Portrait of the Artist
GELERNTER, DAVID
Portrait of the Artist Simon Schama Eyes Rembrandt By DAVID GELERNTER Rembrandt's face is the best-known, best-loved face in art history, and it is the ghost in art's mirror—humbling in its...
...In a whole series of later masterpieces (for example the Portrait of Jan Six, or Saint Bartholomew, or the Frick Self-Portrait), the subject looks right at you but thinks about something else...
...It was "the essence of the matter...
...Public taste had long since passed him by...
...Both paintings have arches in the background...
...Rembrandt's paint seems, at one point, "to have been inseminated with vitality...
...David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...His reds are orangey, his yellows golden, his greens earthy brown...
...In the seventeenth century, grief had perforce to be economically measured out, for there was a lot to go around...
...Why does he think so...
...Today's hot topics in academic art history—gender, race, class, Euro-centrism, multiculturalism, the oppressive tyranny of white males—he doesn't believe are even worth dismissing...
...The metal surfaces he depicts are apt to be gold, not silver...
...He paid the price...
...Take, for example, the characteristic Schama discussion of an important early Rembrandt called The Artist in His Studio (1629...
...It is a small, striking painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that shows the artist with a large panel on an easel...
...Well, ten years after the wedding, the Princess of Orange-Nassau had an affair with Jan Rubens, whose son was Peter Paul Rubens, who was greatly admired by Rembrandt...
...Raphael's takes place behind the plane...
...But for Schama, the "artistic context" largely means Rubens, with an occasional glance at Titian...
...A Rembrandt pearl has golden warmth, not pearly coolness...
...Probably to make sure that no one mistakes his work for academic prose...
...If there was a lot to go around, why not measure it out generously...
...The dispute about The Artist in His Studio tells us something interesting nonetheless about the picture: The reality it depicts is not quite right, not quite real...
...Fists" is a big word for Schama...
...The artist turns his head aside from the panel, toward the viewer...
...Rembrandt's Eyes is a biography whose subject isn't even born until page 201...
...Rembrandt has the moral stature of Giacometti, built on uncompromising artistic seriousness and integrity...
...Why does Schama write this way...
...The companion figure in The School of Athens extends his left hand outward, palm down...
...But Rembrandt had no desire to be a "pseudo-Rubensian maker of angel-choked altarpieces...
...The end of the twentieth century is a good time for a brilliant book about Rembrandt...
...But his unusual style of thought accounts also for his greatest achievement: the invention of a type of light that seems like a direct emanation of mind, that makes spirit visible almost in the sense that night-goggles make infrared visible...
...We see the panel from behind...
...But does Schama really mean that Rembrandt has beat Michelangelo at the game of "repudiating flatness...
...Giacometti kept remaking the same image because he saw each fresh attempt as a fresh failure, another failed effort to translate into paint, clay, or plaster the idea that obsessed him...
...If the hits are good, you forgive the misses...
...Now that we've got that straightened out, we are ready for a series of themes...
...Rembrandt's Eyes reads like an inspired first draft...
...Plain awkwardness lurks in the shadows: "To tell the truth, the three synagogues, one of them Neve Shalom, the Dwelling Place of Peace, housed in the old warehouse called 'Antwerpen,' were the result of another flourishing feature of Jewish culture...
...they don't all look alike...
...Schama certainly knows the relevant points of comparison, but he doesn't choose to discuss them...
...The golden light that fills his paintings seems like the actual stuff of spirit, the light of thought...
...Next, a long excursus about the eye in seventeenth-century painting, leading to a major conclusion: "When Rembrandt made eyes, then, he did so purposefully...
...But their similarities overwhelm their differences...
...Fair enough...
...Raphael's School of Athens (1510) also centers on two striding-forward figures, and Rembrandt's figures are, in a sense, the inverted mirror-images of Raphael's...
...The panel is much bigger than the painter...
...It is a rare achievement, and he deserves all the honor and glory he can get...
...But the artist he most resembles is Picasso—another man who thought not in pictures but by making pictures, another master of pictorial rudeness...
...Most of Picasso's best pictures are portraits, and many are self-portraits...
...Rembrandt's plan called for him to "beat not just Rubens and Titian at their own game but Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini as well...
...So what...
...Schama's comparison of Rubens's Het Pelsken (1638), a painting of his wife in her fur coat, only, and Rembrandt's spectacular Hendrickje Bathing (1655) —to choose one example out of many—is superb from start to finish...
...In Rembrandt's Eyes, Schama has taken the radical tack of writing about Rembrandt...
...Picasso too had an overwhelming technique, a strange sense of color, and a proclivity for print-making...
...Once you are inside, they envelop you...
...You can see a great deal from the vantage point of twentieth-century art...
...Do the figures in The Night Watch explode out of the plane more dramatically than, say, the crucified Haman on the Sistine Ceiling...
...it is said to have picked up its name because of surface grime...
...But today it stands degrimed—and it could still be mistaken for a night scene...
...he was unwilling (unlike Picasso) to satisfy the public's need for novelty, to twist and turn with the times...
...Writers routinely use the language of light to describe intangible, invisible states of mind: "illumination," "clarity," "spark...
...He died poor...
...Schama might have used the comparison to strengthen his point: Rembrandt's action tumbles forward out of the plane...
...Rembrandt is our man, and we are still awaiting a great book about him...
...For painters, such metaphors are harder to wield...
...Growing up in and around New York, I spent some of my happiest hours in the Rembrandt rooms at the Met—and there were several other major masterpieces a mere ten blocks south at the Frick...
...Schama is a historian first, an art critic second...
...Next: The picture is well done, and therefore proves that Rembrandt is skillful, and therefore that Rembrandt "is presenting himself" in this picture "as the personification of painting...
...The young artist's first masterpiece (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr...
...Schama easily distinguishes himself from most of his academic colleagues merely by taking art and scholarship seriously...
...Rembrandt's paintings have the beckoning aura of warm tents on cold nights...
...Certainly Schama is an author who feels no need to rein himself in...
...Schama could have drained the swamps of unnecessary verbiage (or at least built dikes), added art-historical background, cut out the strange images, calmed down the jittery prose...
...In fact Rembrandt's Eyes contains within it (like a nesting Russian doll) a complete biography of Rubens, free of charge— Schama is fascinated with the topic, but Rubens is box office poison and obviously had to be kept out of the title...
...He is a formidable and respected authority on the seventeenth century, and, more important, he is serious about scholarship and art...
...Fair enough...
...we conclude that to be a painter is a big, daunting job...
...Of the greatest Old Masters, Rembrandt is the only one who is decently represented in the United States...
...Picasso too was aggressively original...
...In fact when you compare the two, Rembrandt's painting seems less a repudiation of flatness than a repudiation of Raphael and the whole poised, balanced, crystalline, classical world of the high Renaissance—in favor of thrusting baroque virility...
...You might also conclude that this author takes an awfully long time getting to the point and sometimes never gets there at all...
...Do the bells hang upward or do magpies perch downward...
...Rembrandt was the greater artist and the greater man: He worked with unstinting, fanatic stubbornness at the same image again and again until his work was perfect and he died...
...Rembrandt's range was never broad, and grew narrower as he matured...
...Many others have had the same experience...
...But Schama's wild pitches tend to be not merely strange but illogical—as though they had been translated from some Oriental language, badly...
...he used the warmest palette of any great painter...
...It was no history painting, no conventional self-portrait...
...An intriguing claim—which demands some consideration of the art-historical context...
...It is the nearest art has to a conscience...
...We have no reason to think that Rembrandt saw himself as a failure—but every reason to understand his work in terms of an all-consuming compulsion...
...They offer you the intimacy of a friend who knows you so well, he can acknowledge your presence without interrupting his train of thought...
...Diamonds do come in several colors...
...The bells in an Amsterdam tower can be seen "hanging like magpies on a fence...
...They were two powerful, physically small, spiritually gigantic men whose lives were dominated by art and women...
...Certain aspects of The Night Watch are "breathtakingly scary...
...The Night Watch centers on two striding-forward figures who seem to emerge from the painted surface...
...Great art can be appreciated against an empty background, but can't be understood unless the background is filled in...
...But art historians who have reconstructed the room conclude that the figure's size is a trick of perspective, the consequence of a viewpoint that is surprisingly close to the easel: The artist is a normal-sized adult, and the consensus agrees with Schama that it is Rembrandt himself...
...he must therefore have imagined it, at least in part...
...This painting tells us plainly that Rembrandt is a powerful painter, a powerful man, a force to be reckoned with...
...It is a tragedy of today's intellectual marketplace that he didn't feel he had to...
...Schama's answer: "It was a quiddity...
...He left a trail of vulgar, rude, and scatological images that has upset critics and admirers for centuries...
...So what was it...
...Wherever you go in this book, you are guaranteed to meet sharp observations along the way...
...And what kind of dream...
...Schama's discussion, which covers twenty-five paragraphs, starts with the cracks in the studio wall and explains why plaster tended to crack in Amsterdam and what you could have done about it...
...Yet this panel that dominates the painter (who looks at us with a vague, cool, questioning look) is also (paradoxically) the best way to convey that the painter dominates his art...
...A few more paragraphs, a recapitulation of the "personification" theme, and we are done...
...Portrait of the Artist Simon Schama Eyes Rembrandt By DAVID GELERNTER Rembrandt's face is the best-known, best-loved face in art history, and it is the ghost in art's mirror—humbling in its humility, reproaching with its gently raised eyebrows every artist who plays the fool for fame or fortune, haunting with its intimate faraway eyes every other artist's attempt at art's fundamental rite of self-portraiture...
...But the process of retrieving the brilliant bits feels less like reading than like panning for gold, and calls for patience and fortitude: Schama has delivered not so much a finished product as a rumbling dump truck full of ore...
...Critics sometimes praise his range (of colors, moods, media, brush-strokes)—which is like praising the range of cut diamonds...
...His art extends the eye's capacity to see...
...Rembrandt's colors are relentlessly warm...
...The effect is like an elegant white-tutu'd corps de ballet performing in wooden shoes...
...no artist ever surpassed Rembrandt in wielding them...
...Instead of pondering, they draw or they paint...
...The passage is typical Schama...
...Tulp of 1632) waltzes into the story on page 342...
...Rembrandt's paintings nearly always have an immediacy that reflects an unusual cognitive personality: Every artist thinks in images, but some don't merely think in pictures, they think by making pictures...
...No author has written more comprehensively and convincingly on this theme...
...I don't follow the final "therefore," and Schama's big assertion seems extravagant and unnecessary...
...Modern scholars point out that the famous painting that has been called The Night Watch since the late eighteenth century is actually a daylight scene...
...Any bold, venturesome writer hits sometimes and misses sometimes...
...It could have been more...
...The "context of Rembrandt's art" means, to Schama, the culture, politics, and texture of daily life in the seventeenth-century Netherlands...
...He is a more formidable character by far than a big fisherman next to a small fish...
...Which is surely true, but was obvious before we started...
...Rembrandt made obscene pictures of them...
...Simon Schama would be just the author to write one...
...The artist seems so tiny compared with the panel that some scholars have guessed it is the fourteen-year-old Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt's student...
...His analysis of The Night Watch, for example, is the usual long ramble, with sharp observations embedded along the way like needles in haystacks...
...Rembrandt's figures seem detached, in a remarkable way—while looking you straight in the eye...
...Another artist might have thought obscene thoughts about his critics...
...Evidently the bride's uncle fell off a horse and broke his arm...
...But the "context of Rembrandt's art" might also mean Rembrandt's place in art history, his artistic relationships to the great men (largely of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries) who created our modern pictorial sense...
...Several paragraphs later, he works around to an important question: How would the artist's contemporaries have understood this painting...
...Picture a small fisherman next to a big fish...
...a riddling road to illumination...
...it is therefore "a picture of in-sight [sic]"—a picture of what the artist thinks, not what he sees...
...But his book should be evaluated on its own terms...
...Rembrandt hates blue so much (and ambiguity so little) that he omits the blue sky even when a painting seems to call for it...
...Time magazine would not have written him up...
...the artist's early efforts "are what they are: a fistful of bare-knuckled energy...
...And furthermore it was "a subtle provocation...
...In The Night Watch, the corresponding figure extends his right hand outward, palm up...
...Raphael's left-side figure extends his left arm upward...
...His hatred of blue verges on the pathological...
...Rembrandt recreated one image again and again (or reinstalled one spirit in a long line of bodies) with a fanatic stubbornness unequaled until Alberto Giacometti's work in the twentieth century...
...The historian Simon Schama is an admirable man...
...Then an interesting observation: The tiny figure conveys "a sense of creative reverie, the waking sleep which writers on art since Plato have characterized as a kind of trance...
...The effort of extracting wisdom from the copious ore of Rembrandt's Eyes is complicated by Schama's prose...
...CBS would not have covered the funeral...
...The celebrated "Rembrandt Look" appears on the faces of men and women, old and young, Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks, Biblical heroes, ancient Greek philosophers and modern merchants...
...That must have been a messy procedure...
...Rembrandt's right-side figure extends his right arm downward...
...But his method sometimes leaves gaps and potholes in the discussion—which are the last things you would expect in a seven-hundred-page book that does not suffer from terseness...
...At another point, Rembrandt's colors "are all stuck on the canvas as if the savages themselves [who are gathered round a table] were clutching it in their fists...
...The book could profit from "You are Here" locator maps every few pages...
...the image has the disturbing, vaguely unreal quality of a dream...
...We find ourselves at one point in the middle of Prince William of Orange-Nassau's wedding festivities— in 1561, nearly half a century before Rembrandt's birth...
...The sharp insights keep coming, sometimes with the force of revelation...
...the something that made things (in this case schilderkunst, the art of painting) just exactly what they were...
...His big claim is that Rembrandt has used this painting to "repudiate" flatness more emphatically than any artist had ever done...
...Rembrandt could not have transcribed this scene directly from a mirror...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 15
