Know your classics

Five masterpieces and why you must stand face to face with them

Article

No. 15 • September 2020

We live in a digital age, a world made up of ones and zeros. Through social media, people follow “friends” they’ve never met in real life. Our lives are filled daily with a photoshopped reality. And yet, everyone longs for authenticity. Reproductions have made art more accessible than ever. We can Google images of any painting. That’s great, because you simply cannot visit every museum in the world. But it also presents a problem: it flattens the art of looking. Five masterpieces and why you must stand face to face with them.

See through the eyes of the experts:
Antoon Erftemeijer, Frans Hals Museum
Gregor J.M. Weber, Rijksmuseum
Maurice Rummens, Stedelijk Museum
Bregje Gerritse, Van Gogh Museum
Frouke van Dijke, Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Fig 1. Karel Appel, Mother, child and large bird, 1951

text: Joost Galema

Karel Appel

On the side wall next to Karel Appel’s gouache {{Mother, Child and Large Bird}} hang two children’s drawings in the Frans Hals Museum. Between them is The Scream by Constant, with a quote from the artist: “A painting is not a construction of colors and lines, but an animal, a night, a scream, a human, or all of these together.” This line defines a post-war generation that devoted itself to spontaneity. “Appel and his peers searched for the origin of human creativity,” says curator Antoon Erftemeijer. “Give a child without knowledge paint and canvas, and they will start painting.”

The true force of Appel’s spontaneity in Mother, Child and Large Bird evaporates in images. On the wall, this painting “screams,” but in a photo, you hear no more than an echo. Why this happens remains a mystery, since according to Appel, this anxious image doesn’t arise from thought but because “the paint expresses itself.” As Jan Cremer says just a few meters away in the exhibition: “I fight with the paint. Sometimes I win.” That’s why you have to see the paint, says Erftemeijer — not the reproduction. “In person, this painting is in motion.”

Mother, Child and Large Bird hangs among kindred works, as if you’re seeing a person surrounded by family. You understand better who they are and where they come from. This Appel looks at a family member on the opposite wall: Personnages dans le vent coloré, a large canvas with thick blobs of paint. From the side, it looks like a landscape of craters, ridges, and dry riverbeds. “The clear view on art has been clouded,” reads the label next to it. Signed, Karel Appel. “To regain that clear view, the artist must return to the source of creativity,” says Erftemeijer. “And the viewer must return to the source of the reproduction: the painting itself.”

Fig 2. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait, c. 1628

Rembrandt

When looking at a real Rembrandt, the word aura inevitably arises. And people only experience that invisible halo when they are face to face with the original artwork, believes Gregor J.M. Weber, Head of Fine Arts at the Rijksmuseum. “In the flat and endless repetition of photos, the aura fades,” he says. “Cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin already wrote about this in the 1930s in his fascinating essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But here”—he leans in toward the small self-portrait—“you alone can experience the true magic of this painting.”

This self-portrait is a key work in the artist’s oeuvre. “We see Rembrandt the inventor at work,” says Weber. “The scratching in the paint, the light background, and a figure who doesn’t pose stiffly but turns as if someone has just called his name—all experiments for his major history paintings. He wanted to create natural motion.” The portrait is comparable to the inventions of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, in which he tried to unlock the nature and secrets of musical keys. “These are attempts to master the material. Studies that evolved into art.”

“In addition to the aura, there are also the visual impressions,” says Weber. “The human eye is so much more sensitive than the digital retina. In a photo or on a screen, this painting becomes flat, all the three-dimensional details Rembrandt created disappear. For example, he gave the neck of the white collar more relief by using a thicker layer of oil paint.” That spot, just below his long curls, gleams as if a silver thread runs through it. “The way light plays on that unevenness,” Weber says. He waves a hand in front of the gallery light and the shine vanishes. “For the coat, Rembrandt painted a thin brown glaze over an ochre underlayer, letting the dark yellow shimmer through — a depth you don’t see in pictures.” And then there are the red curls that seem to grow mysteriously out of the painting. “Scratched into the paint with the pointed end of a small brush.”

Fig 3. Marc Chagall, Self-portrait with seven fingers, 1913

MARC CHAGALL

Composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote his Vespers of the Blessed Virgin for Pope Paul V as a disguised job application for the position of chapel master in Rome. A similar idea lies behind Marc Chagall’s self-portrait from 1912. A year earlier, the Russian had settled in Paris. The painting is a master test in which the stammering and shy Yiddish boy from Vitebsk channels all his craft and narrative creativity. “Russia treated Jews as second-class citizens,” says Maurice Rummens, research associate at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, “and even Paris saw him merely as an exotic outsider. Chagall paints himself here with seven fingers on his left hand for a reason. He wants to show how completely he devotes himself to his art.”

“According to Picasso, Chagall—after Matisse’s death—was the only painter who truly understood color,” Rummens says. “What appears black in a photo turns out to be a deep, breathing blue on the canvas. Everything he creates contains incredible richness of color—a secret that his paintings only reveal to those who make the effort to view them. Look at the right eye: he paints a white iris around the black pupil and tints the sclera with browns. This creates a penetrating gaze that follows you as long as the portrait remains in your field of vision. That spatial sensation can’t be captured in a picture.”

Dangling by a parachute next to the Eiffel Tower in the upper right corner of the painting is a tiny figure. “I think it’s Franz Reichelt,” says Rummens. “This Austrian tailor invented a sort of parachute-coat. Around the time Chagall was working on his self-portrait, Reichelt decided to test it by jumping from the first level of the Eiffel Tower — a 60-meter fall. It became a media sensation, there’s even footage of it on YouTube. Chagall lets him float gently down. In reality, he plummeted like a stone to his death. But in this painting, he lives forever.”

Fig 4. Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, Arles, november 1888

Vincent van Gogh

As a child, she often came here, says Bregje Gerritse, researcher at the Van Gogh Museum. She discovered that in real life, Van Gogh is so much more than sunflowers on plastic bags, almond blossoms on strollers, or a string of images on Tram 5. The Sower—a prisoner in a photograph—seems ready to step out of the painting at any moment. Other details also gain dimensions hidden in reproductions: the yellow-green of the evening sky glimmers mysteriously, the sun sinks into that strange color like an object floating on water, and the almost sculpted paint makes the tree bark ripple. Gerritse: “All those colors and techniques take on a strange character in reproductions, but when you stand before the painting, they make perfect sense.”

“The idea for The Sower came from a painting of the same name by French artist Jean-François Millet,” says Gerritse. “Van Gogh called him Père Millet. Little father. Van Gogh always wanted to create his own sower. He began in Etten and Nuenen and continued the work after moving from Paris to the countryside in Arles. He devoted dozens of drawings and paintings to that fascination. And in this final version, it seems he finally succeeded. He gave the colors their own identity, a new meaning. In photos, those colors freeze. In person, they live.”

The artist made this work two years before his death—a final radical attempt to shape the future of painting. Does The Sower thus hold a prophecy? Did Van Gogh sense that the seeds of his creative revolution would only sprout after his death?

Fig 5. Claude Monet, Wisteria, 1917-1920

CLAUDE MONET

It’s almost unimaginable, but after Claude Monet’s death, Wisteria lay forgotten for more than two decades in his abandoned studio. Ignored. No one saw its value, let alone considered it art. The climbing plants, visible from the old painter’s home in Giverny, grew by the pond. The famous water lilies were installed in a massive oval panorama at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. But the ceilings were too low to hang the Wisteria above them. So those large canvases stayed behind until the 1950s, when emerging artists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman embraced Monet as a kindred spirit. They recognized his intense color palette.

“As with Rothko and Newman, for Monet everything revolves around color and scale,” says Frouke van Dijke, curator at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. “The garden paintings Monet made at the end of his life are sometimes three or four meters wide and two meters tall. Behind those water lilies and wisteria lies the same idea as behind Rothko’s chapel: the visitor steps into the painting. They are absorbed by it. They walk around inside. That’s an experience you can’t Google.”

If you look closely, there’s a lot happening in Wisteria. “Sometimes he let paint dry for months, only to scrape parts of it off,” says Van Dijke. “Elsewhere he let the colors blend wet-on-wet. He contrasts glossy with matte, alternates bare areas with thick blobs. He wanted to capture fleeting moments—the wind playing with flowers, light shimmering on water. He thought deeply about how we humans perceive our surroundings: one thing in sharp focus, another blurred. Painter Paul Cézanne said: ‘Monet is just an eye, but what an eye!’ His paint lives and vibrates. You only truly experience that enchantment when standing before the large canvas.”