An exhibit ran at the San Francisco De Young Museum from January until early June 2013 titled “Rembrandt’s Century.” This exhibit opened a window on an astonishing period in European history that among other things laid the foundations for the American Revolution. This was the Dutch Golden age, a period with special resonance to our time. It was a time of explosive cultural, economic and technological advance and change.
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| The Dutch United Provinces In the 17th Century (From Schama, Simon (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age) |
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| Map of the Dutch United Provinces Made in 1658 (From Price, J.L. (2011). Dutch Culture in the Golden Age) |
From their inception the Dutch were a singular and unlikely people. It is thought that the wandering Germanic tribe, the Batavi, found refuge on the northern edge of the European continent where conditions were so harsh that invaders had no interest in the area. They settled on inhospitable bog lands which flooded regularly. The North Sea blocked any further movement north.
Ingenuity, hard work and clever engineering was required to claim the land of bogs and ocean flooding for human habitation and farming. Ultimately, the construction of cities, roads, harbor and watercourses for trade and movement of goods was achieved, but this made the Dutch again targets of invasion. Windmills pumped millions of gallons of water, and dikes held the seas back. Alliances between even close by regions were weak and many times with more contention than cooperation. There was no monarchy, not even a sense of a national identity, in the middle of the 1500’s a very loose republic existed at best. Then came the Spanish who tried to conquer the region.
The Dutch language diverged from earlier Germanic languages beginning in the middle of the twelfth century. It began to be standardized into one language following the Spanish invasion. The Dutch language further set the Dutch apart from other European nationalities even if they didn’t have a cohesive nation of their own.
Then the strangest transformation of all happened at the end of the sixteenth century. In a scant two generations, the disorganized republic would become a world power whose reach would extend across the known and newly discovered world. At the same time they would enter an eighty year war with Spain and through it all become one of the world’s wealthiest nations, and a world center of culture, art and science.
Even stranger was the peaceful coexistence within the Dutch cities of peoples representing opposite extremes of every cultural, social and religious belief. This was also a foretelling of the circumstances of the American Revolution. The ability of an extreme range of beliefs to coexist sharing a fundamental belief in humanism, and brought closer together by adversity is a hallmark of democracy and its endurance.
The Dutch United Provinces as they were known at the time provided refuge to the persecuted, the oppressed, the rebels and the dissenters of other European countries of the time, and was the richer for it. The city became the most powerful merchant city in Europe. Not just goods, but ideas and knowledge where exchanged on a scale never seen before.
It was the long bloody struggle against the Spanish which finally ended in 1648 that shaped the Dutch country and its character. This character generated a deep empathy for the later rebellion against England by the colonists of America. Holland was the first European power to recognize the English rebels as an independent state and was responsible for supplying arms and ammunition without which the rebellion could not have succeeded.
This is not to say that they didn’t have their share of superficial dunces and superstitious elements of the populace such as in our current time, but history is a crowded and noisy business and tends to forget the purely mediocre. The situation was too chaotic and unsettled for any faction or belief to exert much control.
The mediocre can achieve mass hysteria, such as with the Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693), or notable folly, such as the Swedish warship Vasa which was built with such a formidable and top heavy weapons complement that it overturned and sunk after sailing a mile (1628). I mention these two events as they were contemporaneous with the Dutch Golden Age.
The affluence in the region of Holland extended to a wider percentage of the populace than any other European state, along with a complex culture and a wide range of goods from the far corners of the earth. There were technological advances that the populace benefited from. The various forms of copying or producing original images on metal plates where multiple high quality copies could be produced rapidly transformed art. It became common for the newly expanding middle class to own and collect art. The volume and subject matter of art ultimately swelled to a flood that inundated all of Europe. This had an effect similar to the invention and dissemination of photography centuries later.
An interesting aside in the urban culture of the Dutch was its lack of professional or adequate policing. The police were considered corrupt and ineffective. (4) The rising merchant class took pride in self defense and "citizen's justice." Manuals were printed that mirror our own culture's fascination with the oriental martial arts. As pointed out in (4), these printed self defense manuals were more than sports manuals, they were an expression of the ideology of a new and rising middle class and its rights to defend its new affluence.
It is tempting to accept the simplicity of the analogy of printmaking to photography. However there was a more profound effect on the consciousness and culture of the Dutch.
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| Three plates from Romeyn de Hooghe, a Dutch urban self defense manual published in Amsterdam in 1674. Engravings by N. Petter. (From Schama, Simon (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age) |
It is tempting to accept the simplicity of the analogy of printmaking to photography. However there was a more profound effect on the consciousness and culture of the Dutch.
Printmaking and the harbor of Amsterdam constituted an early television or Internet connection, albeit a limited one. Whether it was an image, a book, or rare specimens from remote regions of the planet a connection to a larger world was established and one’s fundamental perception of reality was no longer the same. The experience was more transformational to the fundamental culture and perception of reality to the Dutch Burgher than we perceive photography in our own time.
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| Dutch printmaking shop, Abraham Bosse The Intaglio Printers, 1642, (From Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century) |
A large segment of Dutch society previously limited to the goings on of their local community was suddenly given a ringside seat in the biggest nexus of world trade and culture. You cannot be witness to such a spectacle without becoming a participant. Collections of a wide variety of trinkets and specimens collected from the far reaches of the world became a common pastime of the burghers and tradesmen as well as the wealthy. Prints produced in the hundreds on metal plates became sought after in the homes of thousands.
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| Dutch printmaking shop, Abraham Bosse The Engraver and the Etcher, 1643, (From Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century) |
There was more than affluence and a new awareness of a larger world amongst the burghers of Holland. There were witness and players to the flow of history, indeed they felt a stake in the yearnings and outcome of the progress of humanity, They stood in the shoes of previous masters of the arts and weighed their efforts against the best of those who has come before. From their new vantage point as a nexus of world trade and culture, they saw themselves as present in all the great events of human history past and present.
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| In this rendering of the Circumcision of Christ, done in the style of Albrecht Durer, the artist Hendrick Goltzius places himself in the biblical scene (back right). The Circumcision, Hendrick Goltzius, Engraving 1594, (From Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century) |
This was the era of not only unprecedented art and trade, but the new reality led to fantastical economic excesses inconceivable before such as the great tulip bubble. In the early 1600s the Dutch created many of the financial techniques of the modern stock market such as short selling and futures in commodities. In the frenzy of trade and the collecting of odd and amazing objects from around the world, tulip bulbs caught the fancy of many in Holland.
The bulbs took a long time to grow and mature, they produced flowers with bright and fantastical patterns, and the flowers they produced lasted only a few weeks. The most desirable varieties were those infected with a virus which while yielding the most beautiful flowers also yielded weakened plants which took longer to mature at the same time having a shorter lifespan. This was the perfect input to send a burgeoning economy with fanciful economic tools into an uncontrolled wild gallop. (7) The Tulip mania reached its peak in 1637, when in February 1637 the market for Tulip Bulbs collapsed. Up to this point, there were bulbs valued at as much as 2500 florins (Dutch currency of the time), which compares to the salary of a skilled laborer who might earn 150 florins per year. A ton of butter cost 100 florins.
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| Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait Drawing at a Window, 1648, Etching, drypoint, and engraving (From Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century) |
It is in this exceptional Dutch milieu that that we find Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669), known to us now universally simply as Rembrandt. He was an extraordinary person in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time. From 1629 on his talent as a painter and portraitist was recognized and grew. He moved to Amsterdam in 1631 just as the city itself was becoming a commercial and cultural world center.
Rembrandt was not only a remarkable painter, but he also produced prints and was well known and popular for his printmaking. Printmaking was considered a craft, not an art, and many printmakers copied works of great artists, and many well-known painters hired printmakers to copy their work into prints. Rembrandt was hands on, doing and teaching the etching, engraving and printing, and even using and developing techniques that combined engraving, etching and drypoint. For most of his long career he owned his own printing press, and he produced his own prints from 1626 to 1660.
Rembrandt's work captured the emotional intensity of life in the Dutch United Provinces and the profundity and power of his expression reached far beyond its boundaries. We are still moved by his expression and the power of his images in all the media he worked in. He was popular in his time and his prints were widely distributed in his lifetime. The topics of his prints ranged from religious themes to landscapes, to common people and the lowly street people. He was influential in the art and craft of painting and printmaking, and many of his prints evolved over time as he continued to modify the printing plates over the course of as long as a decade.
Rembrandt portrayed the common people realistically. Even many of his mythical and biblical characters were portrayed with the unflattering bodies of the middle aged corpulent Dutch he saw around him. The depth and complexity he managed to convey in facial expressions and the gestures in his paintings, prints and drawings astound us today.
Rembrandt was not an isolated genius. Although not typical of the artists or printmakers of his time, he required the thriving community of artisans and the wealth produced by the merchants and traders to pursue his craft. He reflected the vital and complex culture around him in his work and it is doubtful that the depth and range of his expression would have occurred without his immersion in such a vigorous and dynamic society.
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| Jacques Linard, Still Life of Exotic Shells on a Boite do Copeaux 1621/1624 (From Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century) |
It is easy to find foolishness and superstition in our own time to rival anything found in the Dutch United Provinces. The Tea Party comes to mind in the immediate present. Harder to characterize are those influences which define and characterize a larger representation of the culture.
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| Two Fools of the Carnival, Hendrick Hondus the Elder, Dutch 1642 (From Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century) |
Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Two of many fools of the Tea Party, United States of America, Early 21rst Century
While foolishness and superstition is universal across all time and culture, the immediately obvious question as we consider the past is who might be playing a similar role of that of Rembrandt in our own time. That is, who captures a unique vision of our place and culture, transcending our time and way of life able to communicate to those outside who gaze into it perhaps for all time to come? In our time the mediums that reach large numbers of people do not require two weeks of effort by the most skilled craftsman of the time. In fact, they barely require two seconds to be broadcast to the far reaches of the earth.
At first blush, it seems that we are no more than crude impostors of the skilled artisans that were required at the time of the Dutch Golden age to produce these wondrous works. However, as we consider the achievements of a more technologically evolved society, there is a purity of vision and perception when the judgment of the artistic impact is based on the pure product and not the technical skill required to render the product presentable.
Images captured with a single press of a button still have the power to ensnare not only the moment but subtler depictions of larger truths. The nuances of expression, background or the predicament of the subject, even the unbelievable that is gone in a split second can be captured by the lucky observer in minute visual detail. These images have power to expand the horizons of contemporaries in the culture and inform and entertain those of other places and times.
A master of this medium for our time is Annie Liebovitz. Her pictures of celebrities capture the strivings and the obsessive neurosis of America of the latter 20th century and the early 21rst century. She has recently extended her vistas to historical peoples and environments that shaped and inspire our perceptions of ourselves and the time we inhabit.
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| Folksinger, Pete Seeger's garage full of tools, Annie Liebovitz, (From Liebovitz, Annie (2011). Pilgrimage) |
As with the observers from the Dutch Golden age, she finds images that influence and inform the time we live in, and subtly imprint the viewpoint of the observer. For the Dutch, biblical stories, historical events, still life, landscapes, contemporary scenes and people or anything else that could be imaged was captured and branded with the viewpoint of their cultural perspective. We learn as much about the Dutch culture and its exuberance, insatiable curiosity, fears and anxieties as we do the subjects of the prints and paintings. The same can be said of Annie Liebovitz’s images.
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| Photographer Ansel Adams' darkroom in Carmel, California. Annie Libovitz, (From Liebovitz, Annie (2011). Pilgrimage) |
By strange confluence, both Annie Liebovitz and Rembrandt experienced severe financial crisis, even while famous and with their work in demand. Their very lives have been artistic canvases with the excesses and the missteps of their two cultures painted on them along with the genius of the age.
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| Viginia Woolf's Studio, Panels around the Fireplace Painted by Duncon Grant. Photograph by Annie Liebovitz (From Liebovitz, Annie (2011). Pilgrimage) |
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| William S. Burroughs Annie Liebovitz Photo |
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| John Lennon and Yoko Ono Picture taken by Annie Liebovitz shortly before Lennon's death |
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| Meryl Streep Annie Liebovitz Photo |
Annie Liebovitz's early work was best known for capturing celebrity in incongruous and culturally emblematic ways. She has lately aimed her vision to the roots and origins of our cultural heritage. There is nothing systematic about her approach, her choice of subjects or their environments. In fact, this is where the true genius might lie, only through a random sampling of a large enough range of roots can unbiased deeper truths be separated from superficial bias. What is universal will emerge from enough visions where it lays camouflaged in mountains of detail.
The canvas now dwarfs the artist, a flea on a giant landscape. When images took a couple of weeks to produce for distribution in the hundreds in the seventeenth century that was a tremendous advance. Their very existence and novelty, combined with their accessibility made collecting them a popular pastime among the burgeoning merchant class. Our psyches are now conditioned to images being captured in fractions of a second, and then it is only a few seconds more until they can be distributed to hundreds of millions. The challenge now is being the drop of water that stands out and is noticed in the ocean of information.
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| Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov as Peter Pan, who attempts to whisk away Wendy (Gisele Bundchen) with the help of Tinker Bell (Tina Fey). One of a Disney series by Annie Liebovitz |
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| Annie Liebovitz opening her Pilgrimage exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art on June 5, 2013. |
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| Queen Elizabeth, photographed March 2007 by Annie Liebovitz |
We no longer hunger for input beyond our immediate environment. We are drowning in information and detail from every corner of the planet. The same commerce which has brought affluence to an unprecedented number of the Earth's inhabitants threatens to bury our very humanity by converting us to mindless machines existing for no other purpose except to consume material goods. It is the mission of the artist to remind us of a higher purpose and warn us of the treacherous rocks hidden by the siren's songs of consumption. The first misstep leading to disaster is to forget our cultural roots.
The inane, the superficial, and knee jerk superstitions will always be with us. We must appreciate those of earlier times and our time who help us see beyond these impediments to human progress. Images have not lost any of the power they wielded in the 17th Century, and irony might be the most powerful medicine of all.
We no longer hunger for input beyond our immediate environment. We are drowning in information and detail from every corner of the planet. The same commerce which has brought affluence to an unprecedented number of the Earth's inhabitants threatens to bury our very humanity by converting us to mindless machines existing for no other purpose except to consume material goods. It is the mission of the artist to remind us of a higher purpose and warn us of the treacherous rocks hidden by the siren's songs of consumption. The first misstep leading to disaster is to forget our cultural roots.
The inane, the superficial, and knee jerk superstitions will always be with us. We must appreciate those of earlier times and our time who help us see beyond these impediments to human progress. Images have not lost any of the power they wielded in the 17th Century, and irony might be the most powerful medicine of all.
References
1. Ganz, James A. (2013). Rembrandt’s Century, Prestel Publishing, Munich, London and New York.
2. Liebovitz, Annie (2011). Pilgrimage, Random House, New York
www.randomhouse.com
www.randomhouse.com
3. Price, J.L. (2011). Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Reaktion Books Ltd, London www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
4. Schama, Simon (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, first published Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, now available Vintage Books, New York
www.randomhouse.com
www.randomhouse.com
5. Tuchman, Barbara W. (1988). The First Salute, Alfred A. Knopf, New York
6. Wikipedia, History of Dutch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dutch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dutch
7. Wikipedia, Tulip Mania
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