Fragrance historian Caro Verbeek must continue to train her nose. She has been building up a scent archive at home for twenty-five years. She stores bottles with scented plants and resins in Tupperware containers, and next to them is a historic perfume collection. Her seven-year-old son regularly asks: “Mommy, shall we recognize scents in your archive together?”
Verbeek (1980) has been calling for a revaluation of our sense of smell for years. As an assistant professor of olfactory heritage at the Vrije Universiteit, she investigates how artists use scent in their work and reconstructs what it must have smelled like in the past. She founded a course on analytical smelling, gives scented lectures, and during corona she organized ‘kitchen cupboard sessions’ via Zoom, in which she investigated odors from kitchen cupboards with participants. In the exhibitions she creates as a curator for various museums, visitors’ noses are never left alone.
For her dissertation (from 2020), she designed scents for paintings in the Rijksmuseum with fragrance manufacturer IFF and investigated their effect on visitors. She concluded that smelling makes you look better. “Take for example the Battle of Waterloo by Jan Willem Pieneman. Visitors suddenly look more at the dark sky in the painting, because the perfume contains the smell of rain. They pay more attention to the soil, because there are also notes of wet earth in it. And the smell of sweat makes visitors look more closely at the expressions of the people and animals in the work of art. Then it suddenly becomes noticeable that the soldiers are depicted heroically, while only the horses are in panic.”
Recently, Verbeek has been focusing a lot on the overlap between smell and other senses. Last week an exhibition curated by her opened in the Kunstmuseum The Hague. Visitors can experience, among other things, how scent influences their perception of music. “A first for a Dutch museum.”
Most art historians examine tangible objects, such as paintings, sculptures and architecture. How did you decide to focus on fragrance?
“That was a very specific moment, about twenty-five years ago. During my final year of master’s in art history, we visited the Venice Biennale. Right at the entrance I smelled a very strong, spicy smell, which bothered me. I thought the curators had had a chic dinner, from which the spice smell lingered. But the smell turned out to come from an immersive work of art called We Fish the Time by Ernesto Neto. For the first time I realized: scent can also be art.”
As a smell historian you reconstruct what it used to smell like. How do you investigate something that evaporates?
“I use nose witness reports, as I call them. People talk about odors in personal documents such as diaries and letters, or in recipe books, advertisements and posters. Sometimes I use the gas chromatography method. With an old perfume bottle, which apparently has nothing left in it, you can use physical processes to find out which molecules were once in the bottle. A kind of odor archaeology. And then my favorite: using your own nose. I stick my nose in archives, in depots, in all kinds of bottles, to find out what something smelled like, or even still smells like. Some smells remain intact for hundreds of years.”
Sigmund Freud delivered the final blow by stating that the ‘animal’ sense of smell became redundant when humans started walking upright
Why do you think we should value our sense of smell more?
“For centuries, the sense of smell was used very consciously, among other things to diagnose and cure diseases by trained doctors, to ward off evil, and to communicate with God.
“From the end of the nineteenth century, smell became less important. Enlightened thinkers already referred to smell, taste and touch as the ‘lower senses’. Sigmund Freud delivered a final blow by stating that the ‘animal’ sense of smell became redundant when humans started walking upright. Looking was elevated to the primary source of information. The rise of media further contributed to a visually oriented society. Radio, newspapers, TV and the Internet cannot spread odors. Some people still believe that our sense of smell is underdeveloped, while we have a very good nose.
“Fortunately, in recent years, scent has become popular again among artists and art historians. Museum professionals are now also embracing the sense. My own research shows that a sensory approach makes art and history more accessible to everyone. By introducing scent, information is retained better. No sense evokes emotions and memories as strongly as scent, making you feel more connected to the stories being told.
“We all smell all day long, but we no longer have the right words for it. I try to change that with my work. The words already exist, I mainly draw on historical scent vocabularies and recipe books. I teach people to reapply them.”
Your new exhibition ‘Base Line – music meets art’ in Kunstmuseum The Hague is the first in which you smound have used, a contraction of smell and sound. How does that work?
“In this exhibition about music and instruments, I focus on the interaction between smell and other senses. In historical sources, synesthesia, the mixing of sensory perceptions, has been used for hundreds of years to describe smells. The connection between taste and smell is well known, but synesthesia is also smelling colors or seeing sound. Most people intuitively know the answer to the question: ‘What smells like a lower note, tar or rose?’
“In the exhibition, visitors can listen to a historical piece of music by Claude Debussy or a modern piece by Ibo Bakker, while smelling three different scents. The so-called major chord scent is full and deep, the scent of the minor chord smells light and thin, and that for the single note C is not a compound but the single scent of jasmine. The idea is that visitors pay attention to different sounds in the music, depending on which scent they smell.”
“It’s the first time I smound used in an exhibition. Although it is not a new idea, as even Wagner based his music on scents that he diffused in his studio. The exhibition is based on the olfactory note ladder of chemist and perfumer Septimus Piessewho noted in 1862 that what we smell influences what we hear, and vice versa.”
You once said in an interview that you want to create a museum of lost scents, is that still your dream?
“I no longer think that we need a scent museum. Then you isolate the sense of smell, while we perceive the world with all our senses. In art they are still too often separated from each other. I want to restore that multi-sensory context, especially in existing museums.”
