Published: June 5, 2005
SINCE the advent of the museum blockbuster in the 1970’s, which helped usher in the concept of the museum as a must destination, art’s growing popularity with the mainstream public has become something of a double-edged sword.
For those who have always considered themselves art lovers, the reactions tend to fall into two camps. There are the Pollyannas, delighted to see more people getting clued in to the joys of art. And then there are the skeptics – those who deplore the idea of art being used to pump up tourism, or who simply resent all those extra bodies getting in the way.
And now the popularization of artists and museums has yielded something else to feel ambivalent about: the first art-focused self-help book, “How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master.”
Previous works by the author, Roger Housden, who wrote the best-selling “Ten Poems to Change Your Life,” have celebrated poets like Rumi and Robert Bly. This time he metes out the pop-Buddhist-mysticism treatment to the life and work of the 17th-century Dutch master.
Mr. Housden’s book is largely focused on Rembrandt’s renowned self-portraits, in which he charted the changes in his visage from cocky youthful promise to destitute old age. The gist is that despite Rembrandt’s all-too-human flaws, he at least had the courage to repeatedly face himself in the mirror – and we can learn from this example. To this end, Mr. Housden has shoehorned the master’s life and work into six “lessons,” with titles like “Open Your Eyes,” “Troubles Will Come” and “Keep the Faith.” It almost goes without saying that we encounter “the presence of angels” along the way.
Although museum officials might be expected to dismiss this book as a frivolous exercise, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Its publication has been timed to coincide with the show “Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits,” which originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It reopens Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and on Friday Mr. Housden is scheduled to give two gallery talks and hold two book signings there. Effectively that gives his book the museum’s imprimatur. The reason? “Synergy between his new book and our new exhibition,” said Cathryn Carpenter, the Getty’s programming director. “It just seemed to fit so well.”
And although skeptics might be appalled by the book’s sentimentality, some among us may similarly find it hard to dismiss out of hand, because Rembrandt, in Mr. Housden’s retelling, seems a weirdly savvy choice for a contemporary everyman figure.
Not only did the artist, after his wife’s death, juggle what Mr. Housden terms a “blended” family, as well as two live-in romantic relationships, one of which disintegrated into ugly legal actions; he also managed to bankrupt himself by the age of 50 with out-of-control spending and an ill-advised real estate loan.
Better yet, the story of his descent and redemption takes place in 17th-century Amsterdam, soon after that city had spawned the world’s first stock market. Certainly, the art world in which Rembrandt rose to fame seems remarkably like our own: it was driven by wide and eager collecting and rampant speculation, and offered so many artists and opportunities that no clearly dominant style emerged.
Indeed, Mr. Housden is not the first writer to seek inspiration in 17th-century Dutch art and life. In the last six years, many others have mined this golden age: think of “Girl in Hyacinth Blue” by Susan Vreeland, “Girl With a Pearl Earring” by Tracy Chevalier and “Tulip Fever” by Deborah Moggach. Each uses a portrait to dramatize the way individual lives can be mirrored and transformed when a person’s image is transmuted into paint.
And for anyone who has ever sat through a high-stakes auction, where artworks often get applauded for the amount of money they bring, there seems nothing too terrible about encouraging more people to see creativity, struggle and personal inspiration, rather than dollar signs, when they look at paintings on museum walls.
Mr. Housden certainly does his bit by presenting Rembrandt as a tortured soul who was impelled to paint and act as the spirit moved him, whatever the consequences. Yet many will undoubtedly recoil at this portrayal, for if there is anything that makes Rembrandt seem truly contemporary, it is that, especially since his death, his life and body of work have always been marked by one constant: continual flux and reassessment. (This is also what makes him such a perfect pop-Buddhist subject.)
Though Rembrandt was greatly admired in his lifetime and beyond, he was initially viewed as something of an iconoclast because of his idiosyncratic choice of subject matter and style. Yet in the 19th century – another era when art was wildly popular, with a widespread audience to match – he was recast as a free-spirited Romantic genius, intent on pursuing his own bliss. (This is pretty much how Mr. Housden presents him today.) No wonder that from this point the number of paintings attributed to Rembrandt steadily increased, leaping from 377 in 1900 to 714 in 1923.
In 1968, the Dutch government began financing the Rembrandt Research Project, an association of scholars who set about sorting the real Rembrandts from the chaff. Since then, many works that earlier generations believed to be by the master himself – including at least one self-portrait – have been reidentified as the work of his multitudinous students and workshop assistants.
One result has been that in the last 20 years – what some might call the golden age of American skepticism – much ink has been spilled on Rembrandt reattributions and reassessments. Gary Schwartz, in his 1985 biography, “Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings,” asserted that the artist’s aesthetic choices were often influenced by his patrons’ tastes. Svetlana Alpers, in “Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market” (1988), illuminated his marketing strategies. And many shows organized since then have focused on what Rembrandt is or isn’t, most notably the Metropolitan Museum’s 1995 “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt.”
Mr. Housden’s book includes a reading list, as well as an appendix noting all the places in this country where it is possible to see Rembrandt’s paintings, including the Wynn Collection in Las Vegas. Yet it includes no nod to Ms. Alpers or Mr. Schwartz, and no mention of the Rembrandt Research Project.
As Simon Schama, author of the 1999 biography “Rembrandt’s Eyes,” once wrote in this newspaper, “Every generation gets the Rembrandt it deserves.” If there is one lesson we can glean from Rembrandt’s life and work today, it is probably that fervently held romantic beliefs are seldom based in reality. The publication of Mr. Housden’s book underlines that in art, as in life, we tend to cling to them anyway.