Shakespeare and Rembrandt
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http://news.ft.com/cms/s/15fc0bb4-78d9-11da-a356-0000779e2340.html
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Rembrandt at 400: master of the inner life
By Jackie Wullschlager
Published: December 30 2005 02:00 | Last updated: December 30 2005
02:00
Greatest painter in the western tradition? For humanity combined with
majesty, there are no rivals. Rembrandt speaks with the psychological
truth of Shakespeare and the spiritual gravity of Bach. Born almost
within 100 years of each other, all northern European Protestants at
the dawn of the age of modern individualism, these are the three
artistic creators who have, since about 1800, come closest to
replacing God for educated audiences in secular times.
Van Gogh, standing mesmerised before "The Jewish Bride" in the
Rijksmuseum, said he would give 10 years of his life to sit for 10
days before the painting. Chagall, fleeing Russia and unrecognised in
the west, consoled himself that: "I'm certain Rembrandt loves me". At
81 Picasso, beginning a series of self-portraits in 1963 with
"Rembrandt and Saskia", identified with the Dutch artist above all
others. And David Hockney, in the catalogue for his current London
show, calls Rembrandt's sketch "A Child Being Taught to Walk" "the
single greatest drawing ever made". Look, Hockney says, "at the speed,
the way he wields that reed pen, drawing very fast, with gestures that
are masterly, not virtuoso, not calling attention to themselves but
rather to the very tender subject". For artists, the sketch is
symbolic: Rembrandt has something to teach all draughtsmen.
Next year is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt, on July
15 1606, the son of a miller in the provincial town of Leiden. His
life followed an archetypal arch from early rebellion to worldly
success to failure and tragedy; he died in 1669 in Amsterdam, buried
in a pauper's grave. For more than a century, what Van Gogh called his
"heartbroken tenderness" was overlooked in favour of the keen realism
of his contemporaries Gerrit Dou and Nicolaes Berchem and, as with
Bach, it was only in the early 19th centurythat his towering
reputation wasestablished.
Since then there has been a Rembrandt for every age. To the romantics
he represented the highest spirit of man. For the Freudian 20th
century he was the greatest psychologist in paint. To postmoderns his
self-depictions are a portfolio of performances, a composite fiction
whose poses challengefixed identity: in Cologne's mocking
"Self-portrait as Democritus", heseems to laugh at portraiture itself.
Shakespeare has similarly meta-morphosed, yet there is a difference.
T.S. Eliot's dictum - that the greater the genius, the more separate
is the suffering man from the creative mind - may hold true for
Shakespeare and Bach, but makes no sense for Rembrandt. His whole
oeuvre is an autobiography in paint, a diary in pigment; his
personality is not lost on canvas but made universal through it. We
know what he and his wives looked like, and how he felt about himself
and about them. We can trace his journey of the soul and reflect on
our own, as his glittering young self-images, flamboyantly theatrical,
evolve into the inner dramas expressed in the fearless, broken late
self-portraits.
No artist ever changed so fascinatingly, yet remained so resolutely
himself, as Rembrandt did between Boston's innovative, suggestively
half-blurred "Self-portrait" aged 23 in a sweeping gold cloak, or
Dresden's exuberant "The Prodigal Son in the Tavern", where the
painter poses as lavish squanderer in burgundy gown and feathered hat,
his beautiful young wife Saskia on his knee, and his self-portrayal 30
years later as bankrupt, lonely painter in workmanlike cap, with flesh
sagging, body weary, proclaiming himself nevertheless master of all he
surveys: his inner life.
That relentless self-scrutiny still conditions how we think of art and
of ourselves. With it, Rembrandt set out a template of what painting
could be, how the physical matter of piled-up layers of paint,
brushed, scratched, trowelled on, pasted over, can build into an image
of what it feels to be alive, to face tragedy or death. His extension
of that sympathy to all his characters, contemporary and biblical,
male and female, is what makes them appear to breathe, think and feel,
even as Rembrandt, in the leap of imagination with which he depicts
them, always acknowledges the limits of observation, the mystery of
individuality. Thus his friend "Jan Six" is a glowing presence, with
serious eyes, warm face, philosophical look, yet enigmatic,
unknow-able, while the awkward, lovely nude "Bathsheba", reading the
disastrous letter from King David, has an expression of reverie so
complex, wrote Kenneth Clark, that "we follow her thoughts far beyond
the moment depicted; and yet these thoughts are indissolubly part of
her body, which speaks to us in its own language as truthfully as
Chaucer or Burns".
(snip exibition description)
From Caravaggio he took, via Dutch imitators, the defining feature of
his genius: the chiaroscuro method of playing brightness against shade
so that his figures emerge out of darkness into a blazing light at
once physical and spiritual. Thus paint, built up from the back of the
picture to the front with delicate glazes so that light suffuses the
background, carries the force of revelation. Light falls, as if by a
miracle, on the prophetic Hebrew words that the Babylonian king cannot
decipher in "Belshazzar's Feast"; his gold chain, promised to whomever
unlocks the language, sways heavily across the picture, casting
shadows amid whirls of dark translucencies and thick encrustations on
the barbaric ruler's brocaded cloak. Spotlights illuminate the
unsparing dissection of a human corpse surrounded by rapt dignitaries
in "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp", the painting that made Rembrandt's
name in 1632. Ten years later, light flickers from shade to dazzle as
the officers in "The Nightwatch" tumble into rowdy view, teeming with
energy so chaotic and informal that those who had paid to be
represented took offence, and the plunge in Rembrandt's fortunes
began.
That same year Saskia died, following the deaths of three of their
four children. Rembrandt began an affair with the nursemaid of the
last; when it turned sour he arranged to commit the woman to an
asylum, then lived with his maidservant Hendrickje Stoffels. She is
the model for the sensuous, intimate "A Woman Bathing in the Stream",
one of the National Gallery's most popular paintings, where she
recalls the bathing Susanna, Bathsheba, Diana - all women who awoke
dangerous desire unawares: in 1654, the year it was painted,
Hendrickje was publicly humiliated by the Dutch church when she gave
birth to Rembrandt's daughter. Soon afterwards Rembrandt was declared
bankrupt and his house was stripped; he was so poor that in 1662 he
sold Saskia's grave.
To modern audiences, worldly, godless, seeking spiritual resonance,
the shift from showy brilliance to withdrawal is the most compelling
episode in Rembrandt's oeuvre. (snip imaginary Rembrandt museum)
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