Word: hooches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some artists get their museum retrospectives at 35, some at 60, most never. Pieter de Hooch is having his at 370, and it was worth waiting for. The display of 41 of De Hooch's paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. (through March 14), is his first exhibition. Organized by Peter Sutton, the Atheneum's director, who wrote the De Hooch catalogue raisonnee back in 1980, it is an absolute delight. Unless you've seen it, you've hardly seen De Hooch...
Next only to Vermeer, De Hooch (rhymes with broke, not pooch) was the greatest Dutch genre artist of the 17th century. Very little is known about his life. He was born in Rotterdam in 1629. He learned painting by apprenticeship there, probably to Nicolaes Berchem. By 1655 his name shows up on the rolls of the artists' guild in Delft. There he must have known the slightly younger Johannes Vermeer. Five years later, he was working in Amsterdam. He married and had seven children. None of his letters survive, and no drawings either. In 1684 he died in a madhouse...
...visionary homebody, less mysterious and abstract than Vermeer but vastly more refined than his predecessors, those Dutch painters of grinning drunks, gamblers and bottom pinchers in brown taverns. De Hooch worked in this mode for a while, but his maturity as an artist began with rejecting it. Instead, he focused on home and hearth, sometimes with a bit of boozing--in Holland beer was held to be good even for small children--but always warmly idealized. What he idealized was domesticity and nurture, set in precise constructions of space, bathed in subtle transitions of light...
...extent that De Hooch made allegories of virtue at all, he certainly didn't try to shove them down the viewer's throat. His morality was all sympathy; he wasn't in any direct way a preacher. But in a time and place that put the strongest emphasis on the idea of the ordered, tranquil family as the basis of a just society, his visions of domesticity had a distinct symbolic point. Disorder, in the real world outside or the formal one inside his paintings, repelled him. Everything in his interiors is swept, garnished. De Hooch epitomizes the Dutch obsession...
...Lincoln--he has a doctorate in education--in what can be attributed to either the ceaseless wonder of America's entrepreneurial spirit or a particularly good batch of hooch, invented the Testicle Festival. "I dabbled in poetry when I was young, and it just sort of rolled off the tongue," says Lincoln, who requests that details of his education be downplayed...