Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

In some sense the self-portraits are close to the fashionable teaching aids of the time, which set out for future artists the permissible limits of bodily expression for suffering, astonishment, horror, and joy. This logic (based on an ancient faith in “characters,” a range of types explaining human variety with a few templates) predetermines the further splitting of movements of spirit into a series of consecutive emotions, each one of which is a separate capsule, insisting on its own existence. These are universal, each has its own facial expression, meaning that what has been observed once can be applied many times, like a mathematical formula or a prayer.

Houbraken, the most lenient of Rembrandt’s ill-wishers, saw in his work above all a carelessness of approach, something akin to crossing the road at a red light.

Many of the manifestations of emotion are ephemeral. Facial expressions rapidly change their appearance on the least prompting so that there is scarcely time to sketch them, let alone paint them. Consequently no other means can be imagined by which an artist could help themselves using this method other than fixing the idea in their mind by means of catching hold of a momentary particular. On the other hand, one might avail oneself of the genius of such men who, by means of established rules and the elements of art have, for the instruction of eager students, communicated to the world each particular expression of emotion in print: such as that invaluable book Discours Académique , dedicated to Monsieur Colbert by the masters of the Royal Academy in Paris, following which example we also have provided samples of that kind, among other borrowed materials, and placed them in the second volume of Philaléthes’s Letters.

What is interesting here is not Houbraken’s faith in ready templates, but the belief that the emotions exist as separate zones (just like the human types), and that they can be carefully delineated. Anger and pity are thought of as static states, like phases in a process, yet the point where they mix is not thought of as a separate space because there is an intangible line between them. In his comparison of the work Rembrandt and Montaigne made on the subject of themselves cultural historian Andrew Small refers to Foucault and The Order of Things , which concludes that despite the chains of vital resemblances, a person is imprisoned and limited by the parameters that describe her borders and leave the center untouched.

Rembrandt’s contemporaries and detractors all reproached him for exactly this: a disrespect for borders — or his lack of ability to draw a line between one thing and another, between light and dark (a draftsman’s chief asset). On this matter they all agree, finding the very manner of drawing unacceptable, “without contour or definition by means of inner and outer lines, but consisted entirely of violent and repeated strokes.” “Clean outlines ought really to be drawn in their proper place and in order to conceal the danger [of this lack] in his works, he filled his paintings with pitch-black; and so it was that he demanded nothing from his pictures as long as they maintained a universal harmony.” “…The other figures could scarcely be distinguished one from another, in spite of their being all closely studied from life.” The attempt to resist what Pushkin called “the mixing up of everything” with a whole variety of rational arguments looks both touching and futile in hindsight, if only because Rembrandt doesn’t impose change, he changes the system from within: he stretches it out to its full extent until it gives under the strain.

In his world there are no precisely drawn borderlines between figure and background, color and blackness, or, to extend the thought, between the self-portrait and the “tronie” nonportrait. It’s as if the corpus of self-portraits rethinks the ruled line of ready-made states, while asserting the presence of another line where states are countless and flowing, like shades on a spectrum, but still held in an arrangement moving toward a clear and distinct end: a sequence of facial developments, along which change flickers without altering the overall reckoning. The task of emulatio (imitation, meaning not just the copying of the original, but the exceeding of it) is embedded in the nature of the genre — and one’s own body becomes an artist’s model, the ideal, unpaid model, over which ripples of emotion, age, phases of life play: a sequence of emblems. Alienation, the constant companion of observation, is essential here, as well as precision in the reproduction of what is seen.

A commentator has likened the relationship between Rembrandt and his own images to a trial of the self. Wouldn’t it be more exact to call them “a refutation of the self” (however what happened between mirror and canvas was translated into the language of the seventeenth century): the alienation from, and shearing off of a whole phase of life, together with the one who has just lived it. For this to happen the artist has to very literally come out of himself, to be exteriorized to the point where he no longer sees the difference between himself and any one of his patrons (or, as in the Dresden self-portrait, between his young, pink-cheeked self and the dead bittern this self holds by the legs).

All the phases of this process are simultaneously discrete and unending. We see before us not inquiry (with its implied result), but fixation, a diary of observations from nature. There is not a single retrospective self-portrait — each new day is fixed and immediately exhausted, cast off, a waste product . In this respect it’s important to look at the self-portraits in order, one after the other, as on their own they have the quality of scientific observation: another notch in the doorjamb marking a new height and age. It is not introspection, but rather the refusal to indulge in introspection; the externalizing and separating of the passing minute. Not autobiography, but autoepitaph.

Often a single portrait is repeated a few times, sometimes with variations and sometimes almost without, in different materials, oil, engravings, by the artist himself or his students. It’s very clear that the concerns of the post-Romantic era, the necessity of avoiding repeats, the whole search for the new and uncaptured, all lie outside Rembrandt’s circle of interests. Add to these the logic of self-knowledge, which is far too easy to impute to anyone found to be interested in their own persona. Perhaps the intention (however it was formulated back then) was not to acknowledge the opening curve of a new segment of life, but to fix the typical, to pin it down. I was this. I will never be this again.

The “selfie” genre operates in exactly this way. It is concerned with the contemporary: the search for variation has been replaced by the production of repeat images. Anyone on social media knows how often pictures appear in little clusters, a few self-portraits all taken in the same place and presented to the world one after the other, out of the sheer impossibility of choice. A number of tools have been developed in order to give the appearance of variety to these clusters: filters that refashion a picture in the manner of an artistic system, in the style of Munch, Klimt, Kandinsky, leaving the core of the self untouched.

It’s this core we’re concerned with. As usual all questions asking “how” are simply a way of answering the fundamental question of “who.” Rembrandt experts all tell of the incredible variety of media for the age, the different ways of applying paint, the brushwork. In this sense Rembrandt has no “signature,” no authorial manner, nothing of what was valued by the art of a new age obsessed with the personal. Or rather, he has too many of them. For each new task he develops a new technical approach, which you could call a filter. It’s a little like our photographs, with their pretense at variety. The difference is first and foremost in what’s present in every Rembrandt portrait, glancing out like the skull beneath the skin, in every fold of flesh — and what the poetics of the selfie eschews at all costs. Facebook photos, like the fairy-tale mirror on the wall, seek to persuade us of our invulnerability. As they dispassionately record each new wrinkle they insist that the face in the mirror is still ours, still the fairest of them all, hardly changed from the day before yesterday.