» Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age

Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Comment: A great idea and a wonderful exposition. The pictures are also beautiful. Interesting also for non-art historians

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Well documented. affordable, interesting work
Comment: As a student of Stuart era British political and social history, I found this work a useful, serious introduction to Dutch economic and art history. Profusely illustrated, and quite readable (despite the intended academic audience), the book uses a detailed study of Dutch economics as a window into the world of Dutch art in the 17th century. A number of sources are translated here for the first time.

Of course, all art history interpretation is necessarily viewed through a personal prism, and Dr. Hochstrasser lets us know she is using a "Marxist" approach (which means that class consciousness is revealed by the art) with her frontispiece quote. For me the narrative made the still lives far more consequential and understandable - I've never been enamored of the pretty fruit type of picture before, but now understand why the subjects were important and why the owners of these works would be proud of their display. I came away with a deeper appreciation for the artwork of the period as well as the economic industry of the Dutch at this time, including the affliction of the slave trade, an odious counterpoint to the "golden age"

This affordable work would be welcomed by anyone with an interest in 17th century Europe, economic history, and Dutch art, of course!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Art, Life and Karl Marx in Amsterdam
Comment: One opens a book of art criticism purporting to be a review of Dutch still life in the Golden Age in the hope that such a book might actually contain art criticism. Ms. Berger Hochstratter foregoes such bourgeois expectations and instead offers us her shock and horror that Dutch still lifes in the Seventeenth Century do not confess loudly the sins of the Dutch colonial expansion and the underlying exploitation of native peoples arising from such things as the spice trade. Oh yes, there are some lovely pictures included.

One is well forewarned of the impending screed by the opening epigram from that most eminent of art historians, Karl Marx. One abandons all hope upon reading the first sentence of Ms. Berger Hochstrasser's preface, which reads, "As I first sat down to draft this preface on 8 September 2001, the International Congress Against Racism was meeting in Durban, South Africa." Indeed.

For the next 280 or so pages, we are made to suffer along with Ms. Berger Hochstrasser as she delves ever deeper into her revulsion at the inhumanities the rich inflict on the poor. Oh, by the way, all those moralizing interpretations that many art historians have read into Dutch art of the period--the vanitas--well, it seems that since none of them really explicitly condemned slavery, international trade, racism, sexism, whateverism--all those interpretations are null and void. Interesting.

I think you get the picture. This is an ideologically driven, sophomoric book. One can admire the author's idealism and her sincerity. Did I mention that the pictures are lovely? Skip this book; read Schama instead.

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