Art: Hearty Hals

Red-eyed and reformed, the wealthier husbands of Detroit sifted back from the New York Automobile Show last week full of new orders and bicarbonate of soda. Meanwhile Dr. Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner had done his best to entertain their wives. At the Detroit Institute of Arts of which he has been director for eleven years, Dr. Valentiner opened the largest, most important exhibition of the work of Frans Hals ever held in the U. S. Of some 300 known paintings by that hearty old Dutchman, about 80 are in the U. S. Fifty of these were in last week’s show.

Frans Hals, born in Antwerp about 1584, was 20 years older than the great Rembrandt van Rijn whom he scarcely knew. He married twice, produced 14 children and a mass of canvases, but had on the whole, almost as dull an existence as the stolid, rich little city of Haarlem in which he spent most of his life. His talent was early recognized. He worked very hard, made a great deal of money, kept little of it. Because of his fondness for painting guzzling guitar players, beery burghers, laughing children, biographers have endeavored to make the domestic hard-working Frans Hals into a lowland Cellini. He is important because, while his greater contemporary Rembrandt was a universal genius who might have lived in any country, Hals was first & last a Dutchman, content to record beautifully the smug unimaginative faces of the clays of Holland’s greatest prosperity.

As usual, lean, immaculate Dr. Valentiner had a sensation to put his show into the news columns. Among the canvases in Detroit was a small self-portrait of Frans Hals, baggy-eyed, slightly disheveled (see cut). It had just been sold by Manhattan’s E. & A. Silberman Galleries to Dr. H. Klaus of Minneapolis. Helsingfors, Haarlem, and the Friedsam Collection in the Metropolitan Museum have other versions of the same picture. The last has always been considered the original. Not so, cried Dr. Valentiner last week. The Klaus canvas, he maintained, was the only genuine one.