Bob Haak (art historian)

Last updated
Bob Haak
Born 22 January 1926
Amsterdam
Died 15 May 2005
Amsterdam
Nationality Netherlands

Bob Haak (22 January 1926 – 15 May 2005) was a Dutch art historian known mostly as one of the founders of the Rembrandt Research Project.

Rembrandt Research Project Project to research Rembrandt works using forensic methods and building a database

The Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) is an initiative of the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), which is the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Its purpose is to organize and categorize research on Rembrandt, with the aim of discovering new facts about this Dutch Golden Age painter and his studio. The project was started in 1968, but has since become the authority on Rembrandt and has final say in whether a painting is genuine.

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From 1954-1963 he worked in the department of paintings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. From 1963 he was curator at the Amsterdam Museum, the museum which today is still the formal owner of the Rembrandt paintings on show at the Rijks, including The Night Watch . In 1956 he worked on the Rembrandt commemorative exhibition in the Rijks, where certain paintings were on show which hadn't been back to Amsterdam for decades, such as the pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit. [1] It was during this project that involved leading Rembrandt experts that Haak first got the idea to start a research project to assist in correct attributions. It was his opinion that much of Rembrandt's attributed work at that time was in fact the work of prominent Rembrandt pupils, each of whom deserved attention for their own qualities and achievements. The pressure to keep a Rembrandt attribution was (and still is) often too high however to do much about it.

Amsterdam Museum Heritage centre, Official Museums of Amsterdam, ICOM in Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Amsterdam Museum, until 2011 called the Amsterdams Historisch Museum, is a museum about the history of Amsterdam. Since 1975, it is located in the old city orphanage between Kalverstraat and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal.

<i>The Night Watch</i> painting by Rembrandt

Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch, is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. It is in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum but is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum as the best known painting in its collection. The Night Watch is one of the most famous Dutch Golden Age paintings.

The pendant portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit are a pair of full-length wedding portraits by Rembrandt. They were painted on the occasion of the marriage of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit in 1634. Formerly owned by the Rothschild family, they became joinedly owned by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum in 2015 after both museums managed to contribute half of the purchase price of €160 million, a record for works by Rembrandt.

Rembrandt Research Project

In 1968 he co-founded the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), together with Josua Bruyn, Jan van Gelder, Jan Emmens, Simon Levie, and Pieter J.J. van Thiel. The project’s aim was a comprehensive study of all of Rembrandt’s paintings and resolving the uncertainties surrounding the authenticity of many paintings, to which several scholars had turned their attention. That was the same year that Horst Gerson published his Rembrandt catalog raisonné, 1968, in which he drastically reduced the number of Rembrandt paintings to 420. The next year, in 1969 Gerson published an update of Abraham Bredius' 1935 catalog of 611 Rembrandt paintings with his attributions based on connoiseurship. Haak responded in 1969 by publishing his bestselling work Rembrandt : His Life, His Work, His Time in three languages. Though this book only included less than a third of the paintings mentioned in Bredius' 1935 work, it also included several works by contemporary artists and several drawings and etchings by Rembrandt that had previously not been published. It changed the way Rembrandt scholars viewed his paintings by putting them into the perspective of other contemporary works by Rembrandt and his pupils, whether it be etchings, drawings, or everyday political events. The scholarly rivalry continued during the course of the 1970s, but there was increasing pressure to publish catalogs and the long-awaited results of the RRP were published in three volumes as A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings between 1982 and 1989.

Pieter J.J. van Thiel (1928–2012) was a Dutch art historian known mostly as one of the founders of the Rembrandt Research Project.

Horst Gerson German-Dutch art historian

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Rembrandt catalog raisonné, 1968 catalog raisonné of Rembrandt works by Horst Gerson

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The declaration that the work was not done however, coming on top of controversies in the art world caused by the publications, resulted in friction in the team. Team member Ernst van de Wetering advocated a different approach based on a holistic study of the paintings, dismissing the age-old ideas of connoiseurship that were seen as being so controversial in favor of using non-controversial forensic techniques as well as archival research and provenance records. Haak was no stranger to the holistic approach in his study of Rembrandt's contemporaries and pupils. In 1982 he published The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, which was equally as well-received as his first book on Rembrandt and earned him the Karel van Mander prize in 1985.

Ernst van de Wetering is a Dutch art historian and an expert on Rembrandt and his work.

However, differences of opinion within the team came to a head in 1993, when Haak withdrew from the RRP, along with Bruyn, Levie, and Van Thiel. They left the further organization of the project to their fellow team member Ernst van de Wetering, who continued to publish another three volumes, finishing with the sixth volume which included a list of 348 autograph paintings in 2014.

Family and World War II

Haak was the son of Jur Haak and Jet van Eek. His father was a footballer in the Dutch national team, and a record high jumper and both parents were teachers at the Montesorri school in Amsterdam. The whole family was active in the resistance during the German occupation. In August 1943, Bob was arrested while trying to deliver a Jan Campert book to some family friends. The Nazis raided his parents house that night and, finding falsified documents (though failing to find the two Jewish people in hiding in the house), deported them to separate concentration camps. His mother died of "malaria" in Reichenbach in December 1944, his father died of exhaustion in Sachsenhausen in January 1945.

Jur Haak was a Dutch male footballer. He was part of the Netherlands national football team, playing 2 matches and scoring 2 goals. He played his first match on 17 November 1912.

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References

  1. ↑ Photo of the 1956 exhibition in the Rijksmuseum for the artist's 350th birthday showing this pair

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