UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the entanglement of temporality, realism, and representation in the making and viewing of Dutch art. I explore these issues through paintings, prints, and drawings by Dutch artists of Amsterdam made in the second half of the seventeenth century. Printed maps, paintings, drawings, and engravings of the destruction and ruination, both historical and imagined, of well-known Amsterdam structures, and images that have been understood to be straight-forward portraits of Amsterdam buildings and spaces are the main subjects of this study. This is not, however, a dissertation about architecture, or even, directly, about the representation of real architecture. Instead, I consider what happens in the intervals between representation and represented, the spaces where imagination transforms the experienced into the imaged. That is, this study begins with the assumption that what is represented in the works of art under consideration is not something that resides in the physical world, but rather the artist's imagining of what could, or should, or might exist in its place. This dissertation therefore questions the very structure of Dutch realism, arguing that the realism effect was actually the location of the severing of world from image.

I argue that Amsterdam cityscapes subvert their own apparent status as realistic representations of contemporary Amsterdam. Though these images have always been treated as mimetic, they actively resist recording the present city, sometimes including structures that have yet to be built, in other instances destroying edifices that were already extant. These images, by Rembrandt, Ruisdael and Jan van der Heyden, among others, visually remake the city in a variety of ways: as it was meant to appear in the future; as a nostalgic and idealized version of its lost, past self; as a decayed ambivalent version that is neither clearly past nor clearly future. Denying the present, seventeenth-century images of Amsterdam convey unease about contemporary urban experience and probe the uncomfortable limits of representation itself. These creative reconstructions of Amsterdam were a form of resistance to the modernizing environment of the city, for they catered to both a false nostalgia for a fictive ancient past, and a deep ambivalence about the modernization and monumentalization of the urban fabric. I argue that Dutch art, which appears to insistently transcribe contemporary experience, is also paradoxically invested in the erasure of the present and the construction of alternate realities. The realist mode favored by many Dutch artists was far more concerned with the construction of new paradigms for society than with the representation of contemporary life.