Really Rembrandt?

By ROBERT HUGHES

YOU CAN'T OFTEN COMPARE PAINTers with writers, because of the apples-and- oranges problem of imagining links between dissimilar arts. But in the case of Rembrandt van Rijn you can, and the temptation to do it, if not carried too far, can hardly be resisted. He was the Shakespeare of 17th century painting, even more so than Nicolas Poussin was the Milton.

That is the first thing that the exhibition "Rembrandt: The Master & His Workshop: Paintings," now in its closing week at London's National Gallery, makes clear. Rembrandt was not a "literary" painter, as his intense devotion to the muck and glow and substance of paint attests. But he was an incomparably theatrical one. In his work, the idea of a figure painting as tableau is exchanged for that of outright drama: deep, dark backgrounds and narrative light picking out the hierarchy of character; turbulent crowd scenes; an eye for all classes, from cobblers to kings; a vast range of expression in the faces and gestures; moments of shock (the blade grinding into the clumsy giant's eye in The Blinding of Samson ((1636)) has the same appalling impact as the blinding of Lear) alternating with passages of the most lyrical eroticism, reflectiveness, inwardness. Then, too, there are the shifts of language, the rough and the smooth, and the long series of self- portraits, Rembrandt's time-lapse scrutiny of his aging, from smooth-faced boy to old potato-nosed master, which incarnate the very essence of soliloquy.

None of this was completely new in painting -- you have only to think of Titian, Rembrandt's father figure and model, and of Caravaggio, whose dirty- feet realism had such an impact on the Dutch master when young. But Rembrandt put the elements of dramatic narrative, character description and history painting together in a way that had not been attempted before, and has scarcely been rivaled since.

Moreover, his art -- another Shakespearean parallel -- always testifies to the fact that when a great artist breaks the mold, the result still pays homage to the mold itself. There can hardly be a more intensely moving portrait of a woman's naked body than his Bathsheba with King David's Letter (1654). At root it is a Titianesque conception, heir to those sumptuous Venetian nudes; but Rembrandt avoids idealism, suffuses the real imperfect body with thought and a sense of moral reflection, re-creates the structure of flesh in terms of an amazing directness of "rough" brush marks. We think of paintings like this or the later Kenwood Self-Portrait (circa 1665), with its sketchy construction (arcs in the background, a near Cubist flurry of angular brush marks to indicate palette and brushes), as being a long way from the Italian Renaissance, but in fact they are grounded in it and in Titian's late manner.

No Dutch painting is more like a Titian than Rembrandt's Moses Breaking the Tablets (1659), the furious patriarch with a shining face, rearing up from the brown murk to smash the tables of the law. The style of Rembrandt's maturity was so totally his own, even in the way it used the past, that it seems inimitable. But in fact it was widely and constantly imitated, especially by his own assistants, and there begins the problem of attribution with which the Rembrandt Research Project, a team of leading connoisseurs and Rembrandt specialists from Europe and the U.S., has been wrestling for the past decade.

The National Gallery's exhibition, previously shown to packed galleries in Berlin and Amsterdam, is meant to explain the committee's methods and make the case for their soundness. It consists of two sections. In the first are 51 paintings now agreed to be indubitably by the master -- the finest "pure" Rembrandt show in memory. The second consists of a dozen "Rembrandts" now assigned to artists who worked with him; each of these is shown with two or three other paintings known to be by that pupil. In all, it is a wonderfully illuminating show, and it makes an unanswerable case for purifying the Rembrandt canon -- without touching a third category, that of deliberate forgeries.

"I should be happy to give 10 years of my life," said Vincent van Gogh to a friend as they were gazing at Rembrandt's Jewish Bride in Amsterdam in 1885, "if I could go on sitting here in front of this painting for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food." This (more or less) describes the fate of Rembrandt's own apprentices. The Jewish Bride (circa 1665) is Rembrandt through and through; but many Rembrandts are not, for the simple reason that (contrary to romantic legends of his poverty and his rejection by the stuffy bourgeoisie of 17th century Amsterdam) he was, for most of his adult life, an extremely popular and successful artist working within a guild system that had changed relatively little since the Middle Ages. Thus he had apprentices, dozens of them over the years, whose work he sold for his own profit, and who sometimes worked on his own canvases. And they paid him, not vice versa -- 100 guilders a year for the privilege of learning in the studio.

But what young painter in his right mind would not want to be with Rembrandt? He was so fashionable that, as one of his more classical-minded contemporaries sourly complained, "artists were forced (if they wanted to have their work accepted) to accustom themselves to his manner of painting: even though they themselves might have a far more commendable manner." Small planets in the gravitational field of an immense talent, some would eventually break out of orbit to make independent careers for themselves, but all of them -- while they were with Rembrandt -- had to work his way or not at all. Hence the peculiar fact, a connoisseur's bad dream, that the very parts of Rembrandt's work that seem most uniquely his -- the "unconscious" hookings and flourishes of line in some of the drawings, for instance -- were just what apprentices like Ferdinand Bol were best at imitating. The more gifted ones would work on parts of Rembrandt's pictures. Some of the assistants were brilliant painters, like Aert de Gelder or Samuel van Hoogstraten. Others, like Nicolaes Maes, Willem Drost or the feeble Isack Jouderville, would hardly be remembered but for the fact that they worked for him.

UNLIKE RUBENS, REMBRANDT was not particularly scrupulous about saying which pictures were entirely by him and which were done in part by assistants, and the result -- coupled with the fact that when his reputation recovered from its short eclipse after his death, everyone who owned a brown luminous 17th century Dutch portrait wanted it to be by Rembrandt -- has been a web of confusion.

Wishful thinking has been an immense factor in Rembrandt attribution. More than 1,000 paintings have been ascribed to Rembrandt, and they cannot all be by him. The reductionists' ax of the Rembrandt Research Project has fallen on paintings that no one with half an eye, after seeing this show, could go back to thinking of as Rembrandts: How did the light, high-colored, almost garish Feast of Esther by Jan Lievens, or the finicky execution of Gerrit Dou, ever get mistaken for his?

But the research project has also cut out some much loved paintings, once considered essential masterpieces, milestones in his art, like Berlin's Man with the Golden Helmet. This has caused tremendous indignation in some quarters -- a fuss comparable to the moment when Bernard Berenson made his name as an enfant terrible by downgrading half the supposed canon of Lorenzo Lotto nearly 100 years ago.

Some Chicagoans will be unhappy to see one of their favorite paintings in the Art Institute, the cat-eyed, Balthus-like Young Woman at an Open Half- Door, signed "Rembrandt f. 1645," being given to Hoogstraten. And hell may freeze over before everyone accepts the revisionist view that the sublime Polish Rider, in New York City's Frick Collection, is really by "Rembrandt (?)."

Nevertheless, the crux of the matter is summed up in a foreword by three directors of the show, Henning Bock of the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, Henk van Os of the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery's Neil MacGregor: "If Dou, Drost and Hoogstraten are the true creators of paintings that have for years delighted and inspired us ((as Rembrandts)), it is clearly time we took another look at them as well. Rembrandt remains a giant . . . But he is a giant surrounded no longer by pygmies, but by artists of real stature, whom we ought to know better." What seems a loss may turn out to be a gain, though one wouldn't want to have to explain that to the collectors whose swans have turned out to be minor Dutch geese.