The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

My new book is coming, and some other news

Dear friends,

I’m happy to announce that my new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, is coming soon. It’s a book I’ve been working on for twenty years, ever since I came to the Netherlands. I was twenty-five.

I didn’t think of myself as an immigrant. Americans prefer the word “expat.” But it turns out that that’s what you are, or what you become, when you go to someone else’s country. And one thing you learn is as an immigrant is that nobody cares about foreigners. Outside your immediate circle, you’re extraneous. You talk funny; you don’t really belong. For a lot of people, this feels alienating. For me, it felt like freedom. It felt like an exemption from the ways of thinking and being that I had inherited from my own culture.

I wanted to keep that freedom. I didn’t want to start caring about Dutch matters as I did about American matters. I felt myself slipping into it. If you watch enough Dutch news, you eventually find yourself thinking: I can’t believe they are raising the price of textbooks in Groningen by four percent! Your skin starts to crawl at the sight of ghastly politicians. (Everybody’s got ‘em!) You roll your eyes at trashy celebrities. (Ditto!) You start to worry about traffic and weather and the rearrangement of the garbage collection schedule.

All this means that you slowly but inevitably start losing sight of what is magic about a new place.

I wanted to keep the foreigner’s eye. And the way I did it was by plunging into the Dutch museums.

If you know this country, you know that the museums are fabulous. There are lots and lots of them. And inside them is a whole galaxy of artists that you, or at least I, have never heard of. You’ve heard of Rembrandt. You might love the handful of paintings by Vermeer. But what is incredible about Dutch art is how much of it there is beyond the most celebrated names. How many geniuses are hanging on those walls. I wanted to know more. I started writing about them. First just as little diary pieces, as a way to remember who was who, a way to keep the names straight. And then, tentatively, as a way to record an education in seeing and understanding. As a way of keeping this new place new. A way of hanging onto everything the word “Europe” means to someone from Texas.

This book is a record of that education. It starts with Rembrandt and goes through the great genealogy that leads from him, in a few short years, to Vermeer: through Lievens, Bol, Flinck, and Fabritius. The second part is about “genre”: the artists who took the intellectual revolution of Don Quijote, published in 1605, and realized that a painting could be like a scene from a novel. It didn’t have to show anyone in particular; it didn’t need to illustrate a scene from religion or mythology. These artists include Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, and Gabriël Metsu. Part three is about some of the eccentric one-offs in Dutch painting: Avercamp, Hals, Saenredam, Potter, Ruisdael, Eckhout. And part four is about two still-life painters who took the tradition into a new century at the end of the Dutch Golden Age: Rachel Ruysch and Adriaen Coorte.

It’s hard to say exactly what this book is. But I can say what it isn’t: a work of art history. It’s a record of my responses to these artists, as one person getting to know another person.

And, quite independently from my own writing, the book is going to be beautiful. I’m extremely grateful to my publishers at Norton for making it so rich with images: something like 130 in total.

It’s coming on October 10. If you want to pre-order it, you can do so here in the US and here in the UK. Or from your local independent bookseller here.

(I’ll send around links to editions in other languages, including Dutch, when I have them.)

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On Sunday, I’m joining Celeste Marcus from Liberties Journal for the inaugural episode of a new series called Libertellect. Since this is a new series, you can use the code LIBERTELLECT to get a free ticket. I’m excited about this one: first because I’ve never talked about this new book before, and second because Celeste is a painter herself. And a great person and friend.

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In other news — amazingly, heroically: my last book has just come out in Ukrainian. That’s right. This whole big brick of a book was translated and published while the missiles were flying overhead. I am deeply indebted to my publisher, Anetta Antonenko, to the translator, Natalia Klymchuk, and to everyone who sees the importance of a book about this person, at this time: about a person who risked her life in Bosnia to stand up for the same values that the Ukrainians are now standing up for now. Sontag stood for everything that we mean by the word “civilization.” So do Anetta and Natalia and their colleagues and readers in Ukraine today.

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Finally (it’s been a long time; I am trying not to overload this email with news): I spent a great evening with the legendary photographer Sally Mann at Paris Photo. Our discussion was published in Gagosian Magazine.

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With warmest wishes and thanks,
B.