Netherlandish painting as contemporary art

‘Netherlandish painting as contemporary art’ represents a section from the fifth chapter of the book Die Wahrheit der Niederländischen Malerei. Eine Archäologie der Gegenwartskunst, which has been published recently in German by Brill/Fink in Paderborn in an English translation. The general argument of that book can be found in the assumption that it is not the overcoming of the Italian tradition by singular modernist artists which made modern and contemporary art possible, but rather a subtle and ongoing transformation of the Netherlandish tradition into the institutional, medial and discursive spaces of modernity. The selected section will lead the reader directly into a discussion of painting in Delft in the 1650s, referring particularly to the conceptual framework of what is called ‘the analytical image’, which the author proposes to understand as one of the essential stakes by which painting began to struggle for its status as art in the modern sense.