by Jean Genet
Jean Genet became familiar with the paintings of Rembrandt on visits to London in 1952, Amsterdam in 1953, then Munich, Berlin and Vienna in 1957, and this is one of two essays that he wrote about the painter. First published in L'Express newspaper in 1958, its style, like the rest of his art criticism, flits between the notational and the poetic. A meditation on the effects of profound loss on artmaking, seeing and vocation, it gives an inisght, too, into Genet's writing, particularly his novels; if Rembrandt's 'wound' was the death of his beloved Saskia van Uylenburgh, for Genet, it was his childhood.
A great kindness. And it’s to proceed without delay that I use this phrase. Rembrandt’s final self-portrait seems to say: “I am of such intelligence that even savage animals will sense my kindness”. But it’s not morality that drives the painter to seek adornments for the soul, it’s his metier that requires it, or, rather, brings it in its train. It’s possible for us to know this because, by a chance unique in the history of art, a painter who posed before a mirror with narcissistic complacency, left us, parallel to the rest of his oeuvre, a series of self-portraits in which we can observe the evolution of his technique and the effect of this evolution on the man. That, or else the inverse.
In the pictures painted before 1642, Rembrandt is in love with splendour, but a splendour that exists nowhere else but in the scenes represented. The sumptuousness – as in his Oriental and Biblical scenes – lies in the richness of the decors, accoutrements and costumes. Jeremiah wears a gorgeous robe, places his foot upon a rich rug, and the vases placed on the rock are of gold. One senses that Rembrandt is happy to invent or portray a purely conventional richness, just as he is happy to paint a sumptuously costumed Saskia as Flora, or himself, on his knees, magnificently attired, raising his goblet aloft. Of course, from his youth he’d painted people of humble background- often adorning them with opulent finery - yet though Rembrandt dreamt of outward splendour, he at the same time tended towards humility in faces. Sensuality withdraws itself when he touches the face, and even when young he preferred to paint faces worn by ageing.
A matter of empathy perhaps, or merely the challenge of technical problems posed by a pensioner’s face. Who knows? But these faces have been accepted as ‘picturesque’. He paints them with taste and finesse, but even when the face is that of his mother, without love. The wrinkles, crow’s feet, warts, the folds of the skin, are all scrupulously rendered, but they don’t extend to the interior of the canvas, aren’t nourished by the warmth that comes from living organisms; in short, they are ornamental.
Detail from Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (wife of Joseph Trip), National Gallery, London
It is the two portraits of Mme Trip (National Gallery) that are painted with the greatest affection, those two old women’s heads that rot and decompose before our very eyes. Here, decrepitude is no longer considered and reproduced as something picturesque, but as something just as loveable as anything else. If we were to wash away the surface His Mother Reading, under the wrinkles we’d find the charming young woman his mother continues to be. We cannot wash away the decrepitude of Mme. Trip, for it is precisely that which appears before us with such force. It is there. Dazzling. Vivid. And it tears away the veil of the picturesque. Whether agreeable to the eye or not, decrepitude exists. And so is beautiful. And rich in … have you ever had a small wound, on the elbow perhaps, which has become infected. A scab forms. You pick at it with your nails. Underneath, you see that the filaments of pus the nourish the crust go a long way down … your whole organism at work nourishing this wound. Each square centimetre of Mme Trip’s metacarpal or lip is the same. Who succeeded in that? A painter who only wanted to render what is, and who, in painting it with such exactitude, returned to it all its force, and thus its beauty. Or else it is a man who, having understood – through sheer force of meditation – that everything has its dignity, must now devote himself to representing that which ostensibly lacks it.
It's been said that Rembrandt, unlike, say, Franz Hals, didn’t know how to capture the likeness of his models; in other words, couldn’t see the difference between one man and another. But if he didn’t see them, perhaps they didn’t exist for him. Perhaps it’s all just trompe l’oeil. His portraits rarely reveal the character traits of his models: the man or woman there before us is not, a priori, spineless, cowardly, good or evil: but is capable, at each instant, of being any of them. But what never appears in his portraits is the caricatural, accompanied by the judgemental. Nor do we see, as with Hals, any ‘sparkling humour’ but, like the rest, it could be there.
Except for the smiling face of his son Titus, there is not a single face Rembrandt painted that seems serene. All seem pregnant with serious, deep drama. These characters, with their huddled, contained postures, are like tornadoes held momentarily at bay. They embody a destiny that has been precisely foretold and that, any minute now, they will fulfil. Rembrandt’s own drama, however, seems only to be that of how he will look at the world. He wants to know what it’s all about, so that he can be delivered from it. All if his figures are aware of a wound, from which they are taking refuge. Rembrandt knows that he, too, is wounded, but he wants it, vainly, to heal. It is this that gives his self-portraits their air of vulnerability, compared to that air of confident strength we perceive when looking at his other paintings. Without any doubt, this man, well before reaching maturity, had recognised the inherent dignity of all being and every object, down to the humblest. In his drawings, the delicacy with which he rendered the most familiar attitudes is not without sentimentality. At the same time, his natural sensuality, allied with his imagination still made him desire luxury and dream of splendour.
His reading of the bible exalted his imagination: buildings, weaponry, furs rugs, headdresses. The Old Testament, above all, inspired his theatricality. He paints. Is celebrated. Becomes rich. Is proud of his success. He adorns Saskia in velvet and gold … then she dies. If, after this, only the world remains, and painting as a way of approaching it, encountering it, then this world only has, or rather is, one single value, such that this has no more or less inherent value than that.
A Woman Bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje), National Gallery, London
But one doesn’t rid oneself of mental habits or such strength of sensuality overnight. Nevertheless, it seems that he did try and rid himself of them, a little at a time, and not by rejecting them outright, but by transforming them, so that they could be of service to him. He clings on to splendour – I speak here of that splendour he dreamt and imagined, as well as a certain theatricality. To defend himself from them they undergo a certain treatment under his hands: he will henceforth exalt conventional splendour but distort it in such a way as to make it barely recognisable. And he will go still further. This brilliance that makes things seem so precious he will incorporate into his most miserable subjects, so that all is confused, indistinguishable. Nothing will be what it seems, but what will silently, imperceptibly illuminate the humblest matter will be the as-yet-unextinguished fire of his old taste for opulence and splendour which from now on, instead of being on the canvas and the object represented, will be placed inside it. This process proceeds slowly, perhaps obscurely, and will reveal to him that each face has value, and that each human identity is worth as much as any other.
The Prodical Son in hte Brothel, or Rembrandt and Saskia, Gemaldegalerie, Dresden
As for painting, this miller’s son of twenty-three knew how to paint, and admirably, too, but at thirty -seven he loses his flair. Now he will have to learn everything again, hesitantly, almost gauchely. And slowly he discovers this again the unique magnificence that each object possesses, one neither more nor less grand than any other; he, Rembrandt, must restore it, offering it to us, utilising the magnificence of colour. One could say that he is the only painter who shows equal respect to the model and to the painting as object, exulting in both at the same time, and one by the other. But what touches us so strongly in these paintings that strive so strenuously for the exaltation of everything - with no concern for hierarchies - is a sort of reflection , or rather an inner glow, not nostalgic, but yet still of something not yet completely extinguished, the remains of his glorious dreams of luxuriousness, the lees of his theatricality, those signs of an ordinary life that was caught up, like any other life, in convention, and made use of it. And in what a manner! Without destroying or exhausting it, but by transforming it, contorting it, searing it. And so now the signs of exterior splendour come to illuminate anything in the here and now, but from within.
And Rembrandt himself? Apart from some self-satisfied self-portraits, all reveal, from his youth onwards, an essentially anxious man pursuing vagrant truths. The acuity of his vision is not adequately explained by the psychological need to stare into a mirror. Sometimes he has an almost mean look about him (recall that he went so far as to pay for one of his creditors to be jailed), or vain (the arrogance of that ostrich plume atop a velvet hat … and that golden chain); little by little, the hardness in his face attenuates. Before the mirror his complacent narcissism becomes an anxiousness, and a passionate, then tremulous seeking.
For some time now he’s lived with Hendrickje Stoffels, and this magnificent woman (apart from those of Titus, the portraits of Hendrickje are steeped in the sublime old bear’s tenderness and gratitude) must at the same time satisfy his sensuality and his need for tenderness. In his final self-portraits, we can longer discern any indications of psychology. If we insist upon it, we can see something like kindliness pass across his face. Or is it merely detachment. Whichever you choose, here, it’s the same.
Towards the end of his life Rembrandt became good. Because malice puts a screen between the self and the world. Malice, spitefulness, and all forms of aggression, all that we term ‘character traits’, our humours, desires, eroticisms and vanities. We must pierce this screen to let the world in. Yet Rembrandt didn’t seek out this goodness – or, if you prefer, detachment – in order to follow religious or moral precepts (it is anyway only in moments of abandon that an artist can truly have any faith, if at all. If he commits what we call his personal characteristics to the flames, it’s to achieve a purer vision of the world in his art, one that is more just. In the end he didn’t care of he was good or bad, irritable or patient, rapacious or generous. He wanted to be nothing more than a hand and an eye. What is more, and by this egotistical route, he had to achieve a kind of purity, one that is so evident in his final portraits that we are almost hurt by it. And it is by the narrow path of painting that he achieves this purity.
Self Portrait as Zeuxis Laughing, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Vologne
If I wanted to schematically, crudely, describe this process – one of the most heroic of the modern era – I would say that in 1642 (though even by this time he was no ordinary man) unhappiness completely overwhelmed this young man bursting with talent, but who was also full of violence, vulgarity, and an exquisite delicacy.
With no hope of happiness ever reappearing in his life, and with a terrible effort, he will try, since only painting remains for him, to eradicate from his works all the signs of his vanity, all the signs too, of his happiness, his dreams. At the same time, he wanted, since after all it is the aim of painting, to represent the world, yet to make it unrecognisable. Does he achieve this straight way? This double demand leads him to give the paint itself a value equal to the that which it depicts, and this exaltation of paint, as it couldn’t then be arrived at through abstraction (though sleeve in The Jewish Bride is an abstract painting), leads him to the exaltation of everything that can be represented by paint, without exception.
This effort results in him being able destroy that in him which could lead to a differentiated, hierarchical vision of the world: now, a hand has the same value as a face, a face as the corner of a table, the corner of table that of a stick, a stick as a hand, a hand to a sleeve … all of that, perhaps is true of some other painters, yet what painter, up to this point, had made something lose its identity in order to exalt it? The hand, the sleeve, and then, without doubt, the painting itself, move endlessly from one to the other unceasingly, in a vertiginous pursuit, towards nothing.
And changed too are the old theatricalities, the sumptuousness and luxury: they no longer have their old function but are now in the sole service of solemnity.
Between 1666 and 1669 there must have been something more in Amsterdam than the paintings of an old crook (if the story of the repossessed engraving plates is true) and besides the city. There was what remained of a person reduced to extremity, who had almost completely disappeared, moving from bed to easel, from easel to the toilet – where he probably made hasty sketches with his dirty nails - and what remained could hardly have been anything more than a cruel goodness, something bordering on imbecility. A chapped hand that dipped brushes into blue and brown paint, an eye that alighted on objects, nothing more, nothing more than a consciousness that bound an eye to the world without hope.
In his final self-portrait, he laughs gently. Yes, gently. He has learned all that a painter can learn. Firstly, this (or lastly this): that the painter is wholly the gaze that goes from object to canvas, and the movement of the hand that moves from the little globules of colour to the canvas.
Self-Portrait at the age of 63, National Gallery, London
The painter is now gathered entirely into the tranquil journey of the painting hand, this serene back and forth in which all fears, luxuries, and splendours have been transformed. Legally, he has nothing. Through a juggling of the books everything he has will be split between Hendrickje and Titus. He won’t even own his own paintings.
A man has lived and died entirely through his work. What remains of him is enough for the journey, but he still has enough time left to paint The Return of the Prodigal Son. He dies before succumbing to the temptation to beclown himself.
Translation © Chris Milton
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