To an American visiting Amsterdam for the first time it’s easy to follow the other tourists to the Van Gough museum, which is home to the work of Vincent Van Gough and his contemporaries. Inside, there’s an endless line of tourists snapping photographs as they’re shuttled along to look at one painting after the next in a queue. Van Gough’s life may have been filled with darkness, but his paintings shine under the lights and then wash out as everyone needs to claim their moment. The colors pop off the canvases and the nonstop flashes flicking from smartphones.
In contrast, the Rijksmuseum nearby feels dark and ominous — it didn’t even have electric lights until the middle of the 20th Century. But it’s the national museum of the Netherlands and dedicated to Dutch art and history. On its walls hang some of the world’s finest art, including Rembrandt’s Night Watch, a painting so show-stopping and ethereal that when I visited in 2014 while on a 10-day sojourn in Europe — my first trip to the continent — with a friend that seeing the painting in all it’s power and grandeur is one of the lasting memories of a trip that included seeing Lionel Messi play in person and drinking endless amounts of Belgian beer.
During my visit another thing happened inside the Rijks: the Swiss-born British author Alain de Botton had an exhibit on display titled, “Art Is Therapy.” Botton put up gaudy-looking Post-it note stylized plawues with various messages throughout the museum. The Guardian wrote Botton’s notes were intrusive and his “insights and descriptions shallow and obvious.” To me, at the time, they felt fresh and refreshing. Museums and art can feel daunting for people who are not immersed in that world. Often museums are serious places and I found the notes funny in a lot of ways, even if they weren’t intended to be. I’m not an art historian or a connoisseur. I have taste and preferences, but often I don’t know what I’m looking at and sometimes I need someone to crack a joke or pull me back from watching people taking selfies or posing in front of some of the world’s most sought after art for a photo opportunity. Art should be provoking, but also fun. With that I mean it should not feel like a burden or a bore. It should in some way entertain and push you — whether that means making you laugh or cringe or become overwhelmed with sadness or happiness.
Similar to wine, art is a world I don’t understand and yet have strong feelings about. It’s one where outsiders like myself can feel adrift and left out. I can’t use the language or technical terms, but I can tell you the first time I learned about Jackson Pollock or Andrew Wyeth or seeing a Francis Bacon exhibit by chance at the MET. I know how that art made me feel. How it stopped me. How it made me think about what this whole LIFE THING is about.
I’m not alone in this feeling, specifically relating to Dutch art, which I found engrossing while visiting the Rijks. Benjamin Moser found something similar when he moved the Netherlands as a 26-year-old chasing love. The Pulitzer-winning writer discovered the Dutch Golden Age of art and in doing so began to ask himself larger questions about life and art, which he chronicles in his book The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters.
Moser is a celebrated translator and biographer who wrote about Clarice Lispector and won the Pulitzer for his biography of the 20th Century writer and intellectual Susan Sontag. He worked at Harper’s, where some of the essays in The Upside-Down World were first published. In this collection, Moser doesn’t spend his time to trying to be an art historian or critic. Instead, he takes a more open-ended approach of trying to solve the mystery of where this art came from and what or who created it. How was it nurtured? How was it viewed then and how is it viewed now? What impact did it have on him when he stood in front of it? All of these questions lead Moser to try and not only uncover the feeling a painting gave him as an observer, but also to try and find any information he could about the painters themselves — hint: there isn’t much. Moser doesn’t want to give a lesson in Dutch art. What he sets out to do is to write about the origins of being an artist and in doing so he asks tries to unravel the biggest question of all about any art-form: what does any of it mean? In doing so, he also wonders about the meaning of life.
At the same time, The Upside-Down World is a moving portrait of a young person growing into an adult and beginning to see life through a new filter. As Moser wanders through the halls of museums and the pages of monographs, he starts to see where he fits into the world.
Moser spoke about the book from his home in the Netherlands via Zoom. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you find time while you're doing all this other research to work on this project, which feels like a diversion, but also a way into your biography work to understand yourself and your craft?
As you know from doing any sort of multiple angled work, like a biography, you have all these moments where it's really intense and you have to do a lot of stuff and suddenly there's all this travel you have to do. But sometimes you're just sitting in a library for months on end, or just transcribing stuff, and it's fun to do something else. It's really intense and it lasts forever, but you can't do it all at once, biographies, because of the nature of them. It's so complex and sometimes there are lulls.
Also, the first stuff I started writing about when I came here was about art because I was so fascinated by what I was finding here and so stimulated by it. It seemed to be this huge subject that I kind of knew was a subject in the way that you go to a foreign country and know that the Germans are good at writing music or something. You kind of know, okay, well there's Beethoven and there's Brahms, but, unless you set your mind to studying it, you don't really know how much there is. Then once you do that, it just gets bigger and bigger.
When you go to the Dutch museums, you see all these names that you don't know. You've heard of the really famous ones, but actually the cool thing about Dutch art, from my perspective, is how many excellent artists there are that you've actually never even heard of. So I started writing little pieces here and there and over the years it kind of started becoming a book in my mind. I started realizing what I was actually doing, which was trying to record this kind of Bildungsroman of this kid who finds himself in this other country and starts looking for these kinds of answers. And the nice thing about being middle-aged is you realize you're not going to find an answer. You're going to keep finding questions and you have to sort of find ease, if that's a word, with the question, and then realize the questions are usually more interesting.
We're always looking for answers, but really it's the questions that we have to focus on. If you're not asking the questions, then you'll never find any answers or any more interesting questions.
Questions lead you somewhere. Answers don't really lead you anywhere.
You write at the end about the cutting and fixing the young person that was in this book a little bit. You came to this place and you saw all this art that you didn't know about, which is not surprising because there's so much art and you only get a snippet of it in your life and can only be taught so much of it at a time, but at the end, were you looking back at some of this stuff you wrote with a new lens into it?
What really changed was, I think, more my writing about it. I was really pretentious. When I look back at some of the stuff that I wrote, whenever I started writing the book, which was 2002 or something, I see this young person trying to sound smarter because I was really afraid of my ignorance. I thought that if I was going to write something about Rembrandt then I had to read every book about Rembrandt. I mean, nobody does that. It's also really boring to read all that stuff because it gets in the way of what you're actually seeing and experiencing when you have all that context around you. So I tried to use this lingo — this art historical language — and this is not a book about art history. It's a book about art, which is a big difference.
Art history is quite technical and it's often really, it's a quasi-scientific discipline, whereas looking at art and experiencing art and asking these questions is closer to fiction.
I think it's not good to look down at your former self because it's like these questions, you have to grow out of certain things. As a writer, you don't really realize you don't really need all that stuff, but it's like armor when you're a kid. You're trying to sound not dumb.
I think a lot of what's intimidating about art and about art history is that it does have this language that is sort exclusive.
There's one artist mentioned and the point I took away was the 27 colors of shades of black.
Yes. There's a certain confidence too that comes with writing. You become more confident. In painting, it's the same way. Like how Hals evolved. So I read this book as much about the art, but also about you and how you evolved as a person living in a place and through the artists you are you examining yourself in ways that I don't know you entirely realize at first, but start to figure out later.
What I like about this book is that it's kind of both, right? It is about me.
I talk about Clara Welker, who's this archivist in this little town who's deaf and who's kind of miserable and nobody likes her and she's kind of lonely. She writes this insane monograph about this deaf artist Hendrick Avercamp from the 16th and 17th century. You read this thing and you're like, what the hell is she talking about? This is really crazy. It is totally unreadable. It's impossible to follow what she's thinking, but you keep reading it and it's oddly compelling. Then you realize it's actually all about her.
If you're a scientific historian or biographer, you're supposed to stuff yourself down to the bottom of the suitcase. You can reveal certain things about yourself if you've done this kind of work— if you've done this kind of writing — and you can kind of smell it when the person is struggling to reveal their own self. For some people, I think when they don't do it or they're too successful at muffling their own voice, those biographies get really boring. It's like if you have a painting in front of you, you can write about it two ways. You can say, “this is what The Boston Globe said,” and “this is what The New York Times said,” and “this is what The Chicago Tribune said,” and “this is what famous person X and Y and Z says.” That's a way to not have to show what you think about it. If you have insecurities about that kind of thing, you can hide behind that. But I don't like that. I find I'd rather actually know what the person I'm reading thinks and who the person is.
You want some vulnerability in your narrator a little bit. We know someone is narrating this. I know you're writing this, you can't hide it,
You’d think that, but I see how people review biographies and they really review them in terms of what they think about the subject of the biography and not what they think about the biography, which are two completely different things.
A lot of the artists you write about aren't known, so you don't have to already have an ingrained opinion. You can say something is ugly allowed to, and then you're allowed to feel that way about other art.
No, you're wrong. You're tragically wrong. You're not allowed to say it's ugly because — I'm warning you — this is a huge taboo in art history and in art criticism. Contemporary artists it’s even worse because contemporary art often is ugly and it's supposed to be ugly. That's kind of the provocation of certain artists. It's really interesting that you say that.
If you say, “what a beautiful painting of flowers,” it sounds stupid to a lot of people in the art world. But, of course, beauty is taboo for a lot of reasons. I've written two biographies of women — two beautiful women — and it's very taboo to say, “what a beautiful woman.” A lot of people are really offended by beauty. They're more offended by beauty than they are by ugliness, interestingly enough.
And fun. People are really upset about things that are fun. I've realized this fun is not good. There's a lot of fun in this book.
Fun is also a word that sort of remits us to the entertainment industry. Sontag had a big question about how much of yourself do you have to put out there into the world of commerce and entertainment and consumption? But the fact is, I think that if something isn't fun, if something doesn't have that spirit of maybe taking you out of yourself in your normal world—making you laugh, making you cry, making you think— it's usually kind of boring. I think we look to art to have experiences that are a little bit different from what we might expect from other things that we experience,
So why did the Dutch art speak to you, especially as somebody that was coming from New York City where everything is either new or it's a refashioning of something? It's such a fast moving place, whereas this art feels kind of slow in a way.
That's a lot of the point of it for me, actually. You're the first persons to ask me about that.
When you saw the Vermeer thing earlier this year, which was this incredibly hyped Dutch crazy event, people from all over the world would call me and try to get tickets to Vermeer. Yes, It was a big thing that you could kind of name drop, but when you went into it, you saw the reactions of people. Yes, they all had their phones out. Yes, they were all sort of impressed with themselves for getting to go to Amsterdam to go see this show, but there was a real kind of spiritual quality to this experience for a lot of people, because what is Vermeer? I mean, it's absolutely nothing. It's just like a girl sitting at a table or something. I mean, there's nothing happening in these Vermeer’s. You can pretend there's a lot happening, and people have analyzed this symbol and that symbol, but really nothing is happening. The whole point is nothing is happening in a way. It's an invitation to stop, put down your fucking phone and just look at something. And that's so rare. I think that, to me, it explains the appeal of this art and that it’s anti iPhone. It looks good on your iPhone, but the experience of standing in front of a Vermeer is something that demands that you exercise muscles in your brain, and maybe even in your soul, that are the opposite of what you are usually invited to do most of your life, which is respond to the email, answer the text, read these 43 articles in The New Yorker that everybody's talking about. Really just sit down and look at something and think about it. It was a privilege.
I went three times and every time I got sort of interested in what it did to people. The paintings were all pretty known. There's only 35 from years, and if you live in Holland and you get to travel and go to museums, you've seen them. There was one from Japan that I hadn't seen, but everything else I'd seen. So you start looking at the people. You see some people are sort of ready for their closeup at the very beginning, and they kind of strut in and they're clearly putting it on Instagram. You watch those people go through and you saw they were changed by it. I was changed by it too.
I think the experience of spending a lot of time with a great artist, whether it's Clarice Lispector or Rembrandt, is one of the real privileges of life
Often authors are in conversation with other authors through their work — by either using or writing about or through some other work — and all of these artists seem like they were in conversation with each other in life and through their work.
That's what was really fun to me. You come into this museum, you come into the Rijksmuseum or something, and you have room after room, after room, after room, after wing, after gallery, after this, and you think, wow, this is a lot of stuff. But as you get to know them, you realize, actually, it's not that many people. Holland only has a million people at the height of the Golden Age. So if you know what any sort of professional culture is like—whether it's media or journalism or writing or law or all these other things—people know each other. So of course, these people all knew each other. Not only that, they were married to the sister of the grandson of the whatever. It was a really small community. They all knew each other, and they're all in dialogue with each other.
It's amazing sometimes to see just how closely they are in dialogue. There's a theme of a woman holding a balance, which you can see in Washington and is one of the great Vermeer’s. But there's also a Pieter De Hooch of the same theme, a little different set up, but same idea. And there's also Gabriël Metsu of the same thing, also a little different setup. They would go to each other's house and De Hooch and Vermeer lived right down the street from each other.
I think the “canon” kind of is in general is a conversation throughout culture, throughout centuries, and throughout genres. This is the only matter that I think I'm sort of arts conservative in. I think that it's really good to know about the Bible. I think it's good to know Shakespeare. I think it's good to have studied the musical tradition, the poetic tradition, the literary tradition, because so much of us is that. We don't even realize how much of ourselves is made out of our culture. I think Americans also now, especially, encouraged to be extremely individualistic. And when you come abroad, you realize how much of you is your culture.
It's terrifying in a way. You realize I'm 98 percent hand me down clothes.
When you went and saw some of these, you, did it kind of shock you that you would get come and connect with something like that??
When you live in Holland, the stuff you kind of see it a lot because it's just kind of around in the museums and in the culture on TV and stuff. Not as much as it used to be and, like everywhere else, I think they've also lost a sense of their cultural continuity, which is a shame. But I was surprised by how distant it really is.
If you read about the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer and the stuff they were discovering, it's stuff that's so obvious. You talk about the Bible and people believed that at the Battle of Jericho that Joshua stopped the sun. If you didn't say that was a totally accurate historical description, you could be put in jail and maybe even beheaded. People didn't know anything about anatomy. They didn't know anything about astronomy. You feel like there is this huge distance between what we know, what even a totally average person knows, and what they knew. And, yet, it feels so close to you.
There's a Rembrandt that's not in the book, it's Saul and David. It's in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It's a portrait of King David, a violent depressive. He’s about to throw his spear at Saul, who is a teenager playing the harp in the corner and looking really scared because they knew in the Middle Ages that music is good for depression, supposedly. It's an incredibly accurate portrait of a depressed, violent man and it is totally thrilling to think that even though they didn't know all this stuff about what is in a drop of blood or a drop of sperm or a drop of water out of the canal, which is all being discovered at the time, they did have this incredible insight into human emotions. And maybe the distance helps because you realize these are the things that have just never changed.
When you see something with a greater feeling at a great distance that is not a contemporary thing—it is not something in the news that you’re upset about—that is deeper and has more real human emotion, there is something about that that brings someone really close. In my book I really do like to talk about how these moments of closeness come about across great distance and how it does comfort you even though with Rembrandt it’s not necessarily a comforting message.