What I learned is that visitors have powerful and often highly personal connections with art. I was amazed, for example, to see how a drawing of boats by a 17th-century Dutch amateur, Jan de Bisschop, struck a chord with 21st-century loneliness:
A lonely shoreline
Boats sleep awash in shadow
Waiting for travel
Deserted boat looms
Emptiness pursues
White space invades
Beached on sandy shore
In suggested water friends float
Hope to sail again
The beauty lies in
The vast open areas
Of this empty life
De Bisschop’s Boats on the Shore and in Water is a sheet that we purchased two years ago from a private collector in the Netherlands. Before that it was owned by an important German scholar of Dutch art. It’s safe to say that this drawing, previously known by only a few specialists, has become the focus of thousands now that it’s on display at the Getty Center. Two-thirds of de Bisschop’s drawing is comprised of blank paper, and this reserve of paper is masterfully employed to suggest sky, bank, and water. Boats on the Shore and in Water is drawn by an artist whom 99 percent of our visitors have never heard of, and whose name is difficult to pronounce. Yet this depiction of 17th-century Dutch boats speaks to people. To our visitors, this drawing, with its broad expanse of negative space, evokes a sense of desolation, sadness, quietude, and journeys unfulfilled. Who would have thought that so much could be conveyed with so little?
The empty space here
Is bound to be filled in by
An ocean of thought
