Apples - Rand on Still Life Paintings, Plus


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For Rand's statement about the Rembrandt side of beef painting, see.

Looking up an old discussion of architects, I came across this by me from 2007:

There's one of the ways in which I part company with Rand on art, her objection (and reasons for her objection) to the Rembrandt side of beef. Why does one need to "[contemplate and ponder] the meaning or significance expressed"? Where from comes any requirement that Rembrandt (or any painter) has to be trying to "say something profound about the world"? Maybe he thought the side of beef was beautiful. (Is there something inherently non-beautiful about it?) Maybe he was interested by the technical challenge (as Chopin was in writing his Etudes). Maybe both. Why is there any need for whatever he was doing being justified? The painting is an expert painting. Maybe people like to look at it to appreciate its expertise and/or because it shows them the beauty in a side of beef.

Ellen

This is one of the more controversial issues with the people that are interested in Rand's aesthetics. Funny I agree with parts of yours and Rand's thoughts on this. I would empathize more with Rand's view if the she where talking about one of Rembrandt's major works, as it is the Side of Beef, is an oil sketch, maybe something he did in an hour. He spent 10 years, on and off, on Danae, one of the great masterpieces. So I view her comment unfair and uninformed about different levels of paintings.

Once having dinner with friends in my studio, Gigli was singing a Mahler song - one of my friends thought the music was very sad, and he didn't seem to like it. I mentioned that 8 of Mahler's siblings died in childhood, and you should have seen the look of wonder and empathy on my friend's face as he listened to the end of the song.

Rembrandt had syphilis, his wife died of it, his son was infected with it at birth and died of it in his twenties, is companion got it from him and he died of it. I can't imagine the horribleness of living that way, and that he managed to imbue so many works with love and tenderness of his son, mistress, and wife is amazing.

[Apparently what I had thought was common knowledge about Rembrandt and syphilis isn't confirmed by online sources, hat tip to Scherk, see below.]

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Syphilis has three stages. The last stage, tertiary, may or may not manifest itself decades later and that's what kills. If I remember correctly, the first two stages, defined by symptoms, are no big deal as such. I don't remember if an asymptomatic carrier transmits the disease. Antibiotics stopped most venereal diseases until AIDS--the big surprise--came along. There used to be all kinds of effectively untreatable conditions one simply had to live with that did not kill, like ring worm and hernias. Medicine has not so much extended life--sanitation did that--as improve it. Take lives that medicine has saved and throw them into the broad statistical mix and they disappear from view. If the Earth were an orange you'd not be able to feel Mt. Everest. If you tried to climb it you'd feel it all the way up and all the way down--if you made it back down. Medicine is for the individual. Society doesn't give a damn. That's why it sucked in the former Soviet Union: it wasn't needed for the health of the state.

--Brant

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I would empathize more with Rand's view if the she where talking about one of Rembrandt's major works, as it is the Side of Beef, is an oil sketch, maybe something he did in an hour.

[...]

Rembrandt had syphilis, his wife died of it, his son was infected with it at birth and died of it in his twenties, is companion got it from him and he died of it.

I am quite unschooled in history of art, and did not know Rembrandt and family had syphilis, or I should say I hadn't registered this if I had learned it in the past. What evidence do you have for this syphilis claim, Michael?

I did discover that Rembrandt painted a gentleman with distinctive physiognomy, whom many historians have concluded was a syphilitic -- on the evidence of the painting:

Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_095.jpgPortrait of Gerard de Lairesse, mid-1660s, Metropolitan Museum of Art

(the Met site tells: Athough the sitter's theories on the ideal in painting were antithetical to Rembrandt's style, which Lairesse disparagingly likened to "liquid mud on the canvas," the portrayal is a sympathetic one.)

Take lives that medicine has saved and throw them into the broad statistical mix and they disappear from view.

That's a fine guess at some big numbers, I suppose.

My guess is that we would find a strong statistical signal for 'medicine' in the death tables. Modern medicine or 'evidence-based medicine,' or 'science-based medicine' has done away with things like smallpox, polio, the diabetic death sentence, and so on -- the invention and propagation of antibiotics alone would certainly show a strong effect. My guess is that if we looked at a 'broad statistical mix' and controlled for sanitation,you would likely change your beliefs and conclusion.

About the beef carcass, I didn't know it was dashed off in an hour, or that it was a mere oil sketch. I did find two depictions which support that notion (and I include a pastiche/recreation in one of Bacon's pope series). I did find a very useful site devoted to Rembrandt.**

I have to remind myself that these images are no substitute for first-hand viewings. Reproductions can obscure what a live eye can immediately perceive, rendering but approximations, a bit hazy (eg, a large-format reproduction of the Rembrandt would be thirty times larger than the images below, and even then could not show the three-dimensional qualities of the impasto).

I wish that we had more images to delight and bedevil in this thread. Although the snarl of argument and dispute can be enlightening and entertaining, my cognitive biases clamour for examples -- after a particularly well-thrashed point, I take myself to Google Image search and seek art works that could illustrate an example of what the worthies are talking about. Worthies like Rand and Kamhi and Newberry and Stuttle and Smith and Garland.

ox.jpg

Carcass of Beef (Flayed Ox) (1638) in the Glasgow Museum of Art.

Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_037.jpg
Carcass of Beef (Flayed Ox), 1655, Louvre.
1561566-head_surrounded_by_sides_of_beef
Figure with Meat, 1954, Art Institute of Chicago
____________________________
** Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work
www.rembrandtpainting.net/

A comprehensive guide to the life and art of Rembrandt van Rijn with hundreds of hi-quality images of paintings, etchings and drawings.

Edited by william.scherk
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I am quite unschooled in history of art, and did not know Rembrandt and family had syphilis, or I should say I hadn't registered this if I had learned it in the past. What evidence do you have for this syphilis claim, Michael?

I did discover that Rembrandt painted a gentleman with distinctive physiognomy, whom many historians have concluded was a syphilitic -- on the evidence of the painting:

Great post.

Oh the syphilis thing I known about for years, as a kid I studied everything I could about Rembrandt. A google search should give you the info you need.

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I am quite unschooled in history of art, and did not know Rembrandt and family had syphilis, or I should say I hadn't registered this if I had learned it in the past. What evidence do you have for this syphilis claim, Michael?

I did discover that Rembrandt painted a gentleman with distinctive physiognomy, whom many historians have concluded was a syphilitic -- on the evidence of the painting:

Great post.

Oh the syphilis thing I known about for years, as a kid I studied everything I could about Rembrandt. A google search should give you the info you need.

I did a specific search -- that's what led to discovering the portrait of the supposed syphilitic -- and each link made a syphilis claim only for Gerard de Lairesse, not Rembrandt himself, let alone wives and children. He lived sixty-three years, productive to the end. If he had syphilis, he didn't notice, and it certainly did not affect his face, if we are to believe his self-portraits. The great pox that was syphilis had variants, some non-symptomatic but infectious, and some grotesquely awful in their final face-eating symptoms. Don't make me post those pix.

Online biographical sources do not give a cause for his death, so I'm inclined to say we shouldn't put the pox on him at all.

I think here you might just have it wrong. Not to say there wasn't suffering unto death in his family, his children and his wives. Just not syphilis ...

But let us know if you can find some evidence that has been missed.

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But let us know if you can find some evidence that has been missed.

Yeah I couldn't find anything on it online, sorry, just relying on my memory of it, and I recall a letter by his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels commenting that she made a mistake being intimate with him because it would infect her this his disease. Perhaps the story was in the old book I had on him, his complete works, but I don't have that book to check.

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For Rand, the difference between "Romanticism" and "Naturalism" is that "Romanticism" presents man as possessing volition and "Naturalism" presents man as not having volition.

How do paintings go about presenting this difference, according to you?

Ellen

In a way volition is a very simple distinction. I don't know of painters using "Naturalism" as a category, but "Realism" fits nicely. There would be some gray areas, but recording by painting what one literally sees, being accurate (like getting proportions right), high level of detail, like individual hairs. A gray area occurs with things like what to leave out, or some lighting stuff, like creating a hierarchy of lights and darks that the artist manipulates to create lighting drama but doesn't actually see that in the subject would lead in the direction of volition.

Instead of using "Romanticism" to show volition in painting I would use "imagination." The artist is then calling on more then what he literally sees, like the vision of his mind's eye. Surrealism like Dali's work for example.

But good representational art combines more then either of these two things, which long preceded objectivism, using the inner eye for imagination and enough realism to make the work believable; what's that film expression? To suspend disbelief.

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