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Worth a closer look?
Rembrandt at the MFA
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

"God is in the details" may have first been uttered by Gustave Flaubert ("Le bon Dieu est dans le detail"), but these days the aphorism is most often attributed to the Dutch-descended architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and little wonder: from Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden on through to Bosch and Bruegel and then Rembrandt and Vermeer and the innumerable landscapes and still lifes, it could be a definition of Dutch and Flemish art. "Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter • Draftsman • Etcher," which opened this past Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, is a voyage into the kind of detail you might have thought only God could imagine. A lesser artist would have made it his "Unimaginable Density of Being," but Rembrandt’s work is also light, lit in a way that neither darkness nor density can comprehend. What the Neo-Platonist Botticelli is to Annunciation, Rembrandt is to Incarnation.

The incarnation of "Rembrandt’s Journey" at the MFA (in February the show will go on to the Art Institute of Chicago, its only other stop) is close to a gift from Heaven. It comprises 218 pieces, of which some 20 are oils and some 30 drawings; the rest are etchings and etching plates. The primacy of "Painting" in the title aside, this is not a show of great Rembrandt oils: you won’t see The Syndics of the Cloth Guild or "The Jewish Bride" or "The Night Watch." But that’s no reason for gnashing of teeth. This artist’s genius manifests itself in the tiniest of details. "Rembrandt’s Journey" is primarily an etching show, and his etching is all about detail.

At the MFA, the journey has been subdivided into many mini journeys, panels of up to half a dozen works that demonstrate Rembrandt’s handling of a particular theme. The museum would appear to have taken its cue from its neighbor the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s 2000 show "Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt: Art and Ambition in Leiden 1629–1631," one of that museum’s one-room, single-theme jewels; instead of being confronted with more than 200 works, you’re invited to look at and think about a few at a time, in the context of a unifying idea. The presentation is very approximately chronological, but you can start anywhere and focus on the themes — mostly Biblical, but there are also landscapes and portraits — that most interest you. The one thing you can’t do is go in without a magnifying glass. I’m not exaggerating: you can see the oils and the drawings all right, but if you try to look at the etchings with the naked eye, you’ll miss out on 95 percent of "Rembrandt’s Journey." If you don’t have a glass to bring from home, the MFA will sell you a fine one at the door for $3.

The MFA painting that’s on the cover of the paperbound catalogue, The Artist in His Studio (circa 1628), provides a general introduction to this artist. He deals in life’s ambivalences and ambiguities, so he’s not going to tell us whether the subject is Rembrandt van Rijn or a friend of Rembrandt’s or just EveryArtist. He shows us the artist’s palettes, the artist’s whetstone, even the grooves in the easel crossbar where the artist places his feet. But you’ll have to decide for yourself why the artist seems to be swaddled in clothes that are too big (the ones Rembrandt is hoping to grow into?), why he’s nowhere near the easel, why the canvas on the easel is so huge, why it has its back to us, and why the light in the room seems to be emanating from it. Even the size of this painting seems a sly joke: it’s just 10 by 12 inches.

The etchings, on the other hand, mostly describe a battle between light and dark. The Adoration of the Shepherds, who it’s clear have come at night, is so black, you’ll need the magnifying glass to make out the visitors with their lantern, and Mary as she reveals to them the sleeping Jesus, and Joseph, who’s reading — by firelight? Or does the light emanate from Jesus? The Stars of the Kings depicts a Twelfth Night procession in similar terms, with the only light coming from the pinwheel star. The three states of Christ Crucified Between Two Thieves show the typical shift in Rembrandt’s point of view from outer world to inner, from the chaotic detail, à la Bosch or Bruegel, of the first to the nightmare limbo and sheeting light of the third. The illumination of the first Entombment suggests candles in a crypt and a small gathering of the faithful laying Jesus, with his frozen face, to rest; in the third, darkness has enveloped the scene and only that frozen face is visible, a light departing this world.

Rembrandt’s "light" also takes the form of white space: the brown-ink drawing Christ Carrying the Cross looks almost like a Picasso, and "Winter Landscape" is so bare, scholars aren’t certain whether the season is winter or summer. But what in the end stamps him as a great artist is his ability to make humanity out of almost nothing, whether it’s Mary’s rapt expression in The Adoration of the Shepherds or the smirking faces of Sarah and Isaac (he’s in the shadows at the extreme left) in Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael. There is, it seems, nothing Rembrandt can’t show us — and nothing he doesn’t want to.


Issue Date: October 31 - November 6, 2003
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