Insight
Provocative penultimate paragraph from Algis Valiunas's Weekly Standard essay for the Rembrandt year (via Arts & Letters):Although the current academic industry is out to make the chief interest of Rembrandt's painting "the way he applies his paint" (in the words of one fashionable art historian), the ordinary cultivated viewer can always hope to find in him the traditional artistic virtue inherent in the word vision: a species of wisdom, connected in representational art with insight into human, inhuman, and divine nature, as acquired by the most attentive observation, a working knowledge of great literary texts, and some sharp-elbowed acquaintance with philosophizing.
posted by paul bowman @ 9:00 PM
2 Comments:
I'd like to see a great deal more of his work than I have. Not counting photos in books, I've only seen one painting - a "lesser" work, tucked away in the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna. I was surprised at how *small* it was. The viewer really had to lean forward and *look*. And of course there were all the shadows to contend with...
Seems to me there's a Rembrandt in the Legion Hall in San Francisco. We visited, but I walked right by it. Again: small. Pretty remarkable, given how his better paid peers were accustomed to painting canvases the size of a garage door.
If you could work out justification for packing up the family and making a little jaunt south, you could check out a number of Rembrandts in collection at the National Gallery in D.C. If you could do it before mid-March, you'd get to see the exhibit showcasing prints & drawings — which, in my relatively limited experience as a viewer of great works, I confess I've found as compelling as any of the paintings I've seen. (I still haven't seen this, to tell the truth. This mention is a good poke in the ribs for me, to get on it.)
The NGA did an exhibit last year, or the year before, of 'religious portraits' by Rembrandt (there's a nice Flash presentation to be looked at, btw); and I managed to see it, thankfully. It's a little embarrassing to consider how accessible these things are for us who live around here. All one's got to do is set aside half a day and drive down & take Metro to the Mall — and it's all free. It's enough trouble, though (especially if you're the sort of 'busy' person this mid-Atlantic-region soil naturally grows), that it gets put off, pushed down the priority ranks, all too readily.
Of course, as easy as it is to love Rembrandt (and, among Protestants, to elevate him to a particular culture-hero status), treating him as the artist to make an occasion for, when there's so much else close at hand that we don't bother with, would be a mistaken kind of appreciation, I think.
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