Do you remember a Rembrandt we considered the artist who had taught humanity more about humanity than any other? A kind of Shakespeare of the visual world, that Rembrandt can be restored. It is just a matter of how we look at him.
For generations Rembrandt scholars have been “arranging” Rembrandt’s paintings and drawings into a smooth and reliable development but Rembrandt was not reliable. They are trying to knock a square peg into a round hole and have nearly destroyed him. We have lost sight of nearly half his works as a result, through de-attribution.
There is an alternative view. A view that is entirely in accord with the reports of Rembrandt’s contemporaries and with the established facts of his life and art. It fits the facts so well that the scholars will not argue with it – they ignore it.
Rembrandt was not reliable, he did not follow artistic precedents in the approved scholarly fashion “he was taught by nature and by no other law” his contemporaries tell us and this judgment is born out by the works themselves. His inspiration came direct from life as he experienced it. His right brain was feeling life more acutely and expressing it more potently than any other artist before or since. Add to that the very strong indication that Rembrandt was a bi-polar, manic/depressive type, who has been studied by scholars with an obsessive desire for order and you get the present disaster in scholarship. Would you try to date the letters of a manic/depressive by his handwriting? That is what has happened.
Nigel Konstam, the “New Humanist” sculptor, would be happy to show you the alternative Rembrandt, whose art he has been studying for 50 years. His Rembrandt is bigger, bolder and altogether more human than the Rembrandt the scholars have been chewing over in that time.
The exhibition at the Getty would afford him the optimum opportunity for an “Alternative Symposium”. Now is the moment – add your voice to that of The Save Rembrandt Society
Please vote either
a massive vote of no confidence in recent Rembrandt scholarship
or
let us at least hear the alternative view of Rembrandt