Art I'm Seeing #38

Judith Leyster was one of the rarest of birds in the 1600’s, a woman who was an artist. One of only two women to be admitted into the painter's guild in Haarlem during the seventeenth century, she must have been an amazing presence in her own right. Choosing for subjects the lives of the dubious; musicians, gamblers, "idlers" who forsook conventional discipline and morality for the merry life, didn't aid her in attaining a respectable status in the Dutch art world of the northern Renaissance. My overall complaint about her as an artist is her failure to command the human form. Often her subjects leave you feeling that something about their body is out of proportion or angled in such a way that indicates a dislocated joint or broken bone: middle school-esque in its competence. But what she lacks in anatomical accuracy, she makes up for in the simple joy of her subjects.

To celebrate her 400th birthday, the National Gallery of Art is hosting an intimate focus show of her paintings in their Dutch Cabinet galleries in the west building. You also get to see works by her husband, Jan Miense Molenaer, and her possible mentor, Frans Hals. Her oeuvre is relatively small to begin with, so anytime a dozen of her paintings are assembled in one place, it's worth the visit.

Furthermore, I commend to your attention the wonderful article in next week's issue of The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl, "A Woman's Work: The Brief Career of Judith Leyster." It provides excellent background information.