Exhibit of the week: Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Through Oct. 10

Frans Hals has gained an exaggerated reputation for being a “sloppy” stylist, said Dan Bischoff in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Granted, the Dutch master (1582–1666) favored “ribald tavern scenes” and rendered them with loose, energetic brush strokes. But as the Met’s focused show reveals, Hals’s “bravura style” imbued his canvases with a singular freshness, and the artist’s preferred subject matter belies his knack for nuanced storytelling. For example, his masterful banquet scene Merrymakers at Shrovetide reads at first as a paean to indulgence. Flanked by hams, pies, and sausages, two bawdy characters “make obscene gestures” as they sidle up to “an apple-cheeked woman in satin embroidery.” But a closer look reveals an underlying edge, thanks to the picture’s unmistakable symbolism: Broken eggs dangle from ropes of sausage; “the bagpipe on the table is wrinkled and collapsed.” It’s a cautionary tale about excess, not a celebration.

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Too bad there’s “no bite to the moralism,” said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. At the end of the day, Hals was a contract painter, tasked with appealing to the vanities of his bourgeois clients, the nouveau-riche Haarlem merchants who “lined up at his studio door to be immortalized.” Hals might gently poke fun at their “waggish attitudes” and hedonism. Yet it never goes much deeper. “The tone seems stuck at a lazy bonhomie,” with everyone apparently high on “the same drug—an intoxicant imparting silly confidence.” Take The Fisher Girl, a “ravishing” canvas showing “a pretty, weather-ruddied urchin grinning as she offers a silvery fish to an unseen customer.” What message about poverty might Hals be trying to convey here? Try: “Everybody is happy in Haarlem!”

No one ought to hold it against Hals that he was a nonjudgmental observer, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The wonder of his work is its capacity to convey human character with freeze-frame immediacy: He “created some of the liveliest, most accessible images of men, women, and children in the history of European painting.” It was his visual style, not his story­telling, that would be embraced by modern art’s leading lights. Van Gogh famously marveled over Hals’s palette of “27 blacks,” while the French realists and impressionists adopted his loose handling of paint. That modernist sensibility comes through, too, in the fact that “his subjects, now at least 340 years old and counting, appear to inhabit a physical and psychic space that is nearly continuous with our own.”