A researcher at the University of British Columbia has used certain technological measures to determine why Rembrandt's paintings are so riveting. I'm surprised that he didn't site my junior year high school paper in which I was instructed to answer the question: "Does the light in Rembrandt's paintings come from the inside or the outside?"
In those days, as I have often said, Pittsburgh didn't have art museums. It had a huge collection of dinosaur bones and it had shows of molten steel being poured at the steel mills and it had a tasting tour of Heinz. But it didn't have Rembrandts, so for my research I was forced to sit at the library and look at books with reproductions. Even under those conditions I could see that Rembrandt was one exquisitely talented dude.
That summer I made my first visit to New York City and was taken to the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a stirring experience, real art on those endless walls. When I entered the Rembrandt room, I had a happy/tragic epiphany.
On the one hand, wow. Like, wow. His paintings up close and personal were beyond amazing. I had never seen such beauty. And then, shit. Like, shit. I was 16 and I clearly knew nothing and had seen nothing and might never see much more than the landscape from behind the counter of Woolworth's. I felt cheated out of 16 years - seemed like a lot at that point - of access to art. Or rather, access to Rembrandt.
I burst into tears and sat down in that round sectional in the center of the gallery and sobbed. The guard came over and told me not to worry, that it was a frequent occurrence in the Rembrandt rooms. I cried and
I looked and I learned that the light is internal to Rembrandt's portrait subjects. And even more moving, many of his subjects were poor people.
A year later I came to college in Boston where in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, my favorite destination in states of altered consciousness, I found his action painting (see photo): Christ in a Storm on the Sea of Galilee. It was so unlike anything else I had seen by him - in life or photo - that I visited it often. I was devastated to learn of its theft in 1990, when I had long been living abroad.
I have since seen many Rembrandt exhibitions and have come to realize how much more than self-portraits and the faces of wealthy burghers he did. I once saw a show in Vienna of his biblical etchings and, again, had to go sit down to deal with a flood of joyous over-stimulation hormones.
So now this scientist has figured it all out, concluding:
“Through these techniques, Rembrandt is essentially playing tour guide
to his viewers hundreds of years after his death, creating a unique
narrative by guiding the viewers’ eye,” says DiPaola. “This may explain
why people appreciate portraiture as an art form.
I'm hoping to get to Amsterdam at the end of the summer to test out his theory at the Rembrandt House Museum and the Rijksmuseum.
And as an aside, funny how I worried that I'd be stuck working my whole life in Woolworth's 5 & Dime, whereas today I'm only sorry the company is no more and that no one is giving jobs to unemployed people my age anyways. Too many artists have something in common with the great man, for Wikipedia says "his later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships."
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