TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052592/0525400.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 9.0 KB | 180 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 60

Really Rembrandt?


An exhibition in London demonstrates that many works attributed
to the great master, including some famous and much loved ones,
were painted by his assistants

By ROBERT HUGHES


    You can't often compare painters with writers, because of
the apples-and-oranges problem of imagining links between
dissimilar arts. But in the case of Rembrandt van Rijn you can,
and the temptation to do it, if not carried too far, can hardly
be resisted. He was the Shakespeare of 17th century painting,
even more so than Nicolas Poussin was the Milton.

    That is the first thing that the exhibition "Rembrandt:
The Master & His Workshop: Paintings," now in its closing week
at London's National Gallery, makes clear. Rembrandt was not a
"literary" painter, as his intense devotion to the muck and glow
and substance of paint attests. But he was an incomparably
theatrical one. In his work, the idea of a figure painting as
tableau is exchanged for that of outright drama: deep, dark
backgrounds and narrative light picking out the hierarchy of
character; turbulent crowd scenes; an eye for all classes, from
cobblers to kings; a vast range of expression in the faces and
gestures; moments of shock (the blade grinding into the clumsy
giant's eye in The Blinding of Samson ((1636)) has the same
appalling impact as the blinding of Lear) alternating with
passages of the most lyrical eroticism, reflectiveness,
inwardness. Then, too, there are the shifts of language, the
rough and the smooth, and the long series of self-portraits,
Rembrandt's time-lapse scrutiny of his aging, from smooth-faced
boy to old potato-nosed master, which incarnate the very essence
of soliloquy.

    None of this was completely new in painting -- you have
only to think of Titian, Rembrandt's father figure and model,
and of Caravaggio, whose dirty-feet realism had such an impact
on the Dutch master when young. But Rembrandt put the elements
of dramatic narrative, character description and history
painting together in a way that had not been attempted before,
and has scarcely been rivaled since.

    Moreover, his art -- another Shakespearean parallel --
always testifies to the fact that when a great artist breaks the
mold, the result still pays homage to the mold itself. There can
hardly be a more intensely moving portrait of a woman's naked
body than his Bathsheba with King David's Letter (1654). At
root it is a Titianesque conception, heir to those sumptuous
Venetian nudes; but Rembrandt avoids idealism, suffuses the real
imperfect body with thought and a sense of moral reflection,
re-creates the structure of flesh in terms of an amazing
directness of "rough" brush marks. We think of paintings like
this or the later Kenwood Self-Portrait (circa 1665), with its
sketchy construction (arcs in the background, a near Cubist
flurry of angular brush marks to indicate palette and brushes),
as being a long way from the Italian Renaissance, but in fact
they are grounded in it and in Titian's late manner.

    No Dutch painting is more like a Titian than Rembrandt's
Moses Breaking the Tablets (1659), the furious patriarch with
a shining face, rearing up from the brown murk to smash the
tables of the law. The style of Rembrandt's maturity was so
totally his own, even in the way it used the past, that it seems
inimitable. But in fact it was widely and constantly imitated,
especially by his own assistants, and there begins the problem
of attribution with which the Rembrandt Research Project, a team
of leading connoisseurs and Rembrandt specialists from Europe
and the U.S., has been wrestling for the past decade.

    The National Gallery's exhibition, previously shown to
packed galleries in Berlin and Amsterdam, is meant to explain
the committee's methods and make the case for their soundness.
It consists of two sections. In the first are 51 paintings now
agreed to be indubitably by the master -- the finest "pure"
Rembrandt show in memory. The second consists of a dozen
"Rembrandts" now assigned to artists who worked with him; each
of these is shown with two or three other paintings known to be
by that pupil. In all, it is a wonderfully illuminating show,
and it makes an unanswerable case for purifying the Rembrandt
canon -- without touching a third category, that of deliberate
forgeries.

    "I should be happy to give 10 years of my life," said
Vincent van Gogh to a friend as they were gazing at Rembrandt's
Jewish Bride in Amsterdam in 1885, "if I could go on sitting
here in front of this painting for a fortnight, with only a
crust of dry bread for food." This (more or less) describes the
fate of Rembrandt's own apprentices. The Jewish Bride (circa
1665) is Rembrandt through and through; but many Rembrandts are
not, for the simple reason that (contrary to romantic legends
of his poverty and his rejection by the stuffy bourgeoisie of
17th century Amsterdam) he was, for most of his adult life, an
extremely popular and successful artist working within a guild
system that had changed relatively little since the Middle Ages.
Thus he had apprentices, dozens of them over the years, whose
work he sold for his own profit, and who sometimes worked on
his own canvases. And they paid him, not vice versa -- 100
guilders a year for the privilege of learning in the studio.

    But what young painter in his right mind would not want to
be with Rembrandt? He was so fashionable that, as one of his
more classical-minded contemporaries sourly complained,
"artists were forced (if they wanted to have their work
accepted) to accustom themselves to his manner of painting: even
though they themselves might have a far more commendable
manner." Small planets in the gravitational field of an immense
talent, some would eventually break out of orbit to make
independent careers for themselves, but all of them -- while
they were with Rembrandt -- had to work his way or not at all.
Hence the peculiar fact, a connoisseur's bad dream, that the
very parts of Rembrandt's work that seem most uniquely his --
the "unconscious" hookings and flourishes of line in some of the
drawings, for instance -- were just what apprentices like
Ferdinand Bol were best at imitating. The more gifted ones would
work on parts of Rembrandt's pictures. Some of the assistants
were brilliant painters, like Aert de Gelder or Samuel van
Hoogstraten. Others, like Nicolaes Maes, Willem Drost or the
feeble Isack Jouderville, would hardly be remembered but for the
fact that they worked for him.

    Unlike Rubens, Rembrandt was not particularly scrupulous
about saying which pictures were entirely by him and which were
done in part by assistants, and the result -- coupled with the
fact that when his reputation recovered from its short eclipse
after his death, everyone who owned a brown luminous 17th
century Dutch portrait wanted it to be by Rembrandt -- has been
a web of confusion.

    Wishful thinking has been an immense factor in Rembrandt
attribution. More than 1,000 paintings have been ascribed to
Rembrandt, and they cannot all be by him. The reductionists' ax
of the Rembrandt Research Project has fallen on paintings that
no one with half an eye, after seeing this show, could go back
to thinking of as Rembrandts: How did the light, high-colored,
almost garish Feast of Esther by Jan Lievens, or the finicky
execution of Gerrit Dou, ever get mistaken for his?

    But the research proj ect has also cut out some much loved
paintings, once considered essential masterpieces, milestones in
his art, like Berlin's Man with the Golden Helmet. This has
caused tremendous indignation in some quarters -- a fuss
comparable to the moment when Bernard Berenson made his name as
an enfant terrible by downgrading half the supposed canon of
Lorenzo Lotto nearly 100 years ago.

    Some Chicagoans will be unhappy to see one of their
favorite paintings in the Art Institute, the cat-eyed,
Balthus-like Young Woman at an Open Half-Door, signed "Rembrandt
f. 1645," being given to Hoogstraten. And hell may freeze over
before everyone accepts the revisionist view that the sublime
Polish Rider, in New York City's Frick Collection, is really by
"Rembrandt (?)."

    Nevertheless, the crux of the matter is summed up in a
foreword by three directors of the show, Henning Bock of the
Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, Henk van Os of the Rijksmuseum and the
National Gallery's Neil MacGregor: "If Dou, Drost and
Hoogstraten are the true creators of paintings that have for
years delighted and inspired us [as Rembrandts], it is clearly
time we took another look at them as well. Rembrandt remains a
giant . . . But he is a giant surrounded no longer by pygmies,
but by artists of real stature, whom we ought to know better."
What seems a loss may turn out to be a gain, though one wouldn't
want to have to explain that to the collectors whose swans have
turned out to be minor Dutch geese.