THE WISDOM OF REMBRANDT

...I remember having been touched deeply by three of the last self-portraits...

...But it is not true that, in his years of sorrow, Rembrandt was a debt-ridden, toothless alcoholic, or that, during his lifetime, he was ever ignored, forgotten, or without commissions...

...Sitting at a window and looking sharply at his own reflection in a mirror, the artist is drawing his own portrait with a needle on a copperplate which rests on a thick tome and a pile of papers...

...He had a big, bulbous nose, and a coarse, flabby, round face...

...Even the young Rembrandt was not afraid of what most men fear—to be alone with himself, and to look searchingly into his mirror...

...An illustrated lecture on Rembrandt will be well attended...

...He has edited a number of art books, and his articles have appeared in Commentary, The American Scholar, and Arts...

...The other day, an American painter, on the opening of his retrospective show, explained his switch to non-figurative art by claiming that we all had "lost our face," living as we were in an "age of treacherous, harrowing notions of mutability, death and decay," in which "all of the old realities have dissolved...

...But I reject this easy ex planation...

...Yet he, too, was victimized by vanity...

...After the purchase of the Aristotle, the Metropolitan Museum, in its Bulletin, correctly stressed the relationship of this particular picture to the ewish Bride, to the Prodigal Son, and to some of Rembrandt's portraits: "His power comes from the vivid and compelling way in which he [Rembrandt] communicates to us the deepest and tenderest human emotions...

...But what needs no proof is that the man who made his first significant contributions to painting about the time that New Amsterdam was founded, is still, or again, popular in our age of science and mechanization, where workmanship and wisdom, and a firm sense of order and structure beneath the seeming spontaneity, are needed as guides more than ever before...

...None of this can be proven...

...I have stressed the self-portraits because they constitute a substantial segment of Rembrandt's oeuvre (there are more than a hundred, if one includes drawings and etchings...

...The transition is highlighted most clearly by an etching of 1648...

...But Rembrandt remains a proud, superior being who does not lose his dignity even after nearly everything has been taken away from him...

...Thereafter, in the last decade of his life, he wears his coarse working cloak, and he holds palette and brush, or an old manuscript, and finally little appears on the canvas except the head, always covered with a small cap or band, and the face that seems illuminated from within...

...When we look at the people in these pictures, we are strongly moved by our sense of intimate contact with them and their innermost feelings...

...Here, Rembrandt is loquacious about himself—he is successful, he has a pretty wife, and, dressed as a high-ranking army officer, he brandishes a tall glass in a salute to the pleasures of life...

...In his years of great success, when wealthy Amsterdamers waited in line to have him paint their portraits, he made himself look more handsome and elegant...

...It has always seemed to me that there is no need to overemphasize the dramatic or melodramatic elements in Rembrandt's story, when his career as a draftsman, painter, and etcher, through the sequence of his works alone, is full of a silent, but deeply touching drama...

...Gradually, emotion and suffering pierced their lines more deeply into the rugged, plebeian countenance...

...Typical is a self-portrait that I know only from reproductions...

...Earnest scholars have suggested that Rembrandt may have been close to the Mennonite sect or may even have been a member of that group that refused to lift the sword against their fellow-men, who abhorred fanaticism, and accepted no authority but the Bible and the enlightened conscience...

...What I deplored was the resurgence of melodramatic biography that quickly infestecf the popular and even the not-so-popular magazines...

...No one is expected in 1962 to draw or paint in the fashion of 1653—the year when Rembrandt signed and dated the Aristotle—but an increasing number of people have become tired of the output of the new abstract academy...

...The very story of the Aristotle should be enough to puncture the legend that Rembrandt was completely out of luck during his last two decades...

...I should like the public to study the Rembrandts in our public collections, especially the self-portraits, and then ask themselves whether the fact that we are now able to shoot a man into space who is able to travel 80,000 miles in five hours, and three times circle the earth, makes Rembrandt unnecessary, old-fashioned, obsolete...

...One, in the Museum of Aix-en-Provence, shows a freedom in the handling of pigment that anticipates certain late works by Goya, and also the vehement brush strokes of a Van Gogh (who was an ardent admirer of Rembrandt...

...However remarkable some of the achievements of Twentieth Century non-figurative art may be, the deliberate expulsion of the human figure leads to impoverishment...

...Confronted with those who have proclaimed the death of the' figure in the realm of art, I cannot help remembering Goethe, who asserted that it was art's aim to rentier the dignity of man within the compass of the human form...

...Others will not be so skeptical...

...So skillfully did the young artist disguise himself in this picture that he virtually erased from the canvas all the spiritual quality one attributes to Rembrandt...

...I hold with Sophocles that while there are many wonderful things in nature, the most wonderful of all is man...

...The famous self-portrait in New York's Frick Collection is the last one in which he painted himself in gorgeous array—majestically attired in a large velvet hat, a full cloak and sword belt, and holding a staff in his hand...

...Yet the painter's hand shows no weakening, the strokes are firm, the colors glow in the gold of autumn, and the figure is powerful and majestic to the last...

...Have they dissolved...

...Don Antonio Ruffo wrote to him from Sicily and commissioned him to paint the Aristotle as well as two other pictures, and he also bought a large group of Rembrandt's etchings...

...There is, finally, the most moving .of all pictures, the one in The Hague, the last of his self-portraits, the one which Rembrandt painted after his most loyal friends had died —first Hendrickje, and then his son Titus...

...They will feel that the great Dutch master can still impart to us the same message he brought to his contemporaries through the medium of his art: that the human soul lives on, even under the thick crust of a materialistic civilization, ever striving to reach its true destination...

...They are like milestones on the artist's road from youthful self-confidence, through a more sober, more realistic assessment of what should be given to the world and what might be expected from it in return, to the final peak of great wisdom, when the artist has become fully aware of his own personal value, and of the use-lessness of many of the things he had held in too high esteem...

...In it, Rembrandt portrays himself with his young bride, Saskia, sitting on his lap...

...Yet Rembrandt's fame had spread to the southernmost tip of Europe...

...It is true that the early part of Rembrandt's life was one of worldly success and that a number of terrible blows fell upon him before he was forty: his wife Saskia died prematurely, his financial situation deteriorated as his popularity as a portrait painter declined, and bankruptcy forced him, with Hendrickje Stoffels (the woman who came to live with him after Saskia's death), and Titus, Saskia's only surviving child, to move from their splendid mansion to poorer quarters...

...In those years some of the master's pupils, who catered to the public's desire for naturalistic effects which the mature Rembrandt scorned, were more successful in Holland than their teacher...

...Yet he did manage to recover his serenity, to judge by the self-portrait in Cologne, where he is seen laughing—laughing with the philosophical superiority of an old man who has seen through all the vanity of life...

...Rembrandt seems to have become an antidote to uncontrolled smearings on mural-size canvases, or to equally large rectangles covered with one color of paint...

...It is the most tragic of all his self-portraits...

...His conclusions were generally pessimistic, yet there was also a ray of hope: "Some people will say that Rembrandt's art, with all its pictorial power and originality, is too much out of key with our age of science and mechanization, of intellectual adventure and spiritual homeless-ness...

...Is nature exhausted...

...But I do trust Rembrandt, the man who teaches us the sanctity of life...

...the original is in the Dresden Gallery...

...For a number of years Rembrandt continued to portray himself in fancy dress, to wear a brocade cap under a red beret, to exhibit gold embroidery, to display a fur-trimmed velvet coat...

...In the first years after the war, there was a tendency to sneer at traditional and humanistic values and at culture in general...

...I do not trust the clever technicians who can one day shoot a dog into orbit, the next day a man, and the third day, a bomb pernicious enough to wipe out a metropolis, or even a country...

...Is it impossible to extract something new and worthwhile from the human face, and body...

...ALFRED WERNER, a leading art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...

...I believe that, in looking at the self-portraits and portraits this Old Master painted, we learn to identify them with men who knew how to carry their burden with dignity...

...What is it that leads me to be so optimistic...

...When New York's Metropolitan Museum acquired an important work by Rembrandt last year, tens of thousands came to see it, and still come...

...Many of those who cami to the Museum may have come out ol curiosity aroused by the sensationa headlines, but would they have stood in the same silent awe if, instead, one of the creations of what is called the New York school of painting— vast and wild non-figurative eruptions of pigment—had achieved the same enormous price...

...With the sadness of the gaze, the furrowed brow, and the totally disheveled appearance, it is, perhaps, the only pictorial indication that the artist had plunged to the depths of despair...

...the wisdom of Rembrand by ALFRED WERNER A decade and a half ago Professor Jakob Rosenberg of Harvard University contemplated the significance which an Old Master like Rembrandt still had for the American masses...

...there is now a visible reversal of this trend...

...One may wonder whether the poj ularity of Aristotle Contemplatin the Bust of Homer is due chiefly t the enormous price—$2,300,000-paid for it...

...Today, the number of those Americans who say that Rembrandt might be "out of key with our age" seems to be on the decline, and the pro-Rembrandt forces appear to be gaining...

...His hair is gray, his tired eyes look inward rather than at the spectator, and the mouth is as sorrowful as would be that of the Biblical Job after everything has been taken from him...

...Yet, as the years go by, the expression of the face becomes increasingly self-critical, and his eyes seem to question the world in general and the spectator in particular...

...The Futurist painters, who idolized the machine, shouted, "Down with Rembrandt...

...If this were so, Rembrandt's pictures would not speak to us as they do...

...External evidence, in the first place...

...We should not underestimate the sensibilities of our fellow Americans who have enthroned this great picture in their hearts despite the Museum's theatrical arrangement in the large hall and the watchful guard...

...In the last two or three years, a dozen books on the master have appeared, including an excellent novel by Gladys Schmitt...

...People should forget the lurid stories, many of them untrue, and, instead, concentrate on his work, especially on his self-portraits, which are, indeed, the only reliable documents that permit us to follow him year by year, as though we had a "film" covering four decades of spiritual and artistic growth...

...I believe that our insecurity, our worry is as great today as were the worry and insecurity of the men of Rembrandt's era who were involved in the Thirty Year's War, or, at best, were watching the catastrophe from a distance, never sure that they and their country might be spared...

...But I cannot join them...

...Young men are supposed to be vain, yet the young Rembrandt was not scared by the "ugly and plebeian face with which he was ill-favored," to quote from a Seventeenth Century biographer...

...Art needs the human body, the human face, to make its most moving statements...

...Others have tried to trace the mature Rembrandt's style to the mysticism of Jakob Boehme...

...In making a self-portrait, the artist has complete freedom—or he did have it in Rembrandt's time, since in the Seventeenth Century there was little demand by collectors for self-portraits of artists, and the painter, therefore, had to please nobody but his own artistic conscience...

...We have such self-portraits in Washington's National Gallery, in the Toledo Museum, in Boston's Gardner Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, and in New York's Frick Collection and Metropolitan Museum...

...If the purchase of the Aristotle had undesirable side effects, they are not to be found in the enormous price...

...Even in his youthful self-portraits there is a deep Rembrandt-esque shadow over the upper part of the full, disorderly, curly hair...