In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  I don’t know that it’s worth taking this too seriously: you don’t need much of a pretext if you’re bent on studying with nature, at her school of lifelong disintegration. However, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there’s a work by Caravaggio that sends me straight back to Rembrandt, although the connection between them is a half rhyme at best. This work is “David with the Head of Goliath”: the fiery brightness of what stands out from the surrounding gloom only makes the arc of the composition more visible. The adolescent boy with his childishly plump cheeks balances the weight of the huge head of his vanquished foe. The color is already draining from the head, the jaw hangs slack, a tooth gleams in the light, and the eyes have neither light nor expression. The boy’s yellow trousers and white linen shirt are the same shades of color as the clothes in the famous 1658 self-portrait by Rembrandt, the cane in Rembrandt’s left hand is tipped with the same dull metal as the sword David rests across his shoulders. A yellow jerkin encloses Rembrandt’s chest like a cuirass and the folds of his shirt are escaping from under it, his heavy paunch is girdled with red, and the same red in the Caravaggio picture colors the strands of flesh that dangle from the dead man’s neck.

  If you stare at David and his trophy for long enough, at the balance between the killer and the killed, the tender and the stiffening, the dimmed and the illuminated, between what you might simply call the rotting and the blooming, you discover that there is no difference between victor and vanquished. You might think that the whole and calculated construct of the painting is about this, but it is suddenly brought dramatically into focus when you realize that the living boy and the dead giant have the same face, that they are different stages of the same process, and a graphic example of all those “before and after” comparisons we are so used to seeing. It is thought that Goliath’s face is that of Caravaggio himself, and it becomes even more fascinating when you look across at the child and it occurs to you that it is in fact a double self-portrait.

  At this moment the triangle (the two protagonists and you, the viewer) bends, breaks apart, becoming open-ended like a horseshoe: all the ages and changes in this face as it travels from beginning to end are compressed, hammered into its invisible curve. What I see is the literal expression of the classic perspective of “souls looking down at the body they have left behind.” The author (who offers for our view not a body, but bodies, the estranged and cooling corpus of a whole lived life) is in a strange place, equidistant from everything, and this position excludes him from any reckoning or choice. This might be the first example I know of an artist’s subject becoming not just the “I” as a result, but the “I” as a movement.

  Art historians believe around eighty of Rembrandt’s self-portraits to be authentic (that is, attributed to Rembrandt, though occasionally with the assistance of members of his workshop), and fifty-five of these, or so I believe, are oil on canvas. This is a lot: a tenth of his whole prodigious output. Some of them are painted over other works in the absence of a ready canvas, forming a second layer of paint over the initial image. The already painted canvases were not necessarily Rembrandt’s own. This was recycling in its purest form and everything was reused — other people’s work, his own failed pictures and drafts, expressive little “tronies,” little genre paintings. Among the canvases were the portraits his patrons didn’t want. On their surfaces the artist himself appeared, his face momentary, one-off.

  But only his face. The used canvases became a kind of drafting space or a sketchbook for the artist, where he could react fast, perhaps because his patrons paid for canvases or gave them to him for their own portraits. The self-portraits, arranged in a long line, examined consecutively, make a kind of catalog, a selection of snatched reflections, that very same following after nature. “After Nature,” as Sebald’s first book was called.

  It seems that the speed with which an image was transferred to the canvas was important to Rembrandt. More important than other circumstances or obligations.

  It once happened that his pet monkey died suddenly when he was halfway through painting a large portrait of a man, his wife and children. Having no other prepared canvas available he painted the dead monkey into the picture. The people objected strongly to this, not willing that their portraits should be arrayed alongside a disgusting dead ape. But no, he was so enamored of that study of the dead monkey that he chose to leave the picture unfinished and keep it as his own rather than please them by painting it out; and that is what happened. The picture in question eventually served as a partition for his students.

  In the authoritative series A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, published by the Rembrandt Research Project, the self-portraits are given their own thick volume. Despite this, one of the main purposes of the accompanying editorial is to warn the reader from seeing the portraits as a special category. We shouldn’t see them as a distinct project or subproject, a lyric diary lasting years, a Montaigne-style inquiry into the self.

  The editor of the volume is engaged in a polemic against something even greater than the human tendency to retell the past with a contemporary vocabulary and to present Rembrandt’s works as a quest for identity (or a search for an interior reality, opening up the space for introspection). This is not about a conflict of methodology, nor the extent to which we can eradicate the sin of anachronism — a sin inherent in any attempt to read a text that has moved a good way along the timescale. It’s more likely that his is just one more attempt to kick against the pricks, to preserve the dignity of the past, and the rights of knowledge — the first of which is an immunity to ready-made concepts and imported frames of reference. There is no longer any escape from these: the agitated search for connection is in the air itself, the air a society breathes in an age of decline in the absence of common lines and unambiguous answers.

  When the foundations of our day-to-day life subside and shift, hindering any attempt at systematic interpretation, we begin to search out handrails, and to welcome even the merest hint of structure. You begin to see order in any sequentiality, trusting chance and coincidence as if they demonstrated an intrinsic connection between things. There are a number of texts dedicated to Rembrandt’s project, and each of them says more about us than it does about him, just like the first biographies. And yet there is something vaguely troubling about the optics that make us see the self-portraits as if through a microscope, the “interior world of their author” magnified, each movement of spirit, dark corner of the soul, or grief-marking laid bare for the purposes of study. I can’t help thinking that the meaning of the many-headed multitude of sketched Rembrandts (their actual face value) is in fact in limiting them to exteriority, to the Aristotelean imprint of today. This is enough in any case: they give far more than we ask of them.

  In some sense the self-portraits are close to the fashionable teaching aids of the time, which set out for future artists the permissible limits of bodily expression for suffering, astonishment, horror, and joy. This logic (based on an ancient faith in “characters,” a range of types explaining human variety with a few templates) predetermines the further splitting of movements of spirit into a series of consecutive emotions, each one of which is a separate capsule, insisting on its own existence. These are universal, each has its own facial expression, meaning that what has been observed once can be applied many times, like a mathematical formula or a prayer.

  Houbraken, the most lenient of Rembrandt’s ill-wishers, saw in his work above all a carelessness of approach, something akin to crossing the road at a red light.

  Many of the manifestations of emotion are ephemeral. Facial expre
ssions rapidly change their appearance on the least prompting so that there is scarcely time to sketch them, let alone paint them. Consequently no other means can be imagined by which an artist could help themselves using this method other than fixing the idea in their mind by means of catching hold of a momentary particular. On the other hand, one might avail oneself of the genius of such men who, by means of established rules and the elements of art have, for the instruction of eager students, communicated to the world each particular expression of emotion in print: such as that invaluable book Discours Académique, dedicated to Monsieur Colbert by the masters of the Royal Academy in Paris, following which example we also have provided samples of that kind, among other borrowed materials, and placed them in the second volume of Philaléthes’s Letters.

  What is interesting here is not Houbraken’s faith in ready templates, but the belief that the emotions exist as separate zones (just like the human types), and that they can be carefully delineated. Anger and pity are thought of as static states, like phases in a process, yet the point where they mix is not thought of as a separate space because there is an intangible line between them. In his comparison of the work Rembrandt and Montaigne made on the subject of themselves cultural historian Andrew Small refers to Foucault and The Order of Things, which concludes that despite the chains of vital resemblances, a person is imprisoned and limited by the parameters that describe her borders and leave the center untouched.

  Rembrandt’s contemporaries and detractors all reproached him for exactly this: a disrespect for borders — or his lack of ability to draw a line between one thing and another, between light and dark (a draftsman’s chief asset). On this matter they all agree, finding the very manner of drawing unacceptable, “without contour or definition by means of inner and outer lines, but consisted entirely of violent and repeated strokes.” “Clean outlines ought really to be drawn in their proper place and in order to conceal the danger [of this lack] in his works, he filled his paintings with pitch-black; and so it was that he demanded nothing from his pictures as long as they maintained a universal harmony.” “. . . The other figures could scarcely be distinguished one from another, in spite of their being all closely studied from life.” The attempt to resist what Pushkin called “the mixing up of everything” with a whole variety of rational arguments looks both touching and futile in hindsight, if only because Rembrandt doesn’t impose change, he changes the system from within: he stretches it out to its full extent until it gives under the strain.

  In his world there are no precisely drawn borderlines between figure and background, color and blackness, or, to extend the thought, between the self-portrait and the “tronie” nonportrait. It’s as if the corpus of self-portraits rethinks the ruled line of ready-made states, while asserting the presence of another line where states are countless and flowing, like shades on a spectrum, but still held in an arrangement moving toward a clear and distinct end: a sequence of facial developments, along which change flickers without altering the overall reckoning. The task of emulatio (imitation, meaning not just the copying of the original, but the exceeding of it) is embedded in the nature of the genre — and one’s own body becomes an artist’s model, the ideal, unpaid model, over which ripples of emotion, age, phases of life play: a sequence of emblems. Alienation, the constant companion of observation, is essential here, as well as precision in the reproduction of what is seen.

  *

  A commentator has likened the relationship between Rembrandt and his own images to a trial of the self. Wouldn’t it be more exact to call them “a refutation of the self” (however what happened between mirror and canvas was translated into the language of the seventeenth century): the alienation from, and shearing off of a whole phase of life, together with the one who has just lived it. For this to happen the artist has to very literally come out of himself, to be exteriorized to the point where he no longer sees the difference between himself and any one of his patrons (or, as in the Dresden self-portrait, between his young, pink-cheeked self and the dead bittern this self holds by the legs).

  All the phases of this process are simultaneously discrete and unending. We see before us not inquiry (with its implied result), but fixation, a diary of observations from nature. There is not a single retrospective self-portrait — each new day is fixed and immediately exhausted, cast off, a waste product. In this respect it’s important to look at the self-portraits in order, one after the other, as on their own they have the quality of scientific observation: another notch in the doorjamb marking a new height and age. It is not introspection, but rather the refusal to indulge in introspection; the externalizing and separating of the passing minute. Not autobiography, but autoepitaph.

  Often a single portrait is repeated a few times, sometimes with variations and sometimes almost without, in different materials, oil, engravings, by the artist himself or his students. It’s very clear that the concerns of the post-Romantic era, the necessity of avoiding repeats, the whole search for the new and uncaptured, all lie outside Rembrandt’s circle of interests. Add to these the logic of self-knowledge, which is far too easy to impute to anyone found to be interested in their own persona. Perhaps the intention (however it was formulated back then) was not to acknowledge the opening curve of a new segment of life, but to fix the typical, to pin it down. I was this. I will never be this again.

  The “selfie” genre operates in exactly this way. It is concerned with the contemporary: the search for variation has been replaced by the production of repeat images. Anyone on social media knows how often pictures appear in little clusters, a few self-portraits all taken in the same place and presented to the world one after the other, out of the sheer impossibility of choice. A number of tools have been developed in order to give the appearance of variety to these clusters: filters that refashion a picture in the manner of an artistic system, in the style of Munch, Klimt, Kandinsky, leaving the core of the self untouched.

  It’s this core we’re concerned with. As usual all questions asking “how” are simply a way of answering the fundamental question of “who.” Rembrandt experts all tell of the incredible variety of media for the age, the different ways of applying paint, the brushwork. In this sense Rembrandt has no “signature,” no authorial manner, nothing of what was valued by the art of a new age obsessed with the personal. Or rather, he has too many of them. For each new task he develops a new technical approach, which you could call a filter. It’s a little like our photographs, with their pretense at variety. The difference is first and foremost in what’s present in every Rembrandt portrait, glancing out like the skull beneath the skin, in every fold of flesh — and what the poetics of the selfie eschews at all costs. Facebook photos, like the fairy-tale mirror on the wall, seek to persuade us of our invulnerability. As they dispassionately record each new wrinkle they insist that the face in the mirror is still ours, still the fairest of them all, hardly changed from the day before yesterday.

  Jean Cocteau said that cinema is the only art form that records death at work. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are solely occupied with recording death, and lined up together they make a sort of protofilm — whereas the kilometers of selfies, taken and uploaded for communal access, look like the exact opposite to me: the chronicle of death as it walks among us, no longer of any interest to anyone.

  Even stronger then is the temptation to see the sequence of Rembrandt’s oil paintings as a narrative arc, a kind of graphic novel, with the face as hero. All of the events and adventures happen to the face, as if it were a character you could manipulate at will, allowing for distortion or dislocation. And these disto
rtions happen of course, although they have little to do with the subject. That is, yes, the metamorphoses of the face are accompanied by changes in the entourage: a little further to the left or right, but you’re still the hero, the emperor, the unfortunate, the old man, no one, yourself. Sometimes this “I” is more successful than in real life, appearing in the clothes and the pose of the princes of this world. Often, the subjects insist on their just deserts — appearing with a gold chain over the chest, the sign of an artist’s success. Rembrandt never received such a reward in life, but the portraits set this to rights. Most of all the artist is quite literally testing the model for durability, for its ability to reinvent itself.

  The quality of loving-kindness is intimately connected with the work of the hands, with the touch of the brush on the canvas, stroke by stroke. Here it is conjoined with the powerful energy of alienation, or distance, to put it simply. The painted Rembrandt changes from canvas to canvas, but retains an unchanging presence — almost like the protagonist of a comic or cartoon, Tintin or Betty Boop, whose depictions have become a symbol, a few oversized characteristics grouped around an empty space. The mathematical constant, along with the constant of the subject, have been canceled out. Sometimes the portrait necessitates smaller eyes, sometimes larger, sometimes they are apart, sometimes closer-set. The chin, too, gets longer and then shorter again. The nose however remains unchanged — if you think of the features of a face as a collection of personalities then the comic stubborn nose, with its bulbous tip would be the main character, the hero of the tale.