It’s a salve to see people smiling in a museum exhibition, and smiling in an exhibition as serious and smart as Frans Hals at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Smiling people, whether they’re adults or among family, aren’t much to be seen in American museums, calculating and constipated as the museums are over race, equity, belonging, and not giving offense. Only masochists and idiots smile as they negotiate pins and needles. Hals (1582–1666) doesn’t evoke, much less invite, angst. His portraits, and almost everything he painted was a portrait, aren’t a task or a reckoning. They’re about joy and camaraderie and prosperity.
Frans Hals isn’t a retrospective. There are no conservation or connoisseurship sections, no reattributions, no comparisons with the work of other artists, and not much about his patrons. Each section is organized around a word cueing the senses. There’s “big,” “laughter,” “twinkle,” “small,” “bold,” and “smearing,” which doesn’t translate well, but I think the curators are after “loose” or, even better, “juicy,” or they could have meant to suggest a child smearing paint or jam or frosting on his face or, better still, the face of another child. Hals doesn’t fence with his brushes. That implies a passion for process or rules. Rather, he paints intuitively, confidently, and with a magic touch.
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