On Rembrandt and the Inward in Art

Odilon Redon, one of the great heroes of the mysterious in painting, thought of Rembrandt van Rijn as "the precursor of all deeply inward art." And this, I believe, rather than Rembrandt's considerable excellence of technical skill, is the secret of the master's enduring appeal.

The Currier Museum in Manchester, NH is currently showing prints and drawings in ink by Rembrdandt and other Dutch artists of the 1600s. 

The many prints by notable Old Masters invite admiration for the artists' facility with such an intractable medium as scratching into metal or stone. 

Indeed, the exhibition's curators invite viewers to marvel at the amazing level of detail by handing out magnifying glasses at the entrance. But, really it's the feeling in art that counts.

And it's Rembrandt's work, distinguished from the rest by its depth of thought and emotion, that actually matters.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at a Window, 1648. Etching, drypoint, and burin.

Look at that brooding self-portrait, simply honest and full of emotion and humility. The figure's placement in a  shadowy interior while the daylight blazes outside could almost stand as a metaphor for the kind of inwardness that Redon said Rembrandt introduced to art. Most of the figures in the prints by the other artists in the show reference Biblical events or everyday cliches. But here, the figure stands for everyman; his humble self-presentation suggests the ordinary trials of the human condition. Works of art like this stop us in our day and can even change our lives.

A vision by Odilon Redon.

Above is a pastel by Odilon Redon that shows you what he meant by the inward in art. For him, the inward meant the world of dreams, fantasy, mystery, mysticism, and private revelations of both the unknown and the known. But the essential language is the same in both artists' work, even if everything being said is not.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Studies of the Head of Saskia and Others, 1636.
Etching

Rembrandt was an artist of his own inwardness but also that of others. These portrait studies accomplish what the majority of artists prior to Rembrandt's period rarely attempted: they pass beyond depicting physical likeness to convey the inner spirit of unidealized, ordinary individuals captured in moments of reflection.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of an Oriental in a Turban, abt. 1633.
Ink on paper.

Lest we neglect Rembrandt's technical powers, look at the pen and ink drawing of a man wearing a turban above. The reproduction doesn't really show it, but there's an astonishing disparity between the amount of feeling and content Rembrandt gets across and the sheer "economy of means" with which he does it. In a few clearly rapid marks and lines, Rembrandt gives us all the information we need to read volumes into the man's life and identity. This is not just a colorfully "different" character type in 17th century Holland, it's a solid human being with a history of dreams, defeats, triumphs, and desires.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman Bathing Her Feet at a Brook, 1658
Etching.

This etching emphasizes Rembrandt's rejection of traditional idealization in western art. The woman here reads not as a type (a Venus, let's say, or a Mary Magdalene), but as a real person, with thick legs and a less than "perfect" body. The pose, elemental setting, and the very human subject matter elevate this work to the universality of poetry, even as it attests to Rembrandt's dedication to really seeing the subjects of his art.

Rembrandt van Rijn, One-Hundred Guilder Print, 1647.
Etching, drypoint, and burin.

The above print is the most fully elaborated of the Rembrandts on display, the one that most resembles his more complex and masterful oil paintings. It depicts Jesus bringing comfort and redemption to the sick and the poor. It has an essentially mystical quality, brought on by the deep chiaroscuro, where rays of light seem to be thrown off from the glowing foreground figures into the shadowy deeps and stony textures beyond. Redon would have loved the supernatural quality of this.

Robert Vickrey, Old Clown, 1957. Tempera on gessoed Masonite.

On my way out of the museum I was stopped by the painting above. There's actually a Roualt in the Currier that depicts clowns also, and the placard on that painting explains how the artist saw the circus as a metaphor for human life, with each of us, like clowns, possessing a public mask that we show each other daily and a truer inner self that's rarely seen. In a much softer way, the above painting by Robert Vickrey expresses an essential human dignity intensified by its proximity to the "superficial" levity associated with the archetype of the clown. The figure's downcast eyes and indeterminate expression emphasize the man's inner world, clearly the result of a life of varied experience - joys suggested by indelible laugh lines and sorrows attested by furrowed brow, clenched jaw, and lips shriveled and pursed. Here, some 300 years later, is the same compassion and insight into humanity that Rembrandt taught the world to love.

Edgar Degas, Repetition au Foyer de la Danse, 1882.

But lest we conclude that art is only concerned with profound human feeling, there are several Impressionist works on display that have recently been obtained on loan. It was with relief and a lightened heart, I admit, that I stumbled onto the charming Degas above, proving once again how much of the life and joy of art depends upon embracing color and deign rather than on brooding statements about humanity. The same truth springs from the breezy, light-filled Sisley below, which the Currier's curators have done well to hang next to the Degas.

Alfred Sisley, Un Noyer dans la Prairie de Thomery, 1880

Such contrasts remind one that art is various, its means diverse, and its compass practically boundless. 

Anyone can develop technical ability; it takes technical ability plus a cultivated inner life to produce important art. But even that isn't enough; as Redon noted it's a far more mysterious affair in the end. "No-one makes the art that they want to," he wrote. The work evolves on its own, "according to its own laws."

So there you have it: it just is, and that's that. "Art is a flower which blossoms freely, to the exclusion of all rules," Redon said. "In my view, it leaves in sad disarray the microscopic analyses of the 'aestheticians' who seek to explain it."

Amen.

Orpheus: The Artist as Poet

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861

At first glance, Corot's light-infused Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) immortalizes the joyful emergence of Orpheus and Eurydice from the Underworld and their return to the breezy trees and light of living nature, which at this moment has never seemed so beautiful and precious. But wait - according to the Orpheus myth, they never made it back!

And sure enough, when we look again, we see the figures emerging from the mist in the background, their shadowy forms reflected in the quiet pool in the painting's mid-ground. These are surely shades, spirits of the dead. Orpheus and Eurydice, then, are still in Hades, just beginning their long (and doomed) journey back toward the land of the living, a journey that will end in ruin - though you'd never know it looking at Corot's lush, illuminated foliage, water, and hills.

Artists and poets have long used the Greek myth of Orpheus as a metaphor for aspects of the artist's life and creative processes.

In the classical myth as the Roman poet Ovid told it, Orpheus, the archetypal singer/poet, descended into the Underworld to rescue his bride, Eurydice, whom the Lord of the Underworld, Hades, had snatched away from the land of the living on their wedding day. Hermes told Orpheus he could go down to get her back but that he mustn't turn around to look at her until they were all the way out.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1870

Unfortunately, Orpheus turns to make sure she's still behind him, only to see her already insubstantial shade receding forever into the darkness below. Having now lost Eurydice twice, Orpheus concedes in despair that death has won. George Frederic Watts painted several different versions, both horizontal and vertical, of the relatively melodramatic moment when Orpheus understands his fate and desperately clings to the drooping, pallid corpse of his bride.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1873

Around the same time, the world's last great sculptor (ahem) Auguste Rodin, sculpted Orpheus and Eurydice half-emerging from the raw stone of his chunk of marble. The two figures seem at once to swoon with desire, lassitude, and inertia, as the cthonic forces of Hades impede their full ascent into airy daylight.

Auguste Rodin, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1877-98

Although here, because of the myth's outcome, it seems especially appropriate, Rodin often left ragged stone around his figures. It's part of the Modern, expressive character of his art, and it causes the figures to emerge from the stone (rather than being "carved from" it). It's also a metaphor for the Michaelangeloesque idea of the artist as creator-god who, through supreme spiritual (and physical!) effort, wrests beauty from primal chaos.

And the Orpheus myth echoes the same idea: The poet's song subdues nature. "Such was the grove of trees the poet gathered round him, and he sat in the midst of a crowd, of animals and birds," Ovid says. And when he mourns, so does the world itself. Ovid again: "the poet of Thrace, with [mournful] songs like these, drew to himself the trees, the souls of wild beasts, and the very stones that followed him."

So Orpheus spends the rest of his grief-stricken days singing about Eurydice and her loss, until a group of women intoxicated by their ecstatic worship of Dionysus come upon him and tear him apart in their frenzy. The last time we see him in in Ovid, some nymphs have discovered his decapitated head floating down their river, still singing in the melancholy tones that made him famous.

John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

Our favorite French Symbolists, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, both envisioned Orpheus's head placed upon the symbol of his musical power - his lyre.

Gustave Moreau, Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on a Lyre, 1865

For Redon, the singer's disembodied head may serve as a symbolic embodiment of the painter himself. If so, in Redon's pastel, the figure emerges from a timeless, semi-abstract setting that we can see as both matter and spirit at once: clouds, mountain, river, flowers, stars, and mysterious light. Orpheus has become a stand-in for the otherworldly, mystical nature of the act of artistic creation.

Odilon Redon, Orpheus, c. 1903

With this in mind, recall Corot: his Orpheus lives at the moment when he still believes he will triumphantly lead the girl into broad daylight. Head intact, he lifts his lyre in victory, albeit premature. His body language says, "Onward and upward!" It's significant that, unlike the front-and-center characters in Watts, Redon, and Moreau, Corot's Orpheus and Eurydice are relatively small figures integrated into the overall landscape that makes up the true subject of the picture. Corot's depiction of the mythic symbol of art leads inexorably to a gorgeous landscape. After all, for Corot painting landscapes and happiness were one and the same.

I like to read Corot's version of the myth, devoid of any hint of a dark side, as a declaration of his creed: the modern artist must reinvent art as a celebration of this life, of the world as it appeals to our senses, seeking out the beautiful moments, however brief, that life interposes between the inevitable tragedies and disasters.

Strangeness in the Proportion

Odilon Redon, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity, 1879

"There is no exquisite beauty," as Poe reminds us, in Ligeia, "without some strangeness in the proportion..."

This is Odilon Redon's The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity. It's a work of 19th century Symbolism, some would say.

Art bears aloft the inarticulate, whether we will or no.

Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings

Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined

Never to occur
You don't mind
You feel spiritual and alert

As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like

You'll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do

-Tom Clark

Redon was a quiet, reclusive artist who at first worked a dark symbolic magic in charcoal (finding work illustrating translations of Poe) and then, after his marriage and a move to the country, celebrated mystery in triumphant, but no less mystical, pastels.

Mary Jo Bang's written an inconclusive, post-modern poem inspired by the balloon image.

Artists are people driven nearly against their will to express they know not what by whatever means at their disposal. The amazing part is that such a personal mystery unfolds as an expression not just of an individual but of an age, and the best, for all time.