Landscapes/Cityscapes:Freaks and Franks of Rembrandtville

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Freaks and Franks of Rembrandtville
by Lyn Fox

I need wooden shoes like I need wooden underwear. Maybe less. Yet, here I am in Schiphol airport eyein' 'em, tryin' 'em, and buyin' 'em with every other globetrotting hillbilly. Why? Well, that goes back a few months to my arrival in the Netherlands.

My non-stop flight was also non-sleep. Four jolly Germans, sitting behind me, held a beer-and-song-athon, across the polar ice cap and well into EU airspace. I was jet-lagged and oom-pah-pahed.

I spent my first day abroad sipping coffee at a café, staring bleary-eyed at a canal. I was devoid of feeling; my thoughts lacked content...except for the recurring image of those clunky Dutch clogs, displayed in the terminal. Why do tourists buy them?

None of the locals around me had been shod by a carpenter. The neighborhood offered no blonde braids, windmills or daffodils. However, it did sport a prostitution info center, a masochistic leatherwear crafter, and a botanical garden with the world’s oldest pot plant. This was Holland.

I associated Rembrandt with old, dark, stuffy pictures. Instead, frame after frame, a cultural revolution unfolded before my eyes.

Most Hollanders live in the Randstad metroplex encompassing Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague -- a long way from the tulip fields, and a short distance from the annex where nonblonde Anne Frank wrote, before attending Nazi death camp.

The waiter brought a warm, flaky appelgebak. My fork became a shovel. Like many such eetcafes, this one had three tables occupied by the owner, some old men watching girls and one paying customer: me.

The joint’s actual business was...well, the joint. A passerby approached the owner, "Hoeveel is de best stof?" (How much is your best marijuana?) A transaction commenced.

The buyer had spiked green hair. A dried blood-trickle led to a giant safety pin piercing his bicep. He clutched a dog leash. Wearing the steel studded collar at the other end was not a pet but a person -- more or less.

The dynamic duo sat at my table while the proprietor fetched the order. I wondered what to say. (Petting the doggie seemed out of the question.) "Excuse me," I ventured, "I couldn’t help noticing that you have an enormous pin sticking through your arm. Doesn’t that hurt?"

Seeming puzzled, he glanced down at the adornment as if noticing it for the first time. "Yeah, I guess it does...but I’m into that."

* * *

The next day, I woke refreshed and ready to explore. The Rijksmuseum occupied my morning. Richly hued Rembrandts exuded a somber golden light, casting an awed hush over the spectators. I was also stunned. My exposure to the Dutch Masters had been mostly confined to cheap cigar boxes. I associated Rembrandt with old, dark, stuffy pictures. Instead, frame after frame, a cultural revolution unfolded before my eyes.

I first approached "Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem." The canvas portrays a biblical story: a spiritual man going his own way as a besieged city burns. Perhaps the flames dance and spoils glitter so because the artist wasn’t simply reading but remembering. Rembrandt didn’t just paint this drama; he lived it.
In the late 16th century, tolerance was barely a wacky new idea. Protestant iconoclasts fanned out from Antwerp, "cleansing" Catholic shrines of images, sculptures and paintings. Knives slashed tapestry. Hammers demolished marble. Graffiti proclaimed: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

In reprisal, the Duke of Alva’s Spanish troops descended upon the Netherlands for bloody inquisition. Over 9,000 people were punished for heresy. Tongues were pierced with hot needles en route to the gallows. Bodies were drawn and quartered or broken on the wheel before being burned at the stake. Religious literature, arts and discussions were banned.

Catholic commander Valdez attacked Rembrandt’s soon-to-be hometown, Leiden, destroying his grandmother’s mill. Grain and hay supplies were cut off; starvation and plague racked the city. Then, "miraculous" floods encircled the Spanish army, forcing retreat. Celebration of the deliverance became the town’s annual fair. Paintings of Pharaoh’s army drowning and Jesus distributing bread and herring were posted in the town hall, giving the event biblical significance. In this city, art was a matter of life or death. And it was here that Rembrandt, with a Protestant family and Catholic relatives, was born.

I stood enthralled again. This time, it was a self-portrait with a wild mane of curls, shadowy mystic eyes and rebel-thug jaw. The dean of painters fancied himself James Dean. No doubt, he was a maverick. He portrayed himself wearing a beret at Jesus’ crucifixion. He hung out with Protestants, Catholics, Mennonites and Jews. He etched the Good Samaritan (a parable about compassion across ethnic and religious boundaries) with a mutt straining to take a dump in the lit foreground, reminding us that such lofty ideals are often crapped on.

He tolerated not only diverse ideas but also diverse humanity. He painted cellulite-riddled nudes sufficiently horrific to disgust anyone. He etched squat-peeing women and stand-peeing men. He refused a study sabbatical in Italy, rejecting the sacrosanct notion that art must emanate from the classical tradition of platonic ideals. Instead, he found the divine in fish or cabbages and peopled his biblical narratives with earthy folks from the corner pub, holding forth pewter flagons of brew. I ogled the legendary "Night Watch." Except, it’s not a watch (more of a jumble, a tumbling out of an archway), and it’s not at night (the nocturnal impression comes from age darkened varnish).

This portrait of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and his company of rowdy republic defending militia broke all the conventions of posed, horizontal group pics in favor of a tribute to freedom even within organization. The work hung in a banquet hall where gentlemen soldiers celebrated their defense of the tolerant pluralistic marketplace that was Amsterdam.

A broad strip was cut off the painting’s left side to make it fit the allotted space, thus losing much of the contextual perspective. My knee-jerk reaction was to brand this as cultural neanderthalism. However, paintings were a standard mass medium of the day. Such resizing was their equivalent of today’s magazine editor reformatting an article to access a broader audience.

Maybe, we moderns can still learn a thing or two about tolerating divergent ideas. No stranger to compromise himself, Rembrandt had actually stitched the "Night Watch" together from several canvasses. Perhaps, we can also learn to tolerate our own patchwork lives, if not consider them masterpieces.

Instead, he found the divine in fish or cabbages and peopled his biblical narratives with earthy folks from the corner pub

Nearly as famous is "The Sampling Officials of the Drapers’ Guild." The disturbing gaze of the six men dressed in black —- two Catholics, a Calvinist, a Mennonite, an ecumenical and a steward -- pulls you into the gathering and poses the question: if differing beliefs can coexist to make a buck, why not for other reasons?

My last canvas to peruse, "The Jewish Bride," was no less weighty but aimed more at the heart. A young husband gently places his hand over his wife’s breast as she reassuringly reinforces it with her own, while her other hand hovers over her womb and their heads incline toward each other. Even after losing his wife to tuberculosis, his house to bankruptcy, his reputation to critics and his son to the plague, Rembrandt never stopped celebrating the abundance and fertility of life.

His own progeny possibly includes our free society itself. Vincent Van Gogh would one day stand on the same spot I occupied, awestruck before that same canvas. As Rembrandt often dared to make himself the model, so Van Gogh would dare to make himself the subject, and eventually our bistro bicep-piercer would make himself the canvas.

* * *

Exiting the museum, I found my way to a table, a Heineken, some Gouda, and more reflection. I had no doubt that our world still has much to learn about tolerance. Back home, the streets are filled with classically sculpted bodies that can’t even accept themselves without multiple cosmetic surgeries.

Intolerance toward neighbors also runs rampant. Many Americans proclaim, "all men are created equal" but support border-security racial-profiling suggesting that, on the capitalist plantation like the Orwellian farm, "some are more equal than others." Many Natives decry prejudice and then summarize past deeds of some Europeans with the maxim: "the whites took our land," just as Nazis twisted ancient acts of a few into the mantra: "the Jews killed Jesus."

We must be tolerant both of others and ourselves to nurture the freedom Rembrandt espoused yet Anne Frank was denied. This includes the sacred right to green hair and a leash. A free society is a rich tapestry, but this tapestry always has a fringe. While bicep pins offer negligible benefit, other weird ideas turn out to be brilliant. Freedom allows both deviation and innovation. Such innovation has lifted many out of hunger and superstition.

Thus, "freaks" occupy a necessary niche in my world view. Still, how could I explain this broadmindedness acquired abroad to my mother at home? I couldn’t. What, then, of my commitment to being a traveler who travels to experience the real world not a tourist who tours to escape the same? Must truth-in-travel-reporting include shattering mom’s Hollandish pipe dreams with hashish pipe nightmares? Surely not. How many times had mother gently preserved my toddler delusion that perverse crayon stylings were actually artistic wonders?

Anne Frank once confessed a great liking for art, poets and painters but a great loathing for algebra, geometry and figures. She must have loved her co-romantic Rembrandt, who bathed a harsh world in warm embracing light. Stark realities must be viewed, of course, but a soft lens sometimes comes in handy.

Frankly (and Rembrandtly), the more I pondered, the more attractive those wooden shoes became. In fact, giving mom a little peace of mind and some nifty coffee table décor, all for a few euros, was really quite a bargain.

Sources:
Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, Random House, Toronto, 1999.

Anne Frank, Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Doubleday, NY, 1989.