The Met on a cloudless Tuesday afternoon was not too crowded (the Vermeer room was empty for five minutes — a record, in my experience). We came to Rembrandt first. I entered his art with a helping of Malraux to guide me. He had written that Rembrandt was a brother to Dostoevsky and “one of the few biblical poets of Western Christendom, and that is why his painting, which does not illustrate his poetry but expresses it, encountered bitterer hostility than Franz Hals had to face.” His poetry “expresses” his painting — again that primal word. I hadn’t been able to make that connection even on the day I read Malraux — I had to see it myself, in person. Here were the familiar six late period paintings, ending with the vaunted Self-Portrait from 1660 and beginning with Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer (The Toilet of Bathsheba is just before it) and going to Hendrickje Stoffels, then to The Standard Bearer, before the Woman with a Pink, and finally Man with a Magnifying Glass. What they all share is that burnished background chiaroscuro, so the figures — often in dour or dark garb, save Aristotle — emerge from the plane of the canvas like Ezra Pound’s words in Canto XVII: Flat water before me, and the trees growing in water, Marble trunks out of stillness, On past the palazzi, in the stillness, This image of Venice is perhaps unsurprising. This poetry might not express Rembrandt’s painting, but it portrays it. While looking at these paintings assembled in a certain trajectory, I came to see the haunting of Rembrandt by Rembrandt and the reverse-haunting of myself in the similarly dark portraits hung in a local faux Mexican fast-food restaurant of my youth, a chain called Zantigo. It held half-swarthy, half-kitschy paint-by-numbers works with a host of subjects similar to Zurburan and Velazquez — particularly the former, a key cog in my fossil record, as his large dark (six and a half foot-long) St. Francis of Assisi in His Tomb hung in the Milwaukee Art Museum, a bejeweled though rare trip of youth. Velazquez and Rembrandt have overlapped in the greater world in the centuries following — Malraux: “Idealized faces, realistic faces, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Velazquez were grouped together, in one collective style.” The Rembrandt paintings in the Met don’t have much in common (save the background) except as a series that New Yorkers may come to know. The sailor sea-blue wall backing makes a difference in the presentation (all the European paintings in the museum have color schemes for the specific country of origin). What goes on when I see the Rembrandts at the Met is hard to perceive, but put the words of Malraux in the atmosphere next to them and changes ensue. In the opening of his Museum Without Walls, he observes: “Inevitably in a place where the work of art, and at a time when the artistic exploration of the world is in active progress, the assemblage of so many masterpieces — from which, nevertheless, so many are missing — conjured up in the mind’s eye all the world’s masterpieces. How indeed could this mutilated possible fail to evoke the whole gamut of the possible?” The paintings compete with one another. So much of the Rembrandt six comes across from what is not there in the other more realist portraits in the room: works by Hals and de Hooch and Flinck, with a couple of quiet Dutch still-lifes by Maes, plus a “follower” of Rembrandt’s more intriguing canvas. When one looks long enough at a painting things emerge, say the squarish parcel of canvas with a more slick-grained patch of black just above Aristotle’s head that is fairly impossible to see in reproductions. This glaze is a major part of the painting — in a dark honey way it highlights the exigencies of the emotional power of line and coloring that seem to be contained in the clothes, the hat, and the withered, though still strong, face of one great man contemplating another (in stone) — the ruffle of his enormous shirt lending weight to a human body that the bust lacks (Malraux: “Rembrandt showers his [figures] with light so as to raise them above man’s estate”). The massive bunchy folds of the garment (off-white off the black of his torso) suggested something else grand and uncommon. Though the man is Aristotle, he is no Aristotle that we have ever imagined — he is dressed in seventeenth-century Dutch clothing. So he is simultaneously in and out of time — himself and more and other. But this eventually gave way to another painting, a smaller one, the portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels — it was at this picture that I looked most during the visit, though I did not know who she was. I just kept gazing at her face, which isn’t so much looking as floating forth caught in some commotion, but standing in to show herself to the viewer like few other figures can — a fresh degree of love. One cannot fully grapple with Rembrandt until our hairs get stippled with gray and our face has been under the sun for fifteen-thousand days. Helen Cixous details Rembrandt’s subterranean ways: Where does Rembrandt take us? To a foreign land, our own. A foreign land, our other country. He takes us to the Heart. [. . .] — A scene by Rembrandt (let’s take a family scene, or a scene like this one, a scene of “corporation”), what gives it its force — by which it takes us, pushes us, pinches us, caresses us, is, beyond courtly war exchanges — beyond pretenses, codes . . . — that it always occurs at the same time in the cellar in the cave or in the forest, in these great and somber prehistoric cathedrals where our colors, our drawings stir, where attraction and repulsion shine, like lanterns in our obscurity. It is there (to the bottom) that Rembrandt leads us.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence