Word: rembrandt
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...such portraits, Van Gogh attained the grave humane fullness of his great model Rembrandt; the landscapes are like nothing anyone had painted before. No wonder the little asylum, with its worn flagstone corridors and pine-shadowed garden, remains one of the sacred sites of modernist culture. Here, as in Manet's Paris and Cezanne's Aix-en-Provence, art turned on its pivot in the 19th century to face the 20th. One does not see many exhibitions like this in a lifetime...
...seeing that remain central to Berger's imaginings. His eye ranges widely, from Rembrandt to Modigliani to an obscure Russian named Pirosmanishvili, who wandered from tavern to tavern a century ago painting pictures of food as inn signs. Berger begins one brilliant essay by describing how peasants in the Haute-Savoie spend winter evenings carving white wooden birds to hang in their kitchens. This leads him to analyze why the wooden birds are works of art, which leads him to wonder why certain things in nature are beautiful...
...Rembrandt at all. Rosenberg and other experts have speculated that the old warrior might have been Rembrandt's older brother Adriaen, a poor shoemaker in Leyden. But if the painting isn't by Rembrandt, then we have no idea who the warrior was, just an old man, tough and brave and sad. The experts are trying to learn more by subjecting the painting to a series of technical tests. These include activating some of its neutrons so that they can be compared with the neutrons in authenticated Rembrandts. The experts are always right, as we know...
...whether he was a man or a woman, one poet or many. Still, any printed work is a reproduction, one of many. And though even a reproduction of a great painting can have a powerful effect, there is something magical about the uniqueness of the original, the knowledge that Rembrandt applied his brush just here, nowhere else, and never again. Or somebody did. So we wander into that philosophical bramble patch at the edge of the legendary forest where the legendary tree falls and nobody is there to hear whether it makes a sound. Is the famous Etruscan warrior whom...
...with the Golden Helmet is as great as it ever was, not the least bit fake. But to be described in the future as a work by "Anon" or perhaps "School of Rembrandt" is to be changed forever. And the change somehow diminishes the picture and therefore diminishes us. This continuous search for truth can be a painful and punishing process. Sometimes it seems that all of education consists of first learning things and then learning that they are not true...