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art reviews from around new york

It could be talking about New York. It tells of a city, a port city, open to the world. You can find pretty much anything here and anyone.

It is a prosperous city and an educated one, although not everyone speaks the same language. It is always under construction, with an eye to creating public spectacles and public spaces, and housing does not welcome everyone everywhere. It has, if anything, too many artists. Above all, it values diversity and tolerance where other states may not, with no shortage of synagogues to match. As happens, though, it is Amsterdam, the city of “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” at the Jewish Museum through August 10—and I work this together with an earlier report on finding freedom under Baroque Spain with Juan de Pareja and Diego Velázquez as a longer review and my latest upload. Now what happens if everyone here claims the Bible’s lessons as one’s own?

The Book of Esther has that rarity in the Hebrew Bible, a happy ending, but with conditions. It is a tale of threats, deliverance, and celebration, and Amsterdam had every right to celebrate. It had at last won its freedom from Spain, as a republic, in time for the great age of Dutch painting, and it saw Esther as about nothing less. History often singles out Rembrandt for his sympathy for Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, and he lived in a quarter that they, too, occupied—although that may have had more to do with an artist’s income and with official decrees limiting Jewish life while guaranteeing freedom of worship. Prints of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, have come to be known as The Jewish Bride. Here, though, the city takes credit.

A Jewish heritage, I might argue, is divided over Esther, too. After the fall of Israel, the Babylonian captivity, and a second conquest by still another empire, Persia, Jews were at last free to go home, but should they, and where is home? Should it lie in a capital for all the people, with the temple and its sacrifices? Or should it lie in the word of God and the law wherever they may be? Where the books of Ezra and Nehemiah demand a community apart, Esther is about living under foreigners, even marrying one. It might speak to the Dutch—or to New Yorkers today.

Do Jews celebrate on Purim to remember their deliverance from a royal decree of death? The Jewish Museum opens with a room for both aspects of remembrance, the story and the place. It has scrolls of the book of Esther, one of the Old Testament’s shortest, to be read aloud on the holiday, and stone fireplace guards with images. It has Delft tiles and silver to help in getting drunk, as the occasion dictates. It has prints of synagogues and a public square with a new town hall in progress. No one seems to be merely idling or, conversely, in a hurry passing through.

Only slowly do paintings take over the story, and they never stop. Near the end, a wooden chest bears small paintings of Esther, enough to call it a book in itself. Do Flemish artists also tackle Esther with crisper, shinier colors? So much for the exhibition’s political history, but then they do reflect a greater hierarchy of kings and attendants. A prominent Dutch painter, Jan Steen, illustrates the tale’s climactic revelation three times. He, too, has brighter lights, along with hokier gestures but a gift for composition.

Above all, here comes the circle of Rembrandt, especially a late student, Aert de Gelder. He can imitate his teacher’s bulky fabrics filling out the promise of female anatomy, but not the softer outlines and inward-directed eye. Where his Esther looks up, toward her god, or to the king, Rembrandt’s looks nowhere but within. So he does, too, in a self-portrait on loan from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (which lost a Rembrandt years ago to a still unsolved theft along with a Vermeer), at age a mere twenty-three. Its firm but parted lips speak of a young man’s confidence and a trembling inner light. The misty darkness of Rembrandt’s late portrait at the Frick Collection is still to come.

That leaves a major gap, Rembrandt’s Bible. You may well wonder where to find it, but the show has a whole room for a standing Esther simply thinking. It is a fraught moment. You may recall that Haman, an advisor to King Ahasuerus, takes offense when a Jew, Esther’s cousin Mordecai, refuses to bow to someone other than the one true god—and in return extracts a death sentence for the Jews. Offended that his wife did not show proper obedience either, Ahasuerus ditches her in favor of Esther, without knowing Esther’s faith. In the painting, she is preparing to tell him.

She will do so, obtaining a death sentence for Haman and a promise of deliverance, although it is a complicates story. (Can Ahasuerus go back on his own word?) And paintings mostly zero in the confrontation, with the bad guy in darkness and the king in the light. Rembrandt shows only Esther and an elderly attendant, and here the older woman is lost in shadow, while Esther is lost in her fears, in her determination, and in thought. Anticipation becomes drama. Rembrandt, around age thirty, has a lot of thinking to do himself.

Still, a large exhibition has a hole at its very center, and there is no getting around it. Not even Rembrandt, largely in his absence, can steal the show. The curator, Abigail Rapoport, does have a 1992 painting by Fred Wilson, who compares Queen Esther to Harriet Tubman. African Americans and other contemporaries can claim the story as a parable of deliverance, too. Yet New York has already had shows of the Rembrandt’s influence, and followers look if anything more awkward here. It is a fascinating story all the same, of a solitary Esther and a busy, unshaken city.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Allow me to continue this week with excerpts from this site’s long history. Last time recapped a “theory piece,” about debunking or sustaining the religious aura of a week of art. But if God has spoken to an artist face to face, it would have to be Rembrandt. Could that be why Rembrandt kept returning to a man who spoke with God?

With “Divine Encounter,” the Frick takes up the life of Abraham. Every so often I like to use this blog to look back at this site’s huge archive of essay sin review, particularly when I could dwell on a single painting. This excerpt dates to 2017, and I invite you to read more.

Kidding aside, Rembrandt always thought of belief in personal terms. He shows Abraham prostrate on the ground, unable to face God, humbled by the promise of a son and a covenant with the Jewish people. He shows him hearing again the promise, from three strangers who will reveal themselves as angels and then as the voice of God. He shows him facing God’s command to sacrifice that promised son, Isaac—and acting on that command even as an angel interrupts the sacrifice. He shows him casting out an older son, Ishmael and the boy’s mother, a mere serving woman, while unable to turn his back on them. In every case, Rembrandt shows the patriarch coming to grips with the strangeness of the divine, only to rediscover the terror and confusion of his own humanity.

The Frick borrows a single painting less than nine inches wide, perhaps an oil sketch for a lost or never completed major work. With that and just eight prints and drawings, it has staged a small show in every respect but its artist. The painting, from a private collection, shows Abraham Entertaining the Angels. The patriarch has welcomed three strangers—in anticipation of the commandment only much later, through Moses, that “you shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Abraham raises a pitcher, its lid just slightly ajar, and a bowl to receive its content. Will he ever deliver sustenance to strangers in a strange land? It depends on what anyone can know about the needs of the human or divine.

A man addresses Abraham at the painting’s center, as a teacher or a friend. The mere mortal at right and the other two strangers at left form a half circle, hanging on every word, but also a pyramid with the young speaker at its apex, elevating him to the rank of a god. He has not yet revealed himself, but he is not just bathed in light. His glow also illuminates others in a darkened world. The angels still shield their wings from Abraham’s field of vision, and the one in the foreground has the earthy colors of this world. The tree behind them, with its thick bole and twisted branches, could stand for earthly vegetation or the tree of life.

The illumination does not extend to Abraham’s wife, Sarah. The Bible has her laughing at the thought of a son at her age—or even scorning it. Here she looks on in suspicion, lurking in an open door, just as she will in a print of the same scene ten years later, in 1856. There God has the beard and robe of an elder statesman, with Abraham almost his mirror image. The background has grown deeper and lusher, and Ishmael scampers over a fence. His playfulness reinforces the moment’s solemnity, and his crossing the fence to a wider and wilder world anticipates his banishment.

Abraham is caught between families, between obligations, and between worlds. So he is again with his arms outstretched to banish Ishmael and the boy’s mother, Hagar. Is he lying to himself about his responsibility toward others? One hand points to the wilderness, the other to the doorway and a dog—at once firm in his resolution and desperate to hold onto them all. Rembrandt never does represent him at his most outspoken, negotiating with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham asks if God will kill even a handful of the righteous in order to punish the wicked, is he speaking on behalf of the saints, the sinners, or his own dual nature?

Maybe only Rembrandt could have found a way to ask. His etchings animate the shadows with crosshatching and freer touches of drypoint, while thick squiggles of ink leave much of the paper untouched and a story’s conclusion unstated. The curator, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, suggests that he understood the burden of a divine encounter from Calvinism, but he has a way of speaking the unspeakable in art. The show does not borrow The Sacrifice of Isaac from 1635, when Rembrandt was not yet thirty, but the remaining drawings and prints stick to its theme. Even when Abraham fondly strokes a son’s chin, one has to remember where he will later raise his knife.

In Rembrandt’s early painting of the sacrifice (now in the Hermitage), a century after a shocker by Andrea del Sarto, the angel obliges Abraham to drop his knife—but it hangs suspended in midair, its point aiming straight at Isaac’s throat and its blade falling toward the boy’s crotch. Does it matter that God will provide or that God’s covenant requires circumcision? In a drawing from the 1650s, Abraham still bends over Isaac, laid out on a table as if for surgery, even as the angel bears down. In a print from 1655, Rembrandt clings to the knife even as the angel’s face comes close to kissing his dark, blank eyes. One can barely discern the ram that the angel has brought to the sacrifice, and the angel still covers the boy’s eyes. God has spoken, but will human nature have the horrifying last word?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.