REMBRANDT & HERZOG

2 short reviews for now. I will post a longer one on The Ethnic Phenomenon soon, which again won’t be a review of a speculative work of fiction. However, I’m pleased to report I’ve finally started rereading Dune a few days ago – so I hope to review that in a few weeks.

If you’re not interested in the books, do check out my Werner Herzog documentary recommendations at the end, and the tragic lesson at the end of the Rembrandt review.

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REMBRANDT’S PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG GENTLEMAN – Jan Six (2018)

The back cover promises this account of how Jan Six discovered a new portrait by Rembrandt to be a “thriller”: sadly this is not the case. Six’s writing is dull and bland, and there is simply no tension whatsoever present, except at the very beginning, when Six spots the painting at Christie’s – it’s ironic that exactly that turns out to be a false account, but more on that later.

If you’ve read anything about Rembrandt by Ernst Van de Wetering – the leading Rembrandt expert – there won’t be that much to learn from this book about the practice of how 17th century paintings are ascribed to a painter, or on Rembrandt’s painterly processes. If you’re new to reading Rembrandt scholarship, this is an easy and quick crash course though. So, your milage may vary.

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REMBRANDT: THE LATE WORKS – J. Bikker & G.J.M. Weber (2014)

As I’m a bit bogged down in the 700 pages of Erikson’s epic Gardens Of The Moon, I’ve decided to do a review of an art book I’ve just finished. I will finish that first book of The Malazan series, I like it a lot, but it’s just such a slow, massive read, and on top of that it has been a busy few weeks too. So here’s some thoughts on Rembrandt! There’s more pictures after the jump!

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I had the pleasure of coming of age in a group of friends heavily interested in contemporary art – 2 of them painters themselves – and so I’ve spent quite some time of my early twenties in art museums and galleries. I still do, but to a much, much lesser extent. During those years, I’ve come to realize that the history of art has a lot to offer too, and that art doesn’t need to be new and shiny to be of interest. I kinda already knew that, as I cried seeing Botticelli’s fifteenth century masterpiece Allegory of Spring in the Uffizi in Florence when I was 17. But it was only in 2007, when I saw a documentary on contemporary Belgian painter Sam Dillemans, that I gained the right mental tools to really look at “old” art. Dillemans is a huge Van Gogh fan, and he uses Van Gogh to explain that it’s not really important what you paint, but how you paint it. That’s obvious maybe, but to my 28-year old self it was revelatory.

Enter me, 35, seeing Rembrandt Van Rijn’s final self-portrait in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, July 2014. That museum has Vermeer’s The Girl With The Pearl Earing too, but the 1669 self-portrait is the true gem of the collection. I was struck by lightning. I had seen paintings by Rembrandt before, but never one of his late works. The way he painted his hair, topped with a kind of turban or ribbon, is simply stunning. In a way, what I saw was the birth of impressionist and even expressionist painting, already in the 17th century. It took me half an hour before I could continue to the next painting, and before leaving the museum, I returned to it again. A profound delight.

So when The National Gallery in London and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam put on an historic, first time exhibition devoted to Rembrandt’s later works, I was thrilled. The London show ran from October 2014 to January 2015, and travelled to Amsterdam afterwards, from February to May 2015. I saw the Amsterdam exhibition. It was amazing.

I didn’t buy the exhibition’s catalogue afterwards, but the taught of it kept nagging, and a few weeks ago I did order it. Jonathan Bikker & Gregor J.M. Weber have done an excellent job in putting together a clear yet detailed book on Rembrandt’s later works. The book includes contributions of the editors, and Majoerie E. Wieseman, Erik Hinterding, Marijn Schapelhouman and Anna Krekeler. It has 325 pages and tons of illustrations.