November 6, 1998 Art Scene: Rembrandt, by Fred Harris

Early this morning, I was browsing through The American Legion Reader: Fiction, Articles, Humor, Cartoons from The American Legion Magazine, edited by Victor Lasky. I have found some amazing stuff in there.

When was it published, you ask? Good question. It's one of those anthologies that somehow forgets to put a copyright on the book itself, but at a guess it came out during or shortly after 1953. Content copyrights run from 1926 to 1953, at any rate. I chanced upon it in a stack of old books we bought for resale, and made the mistake (from a bookseller's point of view) of glancing inside and getting caught up in it. It's moved into my personal library. I politely suggest you get your own copy. Some of it is soldier stuff, and hard to read because of the realities involved - but if you can read something like "The Flag That Wouldn't Stay Down" by Kenneth Foree, from June 1950, and not be staggered by the valor of the men and busting with pride at the end of it, I feel sorry for you. (For a thumbnail sketch of the same story, see The Story of Otto Erler, WWII POW. For a 2003 update, see "long, great story about a WWII POW and his flag", which reprints a dallasnews.com story by Brian Anderson. I tried to link directly to the article at dallasnews.com, but they apparently didn't keep it, at least not at that link.)

So, you say, enough already - the title link here is something about art and Rembrandt. Well, yes, sorry, I have done something of a sidetrack, but it was an intentional one, to enable me to show that this book is an anthology that ranges widely. Well, no, it was more than that. "The Flag That Wouldn't Stay Down" is one of the best stories in the book, and I couldn't resist sharing it with you. There are other great stories, of course, including several that make me laugh out loud. Fiction, nonfiction, advice, heroics, poking fun where it ought to be poked, you name it; Mr. Lasky put together quite a mix, something for nearly every mood. It's one of my favorite anthologies. I wish somebody would reprint it, actually. (There are used copies readily available on the Internet, but who knows how long that will last?)

What got me going (and finally we're steering toward the title link, trust me) was reading this bit reprinted from August 1947. The American Legion was planning to hold a national convention in New York, and it asked "five distinguished New Yorkers" to give out-of-towners a feel for the city they'd be visiting. And one of them, Billy Rose, wrote:

If I were a Legionnaire on a brief visit to New York, here are some of the sights I would want to see:

"Old Lady Cutting Her Fingernails," by Rembrandt, at the Metropolitan Museum of art.

The bronze plaque on the house next to the corner, Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. On this plaque a Roman God thumbs his nose at his next door neighbor. Many years ago, a next door neighbor objected to a man living in this house, for racial reasons. The thumb-nosing plaque was the answer.

The Washington Vegetable Market at 3 o'clock in the morning. This one is for the book.

A bus ride up Fifth Avenue on Sunday morning.

The George Washington Bridge. A breath-taking job in steel and wire.

The dinosaur and the other prehistoric what-nots at the Museum of Natural History. They cut a fellow down to size.

A long look at the Statue of Liberty.

Oh, yes - Broadway, 'specially if you're interested in neon.

When I stumbled across this write-up today, my first response was to the bronze plaque bit. I like that. It's wonderful. I hope it's still there, to tell you the truth. Some of the folks wandering around these days wallowing in self-pity or building patronizing monuments celebrating victimhood maybe should know about this, I thought.

But my second thought was that from what little I know about Billy Rose, I'm not sure I'd put it past him to have sent people to a museum to ask after a painting that wasn't there or didn't exist (all in good fun, of course).

And my third thought, which surprised me, was that I was upset at the idea of someone possibly misusing Rembrandt for a prank. Allow me to explain. Many years ago, I was broke and bored, and wandering around Vancouver, British Columbia. The Vancouver Art Gallery had a free day (or cut-rate day, I forget which) and was advertising The Dutch world of painting and it was handy. Expecting nothing more than a half hour or so's diversion, I went in. And changed my life. Honestly, I was floored by what I saw. I was astonished to find that some of the Dutch Masters were drop-dead funny in their art. I wandered into another room and found myself in another exhibit, where I lingered over a case with da Vinci drawings, grasping for the first time the difference between good drawings and great ones. But Rembrandt. My gosh. I lost myself in Rembrandt and the other Dutch Masters.

Thank you Vancouver Art Gallery. Thank you everybody from both sides of the Atlantic who put that exhibit together. You have no idea what it's like to see something that good, after having been exposed to nothing like that quality. You have no idea, I suspect, of what a gift it was to someone like me who had been steeped in a culture of cheap shots and slipshod work, who had, without meaning to, come to associate "art" with crassness and spoiled brats. I wish I could convey how fabulous it was to see painting after painting that was not only technically good but which spoke to some deep understanding about what is good or humorous about us as humans. It wasn't just that the pictures were beautiful, although some of them were. Somehow they tied centuries and cultures together. Somehow they seemed wise, and witty, and welcoming. Great stuff. Amazing exhibit.

So, anyway, when I read this travel hint from Billy Rose I dove to the Internet and went looking for confirmation that he was being serious, that such a painting existed and had been on display in New York, and found this article written for a Tokyo audience. (You gotta love the Internet.) The author, Fred Harris, has this to say about that particular painting:

I first saw original Rembrandts in the Metropolitan Museum in New York when I was a student at the High School of Music and Art. The large painting of an old woman cutting her fingernails kept me in a spell. I stood in front of this painting for three hours, and didn't realize that tears were running down my cheeks. It's so beautiful; from the soft shadows on her forehead cast from her headpiece to the gesture of the hands while performing this simple act. The old lady was so alive to me that I responded in complete empathy to the canvas.

This kind of art goes beyond any intellectual analysis of composition, historical survey of the times or scientific breakdown of the painting technique. This is simple LOVE, and there are not many artists who ever lived who make you love them as Rembrandt makes me love him.

This particular painting has now been reclassified as being painted by a follower of Rembrandt. It is interesting to note that some people now turn their back to this masterpiece. Not me.

Well, duh, you say - if a painting's good, it's good, right? No matter who paints it, right? Well, I think so, too, but sadly enough it has been the fashion for certain influential, 'important' people to admire works (or not) because it is considered sophisticated to admire them (or not). I probably shouldn't plug it on a blog called "Suitable For Mixed Company", but Tom Wolfe wrote a wickedly pointed history and analysis of this phenonmenon in his book The Painted Word. I wish there was a bowdlerized copy out there, because really some of what he gets into is, uhm, rather gutterish, if I remember right. But, oh, did he skewer "the myths and men of modern art". (For that matter, much of the whole leftist-elitist cultural swamp gets exposed, if I remember correctly.) The back cover blurb crows, "The Painted Word is scandalous!" and (in places) it is, but then again so is the subject - and so are the people - it addresses. Sigh.

But that, of course, is another story...