Word: rembrandt
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Exploiting all techniques of 17th century printing processes, Rembrandt continually reworked his etchings to find a more expressive image, By emphasizing the changes he made on a single plate, the exhibition currently at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts shows the evolution of impressions from the same print. Though each landscape or biblical scene is complete in itself, it forms a step in the growth of the artist's progressive conception of a print. This small but awesome exhibition, Rembrandt: Experimental Etcher, honors the artist by following his creative process...
...catalogue printed in the same parchment tones of the prints describes the techniques Rembrandt used to create his shadowy imagery. He juggled lines - etched, and engraved - according to what he drew, sometimes combining all three in one print. He worked the delicately teethed lines into the most careful description-to weave the wrinkles in a face or show the heaviness of a drapery. He employed rougher drypoint or engraved lines for bolder cuts...
THERE were drag queens mingling with society matrons, rock 'n' roll blasting through the halls where Rembrandt and Velasquez once reigned in hushed glory, and costumes ranging from fringed buckskin to China Machado chic. "Peace Now" buttons blossomed on satin evening gowns. Pamphlets denouncing David Rockefeller, Viet Nam and the art market were dispensed along with cocktails and tiny sandwiches. Outside, pickets protested the lack of black and women artists in the show. Manhattan's venerable Metropolitan Museum had never before been host to anything quite like it, a fact that was duly lamented by diehard traditionalists...
...Barnett Newman or an Ad Reinhardt. Its images, in fact, depend in part on instant recognition. Many of its subjects are the eternal themes of art-scrubbed, rubbed, varnished, stuffed and updated. Susannah and the Elders, an exercise in biblical voyeurism that has been painted by Tintoretto, Rubens and Rembrandt, becomes in Tom Wesselmann's rendition a pink plastic Great American Nude in her bathtub, with gallerygoers playing unreluctant elders. Those meticulous Dutch still lifes of fruits and game are reflected in Pop's soup cans, candy canes, slabs of gooey cake, giant Coke bottles...
...mirror, and could not see himself there at all. In the "disastrously explicit medium of language" that he uses so well, Baldwin adds a yet icier thought: "This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt...