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Rembrandt's the Night Watch and the Paradox of Creativity

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Rembrandt's the Night Watch and the Paradox of Creativity Page 1 of 27 From the desk of Pierre Beaudry REMBRANDT’S THE NIGHT WATCH AND THE PARADOX OF CREATIVITY by Pierre Beaudry, 9/29/2010 “New discoveries in the sphere of his activities, which cast the bread-fed scholar down, delight the philosophical mind.” Friedrich Schiller. “My lord, hang this piece in a strong light and where one can stand at a distance, so it will sparkle (voncken) at its best.” Rembrandt. “Tragedy is not the expression of an error in the behavior of some person, or group of persons, but is, rather, as for Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Schiller, the expression of a systemic defect in an existing culture‟s apprehension of the nature of the human species.” Lyndon LaRouche. 1 1. THE IRONY OF THE NIGHT WATCH TITLE. The principle of irony in a Classical artistic composition should never be difficult to establish, because irony is the natural state of mind of a creative individual, and it is also the natural form of change in the physical universe as a whole; in other words, ironies have both a delightful and a devastating effect of producing change in the universe as a whole. However, even if every human being is born with the power of that potential, the creative process is not always easy to discover and to exercise, because it requires that the mind be attentive to the little things that most people do not pay attention to, because they are considered insignificant in the eyes of public opinion. So, unless you discipline yourself by training your mind to look for what is not there, or to identify what seems to be there by accident, your creative and imaginative mind is going to remain dormant and its treasures locked up as in a vault of inaccessible ghosts and shadows; because public opinion may work perfectly well in the sphere of lies, but it doesn‟t do a bit of good in the realm of the truth. Let me exemplify this point with one of the greatest paintings in history, The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh, (The Night Watch) by Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669). Beyond doubt, this masterpiece is one of the most famous and most controversial paintings in history, but it is also one of the least understood of all times. For instance, about a hundred years after its execution, the title of The Night Watch was given to this painting by British “Grand Style” perception painter, Joshua Reynolds, who was a proponent of “the aging look” effect in paintings, and wanted people to believe that the darkness of the Rembrandt scene was a mask added on by the aging varnish that he had used. This immediately fed the myth, still circulating to this day, claiming that The Night Watch was, actually, a “day watch” that had turned dark out of willful neglect. If you believe that sort of masquerade, then, think again, because either you have failed to understand the first thing about British intelligence, or you have failed to grasp Rembrandt‟s Platonic method of chiaroscuro, or both. Reynolds just lied to cover up half of the truth. He had given the right title, but for the wrong reason. The truth of the matter is that The Night Watch expresses the general dynamic motion of a group of militiamen coming out of the darkness, as if from the inside of Plato‟s Cave, and moving toward the source of light located outside of the painting where you, the viewers, are situated. That is the way the historical stage of human knowledge is set. From that Platonic vantage point, Rembrandt‟s The Night Watch is a pedagogical experiment in axiomatic change: the intention of the composition is to express the chemistry of what happens to you when you come out of the shadows of sense-perceptions and come to be touched by the light of true knowledge. However, most people will not understand this staging of their imagination, because they don‟t operate from principles. Thus, the irony of the painting is based on the ambiguity between this double entendre, between a literal meaning and an inferential meaning, as if in the double meaning of a metaphor between sense-perception and inferential knowledge, between public opinion and creativity. So, let me explain this sense-perception meaning first, and the inferential meaning after. Firstly, the official Rembrandt title of the painting is superficial and purely for sense-perception consumption. That is the social title whose purpose is to identify for public opinion those officials of the 2 city of Amsterdam who accepted to pose for their immortality at the price of an average of 100 guilders each (1,600 guilders for the entire commission of the painting), some paying more and some paying less, and the two officers, of course, paying for the greatest share. However, in all cases, the musketeers are buying their positions within the painting, and are establishing the value of their worth, in accordance with what they expect to be the degree of brilliance and finish that Rembrandt decided to put on their faces. In a word, they are getting their money‟s worth. But, are they? Indeed, all of their names appear in equal darkness on the coat of arms shield hanging from the corner of the arcade in the background. Therefore, they have all been equally immortalized. Figure 1. Rembrandt Van Rijn, The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh, (The Night Watch) 1642. Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. (Reduced from about 13 by 16 feet to about 12 by 14 feet) Secondly, the inferential name of The Night Watch reflects the true expression of the creative process of artistic composition that is based on irony. In other words, you are witnessing, here, the 3 creative interplay between the diversified social positions of city officials and the dynamics that Rembrandt created with the chemistry of generating lights and shadows. This is where the chemistry of the painting becomes identical with the chemistry of the mind of its creator. My aim, here, is to show you the ironies that come out of this relationship, and which were introduced in this composition in order to provoke the spectator to discover the process of creativity itself, as opposed to the apparent objects that are represented. The apparent subject of the entire fresco is the mobilization of a military company put into motion with all of the usual noise and confusion that such a deployment involves, including the clashing of weapons, the excitement of a barking dog, and the rolling of a drum. These shadows, however, are there to hide the true subject of the painting, which is the process of its composition, in which creativity is expressed by a tug of war between sense perception and inferential knowledge. That is a noisy place too, but of a completely different nature. In that sense, The Night Watch represents the fundamental and universal characteristic of all true classical artistic composition: a quid pro quo. But, in order to discover that irony, you must experiment the sudden appearance of singularities as in Leibniz‟s test of the Continuity Principle. In other words, you have to discover what role a singularity plays in the tug of war between reason and power? If the reader wishes to pass this test successfully, he or she must recognize that these two titles reflect a single but ambiguous dynamics, whose continuity of effect and fundamental irony of discontinuity, both reside in an extremely curious discontinuity which is very difficult to discover, but which represents perfectly one of only two possible outcomes of this fight between creativity and public opinion, life or death. This is the only singularity inside of the entire painting which has the power to establish the true significance of this historically specific scene. There is no other singularity within this entire fresco that has such an effective and unique force of determination. It is the most astonishing and most disturbing singularity of all, and yet it is made not to be seen. It is the loudest you could ever hear in that circumstance, and yet, and yet it is made not to be heard by anyone. If the spectator were to fail in discovering that discontinuity, he would have no means of understanding the true significance of The Night Watch, and what makes it the true Classical artistic composition that it is. However, I will give you a clue: this unique singularity is not made visible unless it is inferred through the slight motion of the hand that brushes it aside as if it were a mere annoying distraction. From the vantage point of this axiomatic discontinuity, Rembrandt‟s The Night Watch represents a true reflection of the creative and social processes of a Classical artistic composition representing the delicate balance between different social conditionings and the treatment of the luxuriant pigments of the paint mixture itself; that is, like psychophysical waves, or layers of a palimpsest that corresponds to the chemistry of Rembrandt‟s thinking process. In other words, Rembrandt‟s brush work was a reflection of his thinking process, as replicated most dramatically in all of his self-portraits. The psychological and physical phenomena worked together in the same way, harmonically, and for the same purpose in expressing the same principle. In other words, Rembrandt‟s masterful brushstrokes generated the same “sparkling effect” on the canvas that his ideas generated in capturing the ironies that he painted. In fact, there is a note that Rembrandt sent to Huygens in 1639, just before entering into the difficult task of composing The Night Watch, and in which he wrote that what he was attempting to accomplish in his art was to express “die meeste ende die naetuerreelste beweechgelickeijt.” This was 4 translated into two different ways by art critic, Robert Wallace.
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