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Home , Bob Haak (art expert), Rembrandt

EDWARD GRASMAN

The Research Project: reculer pour mieux sauter*

Only an historian who had languished for years in solitary confinement could have remained unaware of the controversy excited by the first three volumes of A Corpus of Kemhr??zclt ]-Ial*nti?zg?vpublished by the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP). Nor can anyone have failed to notice the hubbub caused by the big Rembrandt exhibition of in which the RRP's hand was evident.' Although the tem- pest has subsided appreciably since then, the appearance of the remaining volumes of the Corpus will undoubtedly fluttcr the dovecotes again. This calm after and be- fore the storm sccms a good moment to examine the intentions of the Rembrandt team, to establish what came of them, what prompted criticism and what we may expect of the ncxt volumes of the The present writer is not a specialist in this particular field, a circumstance which, for all its obvious drawbacks, has one advantage: hc has no earlier stance to dcfcnd.2 It is of course up to the reader to judge whether this position has led to the balanced evaluation of the RRP that I have in mind. Before embarking on a detailed consideration of the RRP, though, I should like to point out that none of those involved in the Project could possiblv have foreseen the tremendous impact their work would have. And there is no apter demonstration of the upset caused bv their findings than the reactions elicited by a single phrase in a review by Joos Bruyn, a member of the team, of Sumowski's book on Rembrandt's pupils. Bruyn suggested that further research pertaining to ?Uillem Drost, one of Rembrandt's pupils, should takc into consideration in the , New York (Br.z79) which, according to Bruyn, has much in common with Drost's early, Rembrandtesque work .3 A circumspect re- mark, really, but it did seem to voice the opinion of the Rembrandt team and cer- tainly sparked off a major commotion. The GuardÙm and The NeJ1/ ?or,?er spoke of 'blood on the canvas' and dubbed thc Rembrandt team 'the 4 And Anthony Bailey used the phrase as a launching-pad for an attack on the Rcm- brandt tcam's work, quoting at one point the eminent Rembrandt scholar Julius 5 Held, who wondered: those people blind?'s

The motor behind the RRP was , the only member of the team without a university degree in art history. The great expertise Haak brought with him when he joined the staff off the Rijksmuscum had been acquired on the . In 1956 Haak, bv then an assistant in the Department of in the , was involved in the major Rembrandt exhibition staged in that institution and in the Boymans Museum. arrived from all over the world, and Haak wars struck by the number of dubious works among them. The time had come to purge Rembrandt's oeuvre of what he never painted. It actually took more than ten years for IIaak's plans to assume concrete form. In 1968, disappointed at Kurt Bauch's book of 1966, which lacked the well-founded sifting of Rembrandt's oeuvre that

153 had been hoped for, Haak, together with Jan Gelder, Jan Emmens, Joos Bruyn, Simon Levie and Pieter van Thiel, all of whom held important posts in museums or universities, launched the RRP. Another participant in the project since the RRP's first trips abroad was Ernst van die Wetering, a heaven-sent rein- forcement when Van Gelder fell ill. Emmens and Van Gelder were not replaced after their respective deaths in 1971 and 1980, the only change being Van de Wete- ring's gradual advancement from a student assistant to a (more than) full member of the team. It seems to me that Emmens' untimely death had a crucial effect on the project. With Emmens gone, so was the ambition to make a systematic study of the icono- graphy of Rembrandt's oeuvrc.7 Since then the project has addressed itself exclu- sively to the question of authenticity. But my bet is that Emmens' contribution would have made a difference to the answers to that question. In his dissertation of 1964, entitled Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst, Emmens paid ample attention to seventeenth-century authors such as Van Hoogstratcn and De Lairesse and their opinions about in general and about Rembrandt in particular. I presume that Emmens would have wanted to voice those opinions in the proposed Corpus of Rembrandt's paintings with a view to shedding a light on the context in which Rembrandt worked. However, in the volumes of the Corpus published hitherto, one searches vainly for such references to the more or less contemporaneous litera- ture on art. By and large, the entries are dominated by the question: is this an authentic Rembrandt or not? The RRP was launched more or less concurrently with the Groningen professor 's revision of the cataloguc of Rembrandt's paintings in 1968 - 69's Gerson had made formidable cuts in Rcmbrandt's oeuvre as presented by Bredius and was duly dubbed an iconoclast. One of the many works he repudiated was a painting purchased by the Rijksmuseum not long before, in T965, as an original Rembrandt, a lloly Fumily at X'iy/Jt (Br, j 568). From an undated newspaper cutting I have learned that Van Thiel, head of the Department of Paintings at the Rijksmu- seum, reacted at the time to Gerson's restriction by letting it be known that a con- siderable number of professors would refute it. And indeed, those are exactly the kind of reactions that the RRP, and hence Van Thiel, were subsequently to encoun- ter, time and time again. The Rembrandt team acquired - correctly - a reputation for being far more restrictive than all its predecessors. There is no denying the RRP's stringent sifting, but is it not also true that most of the paintings rejected in the Corpus are unfamiliar to the general public (certainly in this country)? After all, not even the RRP doubts the authcnticity of works such as the Syndic.s Dra- pers' Guild (Br. or the.1euJish Bride (Br. 416). The most famous work to have been disowned since the RRP embarked on its activities was the Man With the Golden He/wet in Berlin (Br.I28). Although its de-attribution has been credited to the RRP's account, nowhere is the work to be found in the al rcady published volumes of the Corpus. This is because the Corpus treats Rembrandt's works in chronological order and the team had simply not yet reached the Man With the Golden Helmet. What it boils down to is that the RRP was given the opportunity to express the already existing doubts about this work, and thus the responsibility for its de-attribution was shifted to the team. 9 Many of the works absent from the Corpzis are nonetheless to be found in Gerson. In my opinion, however, it is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that Gcr- son would have gone at least as far, had he studied all the paintings in situ and had he had the same technical facilities at his disposal." For it must be said that the RRP was occasionally more generous than Gerson. The .S'elf=l'ortrait mith a Poodle in Paris (Br. IG), rejected by Gerson, as were the Cupid in Vaduz and the in New York (Br. 467), made a conspicuous reappearance in Rembrandt's

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