OSCAR MANDEL
The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art. A Rescue Operation. 1996. Size 21x15 cm. 128 pp., paperback
ISBN 90-70288-26-5

To what extent did Dutch artists of the Golden Age sneak didactic moral admonitions into their paintings of everyday life, urban scenes, landscapes, still lifes, floral pieces, and the like? The trend in the scholarship of our times has been to multiply "discoveries" of such half-hidden messages, all of them undermining for the viewer the ostensible cheerfulness or serenity of the paintings. Frequently these innovative readings have been uncritically introduced into the explanations museums offer to their visitors. At the same time, however, voices have been raised expressing various degrees of skepticism about this new way of looking at Dutch art.

Going well beyond these scattered remarks, Oscar Mandel has launched, for the first time, a methodical and systematic attack, dismantling piece by piece the evidence upon which the case for somber moral didacticism has been built, and analyzing the inadequacies of the reasoning applied to the available evidence. Mandel's concept of dominant and subordinate elements in the aesthetic transaction between the art-work and the viewer plays a key role in his "rescue operation". But not content with liberating Dutch non-heroic art from the excesses of academic earnestness, Mandel establishes an important distinction between the "histories" and allegories whose claims to high moral seriousness can be accepted, and those whose ostensible nobility and high-mindedness are largely bogus. He shows evidence that even the supposed grimness of most Dutch vanitas paintings is subject to question. Finally, readers interested in a still broader per-spective will be especially intrigued by Mandel's thesis that the movement he challenges has been conditioned by the "assault on euphoria" (the title of his first chapter) which is so pervasive in 20th century Western intellectual culture, and exercises so strong a gravitational pull on scholarship and criticism, that it frequently introduces a bias in the direction research takes as well as in the conclusions it reaches.

A native of Antwerp, Oscar Mandel is a professor of comparative literature in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he is also in charge of the art history and musicology programs.