Dali House

Reading about Chaim Soutine going to a slaughterhouse and dragging a side of beef back to his studio at La Ruche in Paris so he could spent several odorific days painting its pageant of festering colours made me hungry for more, so I called up Rembrandt to order a whole “Slaughtered Ox” and he recommended a few other butchers with brushes.

If you missed the reasoning behind Russian expressionist Soutine’s blood-soaked creativity, so did I, but the basic story is here. Pictured is the result, “Carcass of Beef”, which fetched a fatty £7.8 million at auction earlier this year.

Since then meat’s been mostly a matter of angry art. Gabriela Rivera, at the top of this post and the top of her form, chilled a gallery in Chile a few years ago with her “Silence of the Lambs” impressions.

“My work is a metaphor for the relationship that people have with themselves every day when they look in the mirror,” she said from a cloud of appreciative flies, which couldn’t help also noticing her videos of women urinating in the street and smashing boiled eggs with their hands. See the rest.

… No, not “Night Watch” – “Day Watch” – although Rembrandt’s 1642 conversation piece at the venerable Rijksmuseum will always be known as “Night Watch”. It is in fact “The Company of Captain Frans Cocq”, the militia that paid Rembrandt darned good money to paint their portrait in broad daylight, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse, last of three parts

Fully 300 years after he did, someone realised they were looking at it through a gloom of grit and this wasn’t suppertime at all. They sent it to the cleaners and it came back ready for breakfast, much cheerier now, thankyou.

You can scour the Internet all you want, though, and most of the images of it are still grubby. Maybe there’s a lot of smog on the Web as well as smut. On the other hand, it looks better darker, psychological proof that the night tells better stories. If you haven’t already, rest your cursor on the image above for a comparison.

Anyway, it’s cheerier and in mint condition once more, although it’s said that if you “see it in person” (as it were), you can spot the zig-zag of slashes added in 1975 by someone who evidently thought he was Zorro. The restorers couldn’t quite stitch it up right after the unfortunate critiquing, but never mind, “Night Watch” had endured worse before, as we’ll see.

Captain Cocq (no “Star Trek” jokes, please) and 17 members of his civic militia guards paid Rembrandt a tidy 100 guilders each to convey them in pigment. Sheer vanity, one might say, since they hired six other artists to do likewise at the same time. See the rest.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse, second of three parts

A little more biography, then, but first, the painting above. “Belshazzar’s Feast” from 1635 was Rembrandt trying to get on the A-list of baroque historian-artists who did mammoth canvases, and he really went for it.

From the Book of Daniel he pulled the moment when the King of Babylon adds the fatal last straw to his bulging hoard of sins by drinking wine from the cups stolen from Jerusalem’s temple. The writing is on the wall, and though Rembrandt inscribed the Hebrew in columns rather than right to left, likely in a comment on its age and its indecipherability to all but the prophet Daniel, the message was clear: “Get out of town by sundown.” Belshazzar did better than that: He was murdered within hours.

With Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting effects and a passionate cha-cha of chiaroscuro, Rembrandt clad his operatic cast in anachronistic but sublimely rendered togs, every gem and tassel a subtle craftwork. And rarely do you find him so flamboyant in his facial expressions.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on July 15, 400 years ago, in Leiden. Unless you’re Dutch it’s a funny middle name, but a fun one, and anyway his dad’s was Gerritszoon, and mom was Neeltje van Suijttbroeck, so it was family of sound effects, and he painted them often. See the rest.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse in three parts

Surely the truth about someone who’s 400 years old depends on which biography you read, but Sylvia Hochfield of ARTnews, who has the always enigmatic job description “editor-at-large”, seems quite certain about Rembrandt in her terrific essay on the quadricentennial of the old boy’s death, which is just coming to a close.

This assurance despite the nasty testimony about him that she surveys en route to judging Rembrandt a fine fellow after all.

Witness for the prosecution #1, artist Abraham Breughel (not the proto-surrealist): Told by a collector for whom he bought paintings that the recently desceased Rembrandt was the ace of half-length portraits, and could he find a new one, please, Breughel pointed out that Rembrandt had been good for nothing other than heavily draped spectres lurking in the shadows, “save for a point of light at the tip of the nose”. See the rest.