Unraveling a 15th-Century Whodunit
FRANKFURT — Here at the Städel Museum “The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden” is an old-fashioned whodunit. Almost exhaustingly erudite, it mixes up very great Netherlandish paintings of the 15th century with a few not so great ones to unravel perennial questions from galaxy academe about which artist painted what.
Why should we care? For the same reason film buffs debate if Howard Hawks was the real director behind “The Thing From Another World,” the sci-fi classic from 1951 he produced, rather than Christian Nyby, the credited director, or whether the 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear,” for which Norman Foster is listed as director, was taken over by Orson Welles, who played a Turkish police detective in it and whose other movies it partly resembles.
We should care because, commerce and the usual scholarly nitpicking aside, the debate is itself an excuse for looking closer, and because piecing together any great artist’s legacy is a bit like composing a novel, every chapter part of the artist’s grand narrative, without all of which the story is incomplete. And, well, also because good mysteries beg to be solved.
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Why should we care? For the same reason film buffs debate if Howard Hawks was the real director behind “The Thing From Another World,” the sci-fi classic from 1951 he produced, rather than Christian Nyby, the credited director, or whether the 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear,” for which Norman Foster is listed as director, was taken over by Orson Welles, who played a Turkish police detective in it and whose other movies it partly resembles.
We should care because, commerce and the usual scholarly nitpicking aside, the debate is itself an excuse for looking closer, and because piecing together any great artist’s legacy is a bit like composing a novel, every chapter part of the artist’s grand narrative, without all of which the story is incomplete. And, well, also because good mysteries beg to be solved.