terms of function, but even then... Does function really dictate to the designer the proportions, the surfaces of his creations? 'I wonder,' said Janson, 'whether it is possible to find any kind of man-made object – tool, machine or work of art – that has a purely functional shape.'¹

Yet, one cannot simply throw the maxim overboard. For all its slogan-like simplicity, it expresses an important thesis: that artistic form is not an autonomous value, but is derived from other values. But if those values are not primarily mechanical, as the early Modernists argued, what are they then? In his lecture, which appeared in print after his death, Janson suggested that we broaden the term 'function' to include not just the 'work' which a created object is expected to perform, but also the 'task' faced by its maker, the artist. Janson reminded his listeners that the great nineteenth-century cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt, in his last years, challenged his followers to write a new history of art, 'nach Aufgaben,' in terms of tasks. By way of example, Janson demonstrated how a sculpture by Donatello could give expression to Florentine civic patriotism, and an English tomb of the eighteenth century to prevailing ideas about resurrection and immortality.

The message had a strong appeal to me. In my work on the history of Dutch art of the seventeenth century I had been growing increasingly interested in the way artists and their works functioned in society. I now began to examine this aspect of the art world more systematically. What I noticed at once is that the particular functions which had been studied by Burckhardt and Janson, and put into practice by the Functionalists, were not applicable to Dutch painting. The ideal Prince and his State, which obsessed Renaissance Italy, played but a small role in Holland, where the source of political power was much more diffuse. The philosophies of life and death debated so passionately in eighteenth-century England were only beginning to be discussed by a few people in the Netherlands of the previous century. Neither were the corporate images and personal life styles which determine the function of much twentieth-century art relevant to the Dutch situation. It was in the social and religious spheres, in government and in foreign trade that Dutch art seemed to seek its subjects and from which it took its basic terms. Moreover, each of these spheres was coloured strongly by local interests. The English historian K.H.D. Haley describes this side of Dutch life tellingly: 'It was vital to know whether a Dutchman was an Amsterdammer or a Leidenaar or a Haarlemmer. If he was a townsman, he belonged to a fairly tightly-knit community, with its jealously guarded local customs, privileges and tradition, with its common concern for the maintenance of dykes and canals, its civic guards, its orphanages and almshouses, its council and its delegation voting as a body in the provincial States.'²

Even within a small community, however, there were antagonistic concerns as well as common ones. One has to know whether a Dutchman was a Calvinist or a Mennonite, a Remonstrant or a Catholic, to which of the rival patrician clans he belonged or adhered, and how well he stood with the members of his own and other groups.

In order to contribute anything of meaning to a culture of this kind, an artist had to be part of it. He or she had to operate – to function – from a position that was fixed in many ways, and linked by many routes to particular segments of society. Many works of art will have been seen by contemporaries not just as objects of beauty but as manifestations of particular meanings, attributes of a certain milieu. It became my aim to try to map those positions and routes, those meanings and milieus as accurately as possible. The existing literature on Dutch art was of little help in this regard. Art historians tend to be more interested in universal values than in local ones, and are all too quick to claim that the artists they admire transcend the here and the now. In studies on Jan van der Heyden and Rembrandt, I did my best to reconstruct the specific circumstances in which the artists lived, and to investigate the possible effects of the immediate environment on their art.³

When the invitation was extended to organize an exhibition for the Vancouver Art Gallery covering Dutch painting of three centuries, I accepted gladly, with the intention of testing my approach on a larger scale. Since only six months were available for choosing the works and writing the catalogue, and since the displays could only be drawn from The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts and the Dutch museums, it was clear from the start that the exhibition could not in any sense be a survey, let alone an exhaustive treatment, of the subject. The selection of paintings was guided by the desire to illustrate the social and political processes at work in the world of art. The paintings I was after were those which bore traces of their origin in a specific sector of society, and to demonstrate the artist's relation to it. It was not my expectation or intention that all the paintings in the show meet this criteria. That would give the viewer the impression that Dutch painting was nothing but a mirror of society, an impression I do not wish to create.

As research progressed, however, more and more of the exhibits took on closely defined historical contours. Even works which I initially thought of as counter-examples – paintings made for an impersonal market, out of purely commercial considerations – began to surprise me, and I began to wonder whether the localism and particularity of Dutch painting might be even more pervasive than I thought. One such painting is the town- and seascape by the highly commercial Haarlem specialist Hendrick Vroom. The work by him which I had chosen for the exhibition is a view of Delft (cat.nr. 81), a city with which he had no known connection. In writing the entry on the painting, I was pleasantly amazed to come across this document from the Delft archives pertaining to it: 'On June 23, 1634, Master Vroom of Haarlem presented the burgomasters of this city with a portrayal of Delft, painted by his own hand, in regard of the special affection he has always felt for this city, his mother being buried in the Old Church, and the aforesaid Master Vroom having learned his art here in his youth.' To paraphrase Janson: I wonder whether it is possible to find any Dutch painting – portrait, history or landscape – that has a purely artistic function.

Fortunately for the art historian and for the visitor to the exhibition, even this extreme possibility does not detract from the aesthetic value of the paintings. In choosing the works for the exhibition, I was able to indulge my taste for historical puzzle-solving and still come up with paintings that left me, at least momentarily, speechless with delight. I hope the exhibition will succeed in conveying both these pleasurable sensations to the visitor.

1. Janson 1982, p. 13.
2. Haley 1972, p. 195.
3. Schwartz 1983 and 1985.