Van Dyck or Bust

Mary, Lady van Dyck, nee Ruthven  (1640)

Anthony van Dyke was a 17th century portrait painter whose chief claim to fame may have been the fact that his oeuvre was overshadowed by the likes of Rubens,Velasquez and Rembrandt-- who were contemporaries. It's like beating the 4 minute mile today. When Roger Bannister succeeded, it was a big deal. Now with his numbers, you might not even win the local meet. Innovation is time bound though genius probably isn't. Rembrandt was sui generis. If you had plucked him out of his era and placed him in Chelsea in the era of Jeff Koons he would undoubtedly have gotten the attention of Larry Gagosian. But the point is, if you missed the Anthony van Dyke: the Anatomy of Portraiture show which closed at The Frick last Sunday, don't feel bad. He was no Rembrandt. 

The New Rijksmuseum

Could Rembrandt have painted the cast of power brokers in Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum Parts I and II which just finished a run at Film Forum? After all Rembrandt's great masterpiece, The Night Watch, with its portrayal of the movers and shakers of his day, is one of the museum's most precious possessions. Could Ortega y Gasset, the author of such essays as The Revolt of the Masses have dealt with strife between democracy and the higher calling of art that the film depicts? After all it’s the Dutch tradition of democracy that delays the implementation of an enlightened esthetic concept. “This kind of process in which nobody wants to take a risk is too Dutch for me,” is just one of the many expressions of exasperation that the film records. “It’s not democracy,” the Spanish architect declares about the Dutch Bicyclists Union which becomes a major opposition force. “It’s the perversion of democracy.” Actually the closest comparison to the tapestry which The New Rijksmuseum paints lies in the work of Ibsen. The movie is a kind of An Enemy of the People in reverse, with an visionary esthete fighting the town’s folk (in this case the town is Amsterdam) for change. The museum’s embattled director, Ronald de Leeuw, is also reminiscent of Ibsen’s Master Builder, Solness, in his Sisyphean struggle. In Part 1, we follow him as deals with a mounting list of extrinsic and intrinsic problems, one of which is a budget of 134,000,000 euros for a project whose initial construction cost is estimated over 100,000,000 euros higher. The museum was originally designed by Pierre Cuyper l895 and anyone who visited the earlier incarnation might simply ask why change an already magnificent structure? Why accommodate and attempt to contextualize twentieth century artworks in a repository for one of the greatest collections of the past?  For those who resist the notion of change the architects and the director are Robert Moses like figures, who are out to get their way, no matter what the material or human costs. The New Rijksmusem is about art and architecture, but it’s a great work of art itself, comprehensive, multivalent in its concerns and full of a memorable cast of characters, including its own watchman whose devotion to the museum and its renovation is one of the most moving aspects of the film. Rent this movie.

The Afterlife Reified

Paradise of Bhaishaijyaguru

NYU has produced eminent scholars in the fields of philosophy and law. The late Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel are two of the most notable examples. In a recent Sunday Review, Samuel Scheffler, another NYU professor whose appointment bridges these two disciplines broached a question that is not often taken up by either lawyers or philosophers and that’s the afterlife (“The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously,” NYT, 9/21/13). Scheffler isn’t dealing with the question of whether there is soul that lives on in heaven or hell. He is dealing with the life that goes on after we are gone and his premise is that many things wouldn’t make sense in this life, if we didn’t think human life was going to go on after us. It’s a little bit the notion that Beckett expresses humorously in Endgame when Clov asks “Do you believe in the life to come?” and Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.” Scheffler isn’t dealing with questions of heaven or hell. He avoids theology by materializing the question of the afterlife, in much the way that insurance companies do. From an actuarial point of view why would one want to expend energy on certain activities, if the world were coming to an end? “If you were a cancer researcher, you might be less motivated to continue your work,” he remarks. The end of the world would have a similar effect on “an engineer working to improve the seismic safety of bridges.” But when he brings up the question of novelists, playwrights and composers he’s on shaky ground. Sure most creatives dream they will produce classics that will live on forever. But the fact is that few do. Within a generation or two many well-known writers will fade into oblivion. Updike might have staying power, but few people today talk of John O’Hara, the author of Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 who was a legend in his time. Ever hear of a writer named John P. Marquand who won a Pulitzer for The Late George Apley in 1938? How many Rembrandts, Beethovens and Tolstoys are there in recorded history? Must a writer maintain the delusion of immortality in order to function? Or is there something to be said for the fact that writing, composing and painting would have a function even if Chicken Little were right and the sky was falling. After all in the case of a doomsday scenario who is going to write the eulogy for the human race? Who is going to provide the music at the service? Who will provide the design of life’s final brochure?

Washington Journal I: Handjob

Albrecht Durer loved hands. There is the famous drawing of the hands praying which is blown up as a promotional poster at the entrance to the extensive show Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery. Durer was, like Rembrandt, a great self-portraitist. The show parenthetically features a precocious self-portrait Durer did of himself when he was thirteen which contains the inscription, “I drew this after myself in front of a mirror in the year 1484 when I was a child.” And the exhibit also features the famed drawings of his left hand, with the wooing gesture, the obscene gesture (he gives his viewer the finger) and a pointing gesture. When he paints Lucretia stabbing herself Durer emphasizes the hand that does the dirty work. He painted the hands of his patron the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and he painted an elderly man’s aged veinous hand. Hands obviously had great meaning for Durer who as the curators point out was the “German equivalent of Leonardo in Italy.” But why do we admire Durer? His purported greatness is a part of the received wisdom of the ages and seeing the magnificent exhibition on display in Washington is a unique opportunity to think about his work. The series of engravings "Melencolia I,” (1514), “Knight, Death and the Devil” (1513) and “Saint Jerome in His Study” might be said to have derived from the Durer’s Bergman period such is the depth of their raw emotional power. The famed “The Great Piece of Turf” (1503) and "Wing of a Blue Roller” (1512) both demonstrate Durer's talent in the service of natural themes. “The Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I” (1518) reveals the artist in both watercolor and technicolor. “The Visor for a Helmet” of 1519 with its almost surrealist imagery is a dreamscape. The fact that he was the son of a goldsmith is usually offered as an explanation for the delicate and detailed craftmanships which characterizes his style. But technique alone cannot account for the power of Durer’s work.

Rembrandt at Work

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is unquestionably the greatest autobiographical play of all time. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and David Copperfield are two of the great autobiographical novels and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from l663-63 recently on view in the Rembrandt at Work: the Great Self-Portrait from Kenwood House show at the Met is, one could argue, one of the great works of painterly self-scrutiny. We know in the case of the O’Neill, for example, that the Aristotelian unities of space, time and action were essential to the playwright’s ability to turn the raw matter of life experience into a masterpiece. But what accounts for Rembrandt’s virtuosity in the painting under discussion? The casual viewer is first engaged by painter’s piercing eyes. The curators comment that while the earlier portraits and etchings (some of which are on display in another recent Met exhibit, Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), enabled Rembrandt to display his  “inventiveness and emulation” of huge talents like Durer, Raphael and Titian, “in contrast the later self-portraits (ca. 1650-69) seem more straightforward: the aging artist is seen in work clothes, in everyday attire with a beret or linen studio cap, and in some cases, as here, a palette, brushes, and maulstick.” It’s disconcerting to compare Rembrandt’s early etchings from the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man show to the almost impressionistic nature of the Kenwood House painting. It’s almost as if Rembrandt were turning the radical realism for which he was known on its head, but age both diminishes the vision and provides a totally new level of insight. Could the author of a screed called A Doll’s House have really composed the surrealistic When We Dead Awaken in his old age? The Aristotelian unities don’t explain what was going on in the Kenwood House portrait, but Aristotle did contemplate the bust of Homer in another Rembrandt on view in the same gallery.

Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”