Rembrandt's Theatrical Realism

The source: “The God of Realism” by Robert Hughes, in ___The New York Review of Books___ (April 6, 2006).

The works of some great artists inspire admiration and awe, but fail to connect at the gut level with the viewer. Not so the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), observes art critic Robert Hughes. In an age dominated by grand paintings and ennobled human subjects, Rembrandt never used “the human form as a means of escape from the disorder and episodic ugli­ness of the real world.” He im­bued his subjects with enough flaws and “ordinariness” to earn a place as “the first god of realism after Caravaggio.”

Yet a misunderstanding of Rembrandt’s realism has been one of the pitfalls of the effort by the Rembrandt Research Project and others to eliminate work falsely attributed to Rembrandt from his canon. One art historian discredited a putative Rem­brandt called David Playing the Harp Before Saul (1650–55), on the grounds it was “too theat­rical.” Says Hughes: “Theatricality doesn’t disprove Rembrandt; it is one of the things that makes him a great Baroque artist, as well as a great realist.”

The task of authenticating Rembrandt’s work is vastly complicated by the milieu in which he painted. Hardly a reclusive genius, Rembrandt surrounded himself with students and assistants who learned to emulate his style. Hughes lists among the characteristics of Rembrandt’s work the honest, even vulgar, details of commonplace life, the ability to depict “unvarnished, unedited pain,” as in his gory The Blinding of Samson (1636), and a skill as “the supreme depicter of inwardness, of human thought,” even in allegorical figures. Touches of humanity’s imperfection, to Hughes, serve to dramatize the subject matter. In The Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) the boy has lost a shoe in the rush to embrace his father; his bare foot is at once humanly vulnerable and a “none-too-subliminal image of the stripping of the spirit.”

Paintings once revered as the essence of Rembrandt, such as The Man With the Golden Helmet (c. 1650), are now widely regarded as the work of others. Today debate swirls around The Polish Rider (c. 1653), which hangs in New York’s Frick Collection. “To imagine Rembrandt without The Polish Rider,” writes Hughes, “is rather like trying to imagine Wagner without Parsi­fal.”

Rembrandt left only the barest explanations of how he viewed his art. Hughes sees his conception of himself as artist embodied in the Kenwood House self-portrait of 1661–62. Rembrandt sits before a canvas on which two arcs are painted. The half-circles allude to the ancient Greek story of the painter Apelles, who, upon visiting the studio of a fellow master painter and finding him absent, drew a perfect freehand circle on the studio wall, letting his artistic skill serve as his calling card. Rembrandt couches the allusion in a scene from his daily painterly life; he provides both a glimpse of his humanity and an “incontrovertible, utterly simple proof of mastery.” Realism becomes a conduit for the power of the sublime.