The Real Thing

On the wall beside Karel Appel’s gouache Mother, Child and Large Bird hang two children’s drawings. Between them is Constant’s The Scream, accompanied by a line from the artist: ‘A painting is not a construction of colours and lines, but an animal, a night, a scream, a human, or all of these together.’ It captures something essential about the post-war generation to which Appel belonged: a search for spontaneity, instinct and the origins of creativity. ‘Appel and his peers wanted to get back to the source,’ says curator Antoon Erftemeijer. ‘Give a child with no knowledge of art some paint and a canvas, and they will start painting.’

That spontaneity is exactly what gets lost in reproduction. On the wall, Mother, Child and Large Bird screams; in a photograph, little more than an echo remains. For Appel, the image did not begin with an idea, but with the material itself: ‘The paint expresses itself.’ A few metres away, Jan Cremer puts it more combatively: ‘I fight with the paint. Sometimes I win.’ That is why, Erftemeijer says, you have to see the paint itself, not just its reproduction. ‘In person, this painting is in motion.’

Mother, Child and Large Bird hangs among kindred works, and that company changes the way you see it. Across the room is Personnages dans le vent coloré, a large canvas built up with thick masses of paint. Seen from the side, its surface resembles a landscape of craters, ridges and dried riverbeds. ‘The clear view of art has become clouded,’ reads a nearby quote from 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.’

Looking at a real Rembrandt, the word aura inevitably comes to mind. According to Gregor J.M. Weber, Head of Fine Arts at the Rijksmuseum, that invisible charge can only be felt when you stand before the original. ‘In the flat, endless repetition of photographs, the aura fades,’ he says. ‘Walter Benjamin already wrote about this in the 1930s in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But here’ – he leans towards the small self-portrait – ‘you can experience the true magic of the painting for yourself.’

This self-portrait is a key work in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. ‘We see Rembrandt the inventor at work,’ says Weber. ‘The scratching in the paint, the light background, the figure who does not pose stiffly but turns as if someone has just called his name – these were all experiments for his major history paintings. He wanted to create natural movement.’ Weber compares the portrait to the inventions of Johann Sebastian Bach, in which the composer explored the possibilities and secrets of musical keys. ‘These are attempts to master the material. Studies that became art.’

‘Alongside the aura, there are the visual impressions,’ Weber continues. ‘The human eye is so much more sensitive than the digital retina. In a photograph or on a screen, the painting becomes flat and all the three-dimensional details Rembrandt created disappear.’ Take the white collar: Rembrandt built up the paint around the neck so that it catches the light. Just below his long curls, it gleams as though a silver thread runs through it. Weber moves a hand in front of the gallery light and the shimmer vanishes. ‘For the coat, Rembrandt painted a thin brown glaze over an ochre underlayer, allowing the dark yellow to shine through – a depth you simply do not see in reproductions.’ Then there are the red curls, which seem to grow mysteriously out of the surface. ‘Scratched into the paint with the pointed end of a small brush.’

MARC CHAGALL

Composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote his Vespers of the Blessed Virgin for Pope Paul V partly as a calling card for the post of chapel master in Rome. Marc Chagall’s 1912 self-portrait can be read in a similar way. He had arrived in Paris a year earlier, and the painting feels like a declaration of everything he could do. The shy, stammering Yiddish-speaking boy from Vitebsk pours all his skill and storytelling into a single image.

‘Russia treated Jews as second-class citizens,’ says Maurice Rummens, research associate at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ‘and even in Paris he was often seen as an exotic outsider. Chagall paints himself with seven fingers on his left hand for a reason. He wants to show how completely he gives himself to his art.’

‘According to Picasso, after Matisse died, Chagall was the only painter who truly understood colour,’ Rummens continues. ‘What looks black in a photograph turns out to be a deep, breathing blue on the canvas. His paintings contain an extraordinary richness of colour, but they only reveal it when you stand in front of them. Look at the right eye: around the black pupil is a white iris, while the white of the eye is tinted with brown. It creates a piercing gaze that follows you for as long as the portrait remains in view. That sense of space simply cannot be captured in a reproduction.’

High beside the Eiffel Tower, a tiny figure drifts through the sky beneath a parachute. ‘I think it is Franz Reichelt,’ says Rummens. ‘The Austrian tailor invented a kind of parachute coat and, around the time Chagall was painting this self-portrait, tested it by jumping from the first level of the Eiffel Tower, a fall of about sixty metres. It became a media sensation, and footage of the jump still survives. Chagall lets him float gently down. In reality, he fell to his death. But here, in the painting, he lives forever.’

Vincent van Gogh

As a child, Bregje Gerritse often came here. Now a researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, she knows that seeing Van Gogh in the flesh is something else entirely from sunflowers on plastic bags, almond blossom on prams or a stream of images passing by on Tram 5. Trapped in reproduction, The Sower seems almost to break free when you stand before it. Details invisible on a screen suddenly come alive: the yellow-green evening sky glimmers mysteriously, the sun seems to float on its strange colour like an object on water, and thick ridges of paint make the bark of the tree ripple. ‘All those colours and techniques take on a strange character in reproductions,’ Gerritse says, ‘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,’ Gerritse explains. ‘Van Gogh called him Père Millet – little father. He had long wanted to make a sower of his own. He began in Etten and Nuenen and continued after leaving Paris for Arles, devoting dozens of drawings and paintings to the subject. In this final version, it feels as though he finally succeeded. He gave the colours an identity of their own, a new meaning. In photographs, those colours freeze. In person, they live.’

Van Gogh made the painting two years before his death, in what feels like a radical attempt to imagine the future of painting. Perhaps The Sower carries something prophetic too: the seeds of a revolution that would only begin to grow after his death.

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.”