Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher
Like other 17th-century painters from Caravaggio to Vermeer to Georges de la Tour, Rembrandt was a poet of light. Indeed, most of the more than 200 works in the Art Institute’s masterpiece-filled show–which in-cludes 153 prints as well as paintings, drawings, oil sketches, and original copper etching plates–can be seen as delicate duets between Rembrandt’s wonderfully fleshy sense of the physical world and his use of light to suggest imma-teriality or transcendence. Rembrandt’s treatment of light is just as strong in his black-and-white prints as in his paintings–though the public prefers painting. Or so exhibition curator Clifford S. Ackley was told when he first planned a show of prints plus one painting. But as this superb exhibit proves, no artistic medium is inherently superior to any other.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In the prints, “light” is of course blank paper given nuance by Rembrandt’s masterful use of line. Not surprisingly, he sometimes creates a glow around Christ’s head, as in the 1634 print Christ at Emmaus, defined by the absence of a refined, complex network of marks. But as often happens in these prints, the textures that disappear into light somehow continue in the mind’s eye, infusing the white with remembered patterns. The ordinariness of the scene’s other details–the curves of a tablecloth, the texture of a dog’s fur–only heighten the power of Jesus’s halo.
Rembrandt’s inventive use of darkness is just as variable in its meanings. In An Elderly Woman (Rembrandt’s Mother, Seated at a Table) (circa 1631), the figure’s dark, highly textured garment–a dense thicket of lines with only a few white areas–feels like a weighty trap for light. The darkness in The Flight Into Egypt (A Night Piece) (1651) is straightforwardly threatening to the figures, while in Saint Jerome (In a Dark Chamber) (1642) it suggests the inwardness of thought: this scholar, hand on his brow, has no need for even the faint light cast on the book before him.
The failures use light in reductive, trivializing ways. Charles Biederman’s #9, New York, 1940 (1940) is an interesting geometrical sculpture with three fluorescent lights hidden within it. The problem is that the diffuse reflected light is subservient to the geometry, too different from it to be anything more than a decorative addition. Stephen Hendee’s Dead Collider (2004) is worse, a room-size installation of translucent panels with lights behind them intended to commemorate the unbuilt superconducting
These transformations render the light both completely immaterial and strangely alive. Afrum-Proto is like a changeable creature–a metaphor for shifts in human consciousness. It also transforms a familiar rectilinear room into a mystery: the simple beam pointed at a corner thoroughly derationalizes the space, throwing all our knowledge into question.
