Financial Times Weekend 22-23Feb2020

22 February/23 February 2020 ★ FT Weekend 11

wants to die; his wife clings firmly to her

goat. Within a gloomy interior, their

deeply lined faces and fervent gestures

stand out, and our sympathy bounces

between them.

The palette here is muted, and grows

more so year by year: browns, greys,

dark yellows and blues replace initial

hectic colours. Figures are increasingly,

adroitly, modelled from light and shade,

psychological exchanges are subtler,

chiaroscuro determines narrative. The

donkey’s legs are awry, but “Flight into

Egypt” (1627) is a delicate nocturne,

light bathing Mary and the baby as

Joseph leads them into the composi-

tion’s centre. In “Samson and Delilah”

(1628), the Israelite judge, head buried

in Delilah’s lap, slumbers in darkness as

she turns, spot-lit in a moment of terri-

fied suspense, to the looming shadow of

the Philistine who will cut his curls.

Rembrandt was finding his storytelling

mode, as is made clear by the juxtaposi-

tion of “Samson” here with a conven-

tionally melodramatic rendering by his

best friend/rival Jan Lievens.

In 1629, statesman Constantijn Huy-

gens visited Rembrandt and Lievens in

their Leiden studio. On the easel was

Rembrandt’s “Judas”: “demented, wail-

ing, beseeching forgiveness but not

expecting to receive it or displaying any

hope in his feature, that awful face, the

torn hair... twisted limbs... the

entire body contorted”, wrote Huygens.

“I am struck dumb by it. What this

young man, a miller’s son, a beardless

boy, has done in summing up various

emotions in one figure and depicting

them as a single whole!”

“Judas” introduced a vitalising of

emotion that was new to Dutch art.

Rembrandt brought this manner of

painting to its apogee in the Leiden

years in two magnificent dramas cen-

tred on old men: the weeping prophet in

purple gown engulfed in a glow from the

burning city in “Jeremiah Lamenting

the Destruction of Jerusalem” (1630),

and “Simeon’s Song of Praise” (1631),

where the sage in the temple recognises

baby Jesus as the Messiah.

This was commissioned, via Huygens,

from Stadtholder Frederick Henry, and

Rembrandt brought all his genius to the

sumptuous orchestration of poses, bal-

anced yet fluid, including an astonished

Mary, richly varied brushstrokes —

transparent architectural elements,

exquisite raised strokes for the figures —

and sophisticated chiaroscuro, no

longer dividing light from shadow but

allowing a divine luminosity emanating

from the baby to taper off mysteriously.

Rembrandt was 25, but the sublime

old-age self-portraits are already pres-

aged. In Amsterdam from 1632, a career

as a portraitist beckoned. The Ash-

molean’s final work is the probing,

affecting “Portrait of an 83-Year-Old

Woman” (1634). Wrinkled and dissatis-

fied in a big white ruff, she sparkles

nonetheless — impasto highlights, flour-

ishes of dark shadows, a spontaneous

look conjured from absolute pictorial

control. Within 10 years, Rembrandt

had evolved an original painterly idiom

giving full visual expression to an

enlarged empathy with everyday

humanity, still unrivalled in art history.

‘YoungRembrandt’,February27-June7,

ashmolean.org

His figures, increasingly,

were modelled from light

and shade, with narrative

determined by chiaroscuro

S

ome groundbreaking artists —

Van Gogh, Matisse — struggled

even learning how to draw,

and their early works give lit-

tle idea of triumphs to come.

Others — Picasso, Raphael — burst on to

the stage as virtuoso prodigies.

Rembrandt belongs to the former

group — although not entirely, for in his

clumsy, unconvincing youthful paint-

ings, the emotional expressiveness and

human drama central to his life’s

achievement ring out. Gradually, he

refined his technique, developed ideas

and intensified his focus to achieve his

single stated aim: to create “the greatest

and most natural movement” —

unprecedented, dynamic pictorial and

psychological realism.

Young Rembrandt, arriving this week

at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum from

the Museum De Lakenhal in the artist’s

native Leiden, traces the battles and

breakthroughs of his beginnings, in the

years 1624-34, in engrossing, revelatory

detail. The largest ever show devoted to

this period, and the first in the UK, it is

packed with both unfamiliar curiosities

and rarely loaned glories.

We meet, first of all, a self-absorbed,

restless, eager youth, experimenting

equally with oil, pencil, ink and with his

identity. Emphasising wet-on-wet

wildly scratched curls and a flamboyant

lace collar, he peers out, earnest and

alert in the half-light, in Munich’s “Self-

Portrait”. He tries quick-changing guises

in drawings and etchings — “Self-

Portrait with Mouth Open”, “Self-

Portrait with Long Bushy Hair” — and

gives a swaggering grimace in the little

copper panel “Rembrandt Laughing”.

Gaining confidence, he dresses up: in

the only full-length self-depiction of his

life, the haloed “Self-Portrait in Oriental

Attire with a Poodle”, he apes a biblical

potentate, lord of a universe unfolding

in paint, with surfaces of velvet, satin,

armour, fur and feathered headdress.

This was Rembrandt in 1631, about to

leave Leiden for Amsterdam: he seems

to look far into the distance, and also

back within himself.

He knew he had come a long way. So

uneven is the early work that attribu-

tions are vexed: an awkward, pyramidal

composition showing Jesus surrounded

by babies, infants, a naked girl and

crammed jostling crowds in “Let the

Little Children Come to Me” (1627-28)

sold recently at a south German auction

as “Dutch School”, and now has its inau-

gural display as a Rembrandt. From

just four years later, the Metropolitan

Museum’s majestic, life-size “The Noble

Slav” is radiant with dazzling brush-

work and theatrical chiaroscuro: coiled

white turban in sweeping impasto;

translucent scarf; glittering gold chain

and pearl earrings; leathery, furrowed,

resolute face half in shadow, half illumi-

nated by the fall of light catching myriad

textures of flesh and fabric.

Rembrandt never visited Italy, so the

essential influence of Caravaggio’s dra-

mas of light and shade reached him via

his teacher, history painter Pieter Last-

man, who worked in Rome in the 1600s.

Rembrandt left Lastman in 1624 and, in

that year’s “The Spectacles Seller (Alle-

gory of Sight)”, Caravaggesque aspects

are pronounced: the shadow cast on the

woman’s face, livid brushstrokes for the

pedlar’s glinting wares and the portrayal

of ordinary people observed from life.

The composition is nevertheless, says

curator Christopher Brown, “a crude,

garishly coloured painting by an artist

struggling with his medium”.

By 1626, Rembrandt still referred to

his teacher’s examples. The exhibition

includes both his and Lastman’s ver-

sions of “Baptism of the Eunuch”, dem-

onstrating common design elements

and also where Rembrandt threw his

efforts: adopting a vertical instead of

horizontal format, he foregrounds the

action, reduces the landscape back-

ground and relishes the drama of paint,

especially in the lavishly textural white

fur coat cloaking the black eunuch. But

the attendant animals are poorly ren-

dered, the colours uncoordinated, the

composition cramped.

Three other 1626 works follow: Mos-

cow’s acid-hued, convoluted “Christ

Driving the Money Changers from the

Temple”; Lakenhal’s heavy, obscure

“History Painting”; then — suddenly

promising brilliance — the Rijksmu-

seum’s precise, highly finished “Tobit

Accusing Anna of Stealing the Kid”. The

old man, empty eye-sockets denoting

blindness, hands clasped despairingly,

The making

of a master

Young Rembrandt| The

artist’s early years are on

display in a superb show that

reveals his hits and misses.

ByJackie Wullschläger

A

green tractor sits outside

the Guggenheim in New

York, the arc of its fenders

echoing the curves of Frank

Lloyd Wright’s building.

Opposite is Central Park, carefully coif-

fured and terraformed to resemble a

natural landscape.

This is, of course, not the country-

side; it is the Upper East Side. But

there is a delight in stuffing the Gug-

genheim with the frankly ugly results

of a forage into the subject by curator

Rem Koolhaas, entitledCountryside:

The Future. Koolhaas — architect,

writer, theorist, provocateur — is a

dedicated contrarian. After more than

four decades of exploring urban envi-

ronments, at the moment when every-

one else is thinking about the future of

the city (where, famously, over half of

us now live) he has popped up in the

country. This is now the real locus of

radical change, he suggests.

The show was catalysed by Kool-

haas’s sojourns in the Swiss country-

side. The one-time peasant-tended

landscape had become a cultural-agri-

cultural hybrid — a place farmed by

south Asian migrants using high-tech

machinery and consumed for leisure

by a holiday-homed bourgeoisie in

search of “authenticity”.

The city, Koolhaas suggests, has

become predictable: a generic site of

globally reproduced archetypes. To

allow it to thrive, the countryside has

had to become a brutally functional

machine. In support of this thesis, the

show is full of images of frighteningly

homogenous landscapes of agricul-

tural monoculture, fields and green-

houses, stretching from the Mexican

to the Canadian border to China —

perhaps to infinity.

Twenty-five years ago, Koolhaas

was writing about “Bigness”, where

“the size of a building alone embodies

an ideological program”. He seems to

have found its ultimate expression not

in cities, but far from where most

architects work. The desert state of

Nevada is, it turns out, populated by

some of the world’s biggest buildings.

In an otherwise empty stretch of

countryside outside Reno, the Tahoe

Reno Industrial Center is an area the

size of Manhattan staffed by a popula-

tion the size of a small village. Com-

posed of “gigafactories” (including a

Tesla battery facility) and robot

sheds, this is post-human architec-

ture, unconstrained by the awkward

needs of people. You can sense Kool-

haas’s thrill at the idea of, literally, the

next big thing — a new industrial sub-

lime, the almost incomprehensible

banality of it all.

Koolhaas says it “is not an architec-

ture show”, while the catalogue argues

that “the view of the world’s country-

side can only ever be ‘pointillist’”.

The exhibition itself is a fascinat-

ingly, infuriatingly scattershot attempt

to communicate an image of the coun-

tryside today, more journalistic than

curatorial. The walls are populated by

endless words. Screens flicker with

Soviet tractor films and cheery peas-

ants, Nazi reels of newly built auto-

bahns stretching the city’s tendrils into

the landscape of the authenticVolk.

There is a terrific section on innovations

in Kenya, from motorbike taxis to the

neocolonialism of Chinese infrastruc-

ture. There are Volkswagen plans for an

electric tractor, designed for African

conditions and small farms, which also

becomes a mobile power bank.

There are reproductions of cheesy

ads for rural wellness spas, country-

music album sleeves and fashion mod-

els lounging in hay. That the occasional

Poussin pops up is a nod to the lack

of contemporary attempts to portray

the countryside in anything other than

a cliché of the pastoral. Where, Kool-

haas asks, is the depiction of today’s

countryside?

There’s even nature in the exhibi-

tion, from cutting-edge research into

how trees grow to the resurrection of

ancient understandings of how crops

can reinforce and nourish each other.

That said, there’s something a little

lacking in conviction in these explora-

tions. The exhibition spirals upwards

to a zenith of high-tech agriculture,

robots, drones and cutting-edge green-

houses in which crops are grown in

recycled paper rather than soil, and

light is supplied only at the necessary

wavelengths (an eerie, pinkish hue).

All of which reminds you that this is a

show by a Dutch architect working in

the futuristic tradition of a country

which reimagined and engineered its

own landscape, just as New Yorkers

began to do here in Manhattan in the

19th century. Koolhaas’s claim that no

one is looking at the countryside

doesn’t quite stand up. From Bruno

Latour to George Monbiot via Michel

Houellebecq, bookshop shelves sag

with Gaia theory, rewilding and apoca-

lyptic forecasts of declining insect pop-

ulations, deforestation, food insecurity

and environmental collapse.

What he does do is smash these ideas

together in a jarring collision of politics,

technology, maps and new forms of

colonialisation. The words unravel on

the walls to create a vivid, occasionally

naive, sometimes stupid, occasionally

funny and always provocative scan of

the other 98 per cent of the planet’s sur-

face, the bit that isn’t urban. At the

show’s opening, Koolhaas apologised

for the U-turn from city to country.

“Now I’ve put a tractor outside,” he

said, “I feel like a naughty boy.”

UntilAugust14,guggenheim.org

A radical rural ride

Countryside| Dutch urbanist Rem Koolhaas turns his attention to the countryside, and reveals that the natural environment isn’t what we may think. ByEdwin Heathcote

In the pink:

in a high-tech

greenhouse,

crops are grown

under light with

all non-essential

wavelengths

removed

Luca Locatelli

Clockwise from above:

‘Bearded Old Man’ (1632);

‘The Spectacles Seller

(Allegory of Sight)’ (1624);

‘Nude Woman Seated

on a Mound’ (1631);

‘Self-Portrait in a Cap’

(1630)— Harvard Art Museum; Museum

De Lakenhal; Rijksmuseum; Ashmolean Museum

To allow the city to thrive,

the countryside has had

to become a brutally

functional machine

FEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 20/2/2020 - 17: 32 User: adrian.justins Page Name: WKD11, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 11, 1