So what was the nature of my Rembrandt revelation? Svetlana Alpers, in her famous book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, argued that Dutch painting should be understood as describing the world as it is seen, rather than as imitating or alluding to the world (or texts, or language, or traditions). She put together the northern European interest in seeing the world more clearly through telescope or microscope with the close attention to detail that appears in the earliest Dutch Madonnas and landscapes, and then lets the concern with seeing guide her through the paintings. She was able to notice new details about the experience of seeing -- how, for instance, landscape artists like Ruisdael played with the placement of the viewer. As the viewer of a Ruisdael landscape, where exactly are you standing? It's not clear: perhaps a neighboring hilltop? A low-hovering helicopter? And she puts into words the marvelous feeling that many Dutch landscapes convey, the sense that there's a world beyond the picture frame, that the frame of the painting exists almost by accident, that it doesn't act so much as a window as it does a surface.
And with the surface is where I started to see Rembrandt afresh at the Mauritshuis. I've never had much patience with Rembrandt's meditative studies, especially the self-portraits. (Dramatic corporate pictures like Nightwatch captivate me.) There are too many of these studies, they seem gimmicky, they're burdened with the weight of too many pretentious scholarly claims (the invention of the individual, etc.), they often convey a sense of self-pity that gets on my nerves (though not as much as the complacency of your standard Rubens portrait). This 1669 example above, in fact, fit all these categories, and when I first entered the room I walked by it without stopping. I went instead toward his Homerus, kitty-corner to the self-portrait.
For many minutes (was it Robert Hughes who said you need to look at a painting for an hour to get a sense of it?) I just couldn't find my way in. Homerus is a brown study, "rich with pathos" you might say. I was about to give up: and then I caught something that doesn't show up on the tiny copy above, a sheen of almost sheer paint in broad vertical stripes on the right-hand side, almost invisible unless you look very closely. I couldn't identify the color: brownish-black? But immediately it struck me as a much subtler version of the dramatic stripy effects in Francis Bacon's Innocent X -- to the degree that I began to wonder whether Bacon's Study was as much a reaction to Rembrandt as to Velasquez. There was something happening on that surface that, I thought, had nothing to do with the clichéd questing blind gaze of the figure. But then (I thought in the next moment), the effect relates somehow to the subject of the painting: it's inches away, one can only ignore the figure by doing experiential violence to the work. Perhaps simply virtuoso texture-creation? Or something else: not the veil before the poet's blind eyes, exactly -- the near-evanescence of the effect made it impossible for me to interpret it as in representational terms -- but a gesture toward the cloudy distance that separates us from Homer, a gesture toward the impossibility of representing the distant past.
Re-energized and now curious, I turned to the self-portrait. Again it eluded me: I felt impatient and bored. Then I began to notice the red and ochre threads of paint in Rembrandt's grey hair--or rather, since I'd noticed them earlier, this time I started to think about them. Ghosts of color, they rusted his head, combining with the black and grey patches in the pinkish face to create the effect of fleshy corrosion. The theme is extended in the bloody scrapings of vermilion over the black waistcoat. And here the astonishing mastery of paint, which never ceases to astonish, did the work stylization nearly always does: it distanced the pathos, made the painting a matter of surfaces rather than depth (the false depth that tends to self-dramatize both the subject and the viewer of the painting), re-made the work as something not to fall into but to reflect on, in the deepest sense of the word "reflect".
I still have more to see in Rembrandt, but this was a major step. Today I travel to the Franz Hals museum in Haarlem with the other NIAS fellows. I hope to see more Ruisdaels and -- something I wouldn't have said before Saturday -- more Rembrandts.
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