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Undoubtedly Rembrandt
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15613 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1989 |
2,163 Words |
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James Breslin
James Breslin is the author of William Carlos Williams: An
American Artist and From Modern to Contemporary: American
Poetry, 1945-1965. He teaches English at the University of
California, Berkeley, and is presently working on a biography
of Mark Rothko. |
REMBRANDT'S PORTRAIT
Charles L. Mee, Jr.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988
336 pp.$19.95
Charles Mee, Jr.'s, Rembrandt's Portrait is the kind of book that gives biography a bad name.
Mee begins by describing eleven self-portraits--all etchings--done at the beginning of the Dutch master's career, each of these works displaying a dramatically different Rembrandt. "Somewhere in all these pictures," Mee asks, "is it possible to find the authentic Rembrandt?" Of course, like anyone else who raises this kind of question, Mee believes that it is quite possible, and that conventional biographical means are sufficient both to find and to represent the "real" figure behind that proliferation of self-images.
Mee's book, a lively but superficial narrative, would have been more interesting and even more profound had he been willing to confront some of the problems raised by his opening question. Is his subject's self necessarily single and unified, or might it be multiple and discontinuous? What is it exactly that biographers have at stake in their insistence on a unified self? How can a biographer use external means--anecdotes, documents, paintings--to arrive at the subject's interior life, however defined? But Mee is less concerned with contemplating difficulties than he is in reassuring us that "the authentic Rembrandt" is buried somewhere in the pictures and scholarly commentary.
The case of Rembrandt, however,
... (1998 of 12842 Characters)
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