Strokes of Genius: Rembrandt’s Prints and Drawings
The National Gallery of Art (through March 18th)
Note: the following review was “derived” from its fellow, which was done a month before. Since that time, the photography exhibit closed, which has given me an opportunity to explore one man’s life and work in somewhat greater detail. This piece was written for WAMU’s “Metro Connection.” I apologize for the repetitions.
The stuff or ordinary life is by terms repellent and irresistible; small and grand; impossible to love yet curiously endearing. We profess not to like it: hence our well-planned vacations and Super Bowl weekends. We dance around it, we look in with trepidation, we escape.
The mundane-obsessed artists of the past have been given a bad rap – unless they happen to be among the art stars historians have singled out for art appreciation courses - or blockbuster exhibits people stand in line for all over the country. Yet sometimes there is a fortuitous collision of the prestigious and the plebian; great, glittering success and artistic gravitas. Aside from Andrew Wyeth, the punching-bag of choice for the post WW II era, no living artist might warrant that description. Rembrandt is doubly useful then: as a poster boy for the Great Artist Gone Bad and as a genuinely tragic figure about whose life a great deal more is known than Shakespeare - who was a good businessman and not “artistic” – except on the page.
Among long-dead artists, Rembrandt is perhaps the epitome of what the French call an artiste manque. He lived larger than his means, fell out of popularity, and was damned for it. (No second act for him either.) He could not marry his mistress because of legal complications. And, finally, he was evicted from the house his earnings as a fashionable portrait painter built – a crowning humiliation from which few men in those days recovered completely. Rembrandt is perhaps our greatest household word, next to the public relations-minded Picasso, who wanted to be.
In his last years, Rembrandt became the Shakespeare of our painting, dissecting his own frailty with a sternly compassionate sensibility that can seem unduly critical. You don’t see self-portraits like his these days. Rembrandt’s fall from grace had made him a thoughtful man, with his humanity fully intact. Rembrandt’s personal problems broadened it, just as Shakespeare’s had. He took from the raw material of his own life its whips and scorns and transmuted it; Rembrandt’s later self-portraits are nothing less than touchstones of human progress.
Rembrandt had a natural affection for ordinary people and drew them without condescension. Since this particular exhibit deals with Rembrandt’s drawings and etchings, we are privileged to see Rembrandt working directly: on himself, his mother, his neighbors, his mistress, his wife – a living community replicated on every block in every city or town in the entirety of human civilization.
Without going into particulars of subject or technique, I can’t recommend this show enough. I’m only sorry that Streets of New York, an excellent counterpart, could not have run longer. But it was a master-stroke to give us such a timeless spectrum of human activity, first with chalk, crayon, and etching needle: and, finally, by means of the photographic lense.
Like any conscientious photo-journalist, Rembrandt embraced the moment while revolting against popular conceptions that define beauty – even if they were not yet codified. Rembrandt’s people appear as they are – that is to say, they’re not dressing themselves up psychologically for A Portrait. They’re there and you see them as they and their neighbors saw them. Immediacy is Rembrandt’s forte; it is, in fact, the essence of his art overall. Rembrandt unintentionally liberated painting from the conventions of representation, though, as his graphic work easily demonstrates, his draftsmanship was unerring. His sometimes scratchy, searching line scoped out a physiognomy with a kind of tender precision, charting for us an inimitable personality. The human stain, as Phillip Roth put it, is everywhere in these faces. In mirroring the particular, Rembrandt walked into a timeless dimension – a privilege few artists ever know.
It is regrettable that Weegee’s photographs have been taken down. Though his milieu was New York City’s thriving underbelly, I think Rembrandt would have gotten a kick out of the man. In one of Weegee’s best photo-narratives, a homeless lady squawks at two simpering socialites heading for their seats at the opera. By his own admission, Weegee staged this picture. A master orchestrator himself, Rembrandt might have said: “Hmmm. You can do that, huh? Why not?”
Why not indeed?
The show is well-planned, with a decent historical overview and more than adequate spacing between images.
In a broader sense, I can only hope that the “real” Rembrandt might get people talking. So much art today deals with political realities or technological gamesmanship. There is a school of sanitized realism which can be paralleled with the political blinders we are just beginning to yank off. An exhibit that is so plainly illustrative – apart from its undeniable artistic values – is a possible sign of an emerging consciousness, a shift toward a perception of us as a community and not just a bunch of ragged – and not necessarily rugged – individualists.
