Man in Jiffy-Pop Hat? Dude with ‘Tude?

If Dude is an image, rather, of a Russian “boyar,” or nobleman, as put forth by the Rembrandt Research Project, then surely this is a send-up of an aristocrat and not a serious picture. I see more Chef Boyardee than boyar in this poor fool whose cheap ensemble, including the pompous van dyke, looks fresh off the rack at Party City. It’s a work of “laughable absurdity,” as one of the co-curators of Rembrandt in America, Tom Rassieur, described it.

Thank goodness Dude has been absorbed into the hand-rolled q-tips of deft restorers. It survives today as merely a photo, a thumbnail illustration on the wall label for Rembrandt’s beautiful Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes.

It’s incredible to think that for almost 400 years, however, Dude successfully masked Shaded Eyes, which Rembrandt painted in 1634, at the height of his Amsterdam fame, when there was a market for his likeness. Once all the offending overpaint was removed—the last vestiges were lifted in 2002—and a stunning, original self-portrait of a 28-year-old Rembrandt emerged, the long-hibernating masterpiece fetched over $7M at auction, bought at the time by Las Vegas casino mogul (and English lit. major) Steve Wynn.

We sometimes hear about Old Master works of art being sloppily painted over to escape the eye of Nazi “collectors” in WWII, but this painting was intentionally disfigured only a few years after Rembrandt finished it, according to the Rembrandt Research Project, the venerable organization brought in to conduct tests on the outer paint layers and assess the possibility of there being something superb underneath. According to the world’s authority on Rembrandt and the head of the RRP, Ernst van de Wetering, “the overpaintings were so old one had to entertain the possibility that they had been done in Rembrandt’s own workshop.”

Seriously?

Rembrandt may have overseen this?

Perhaps—suggests Van de Wetering, in his Rembrandt: A Life in 180 Paintings—once the original self-portrait didn’t sell. The RRP speculates Rembrandt may have overestimated the market for his self-portraits, and when Shaded Eyes wasn’t purchased, it went back into his studio (where Rembrandt trained many apprentices) to be converted first into a more up-to-date image of the master and then into a tronie, a character study considered “very popular wall decoration in Rembrandt’s time.”

What’s equally fantastic is how the RRP’s expert restorers went about taking off the overpainting. “This is the most challenging type of restoration to pull off,” said NCMA conservator Noelle Ocon, “old oil paint over old oil paint.”

Refined removal takes place at the molecular level. Initially aided by x-radiographs and ultraviolet luminescence that help delineate layers, restorers work on a painting under a microscope “the way surgeons use ultrasound” and other advanced imaging technology. “Thousands of scientific and stylistic decisions go into what to leave on and what to take away.” It also helps that the chemicals restorers use aren’t what you’d apply to strip furniture. “My strongest solvent,” said Ocon, “won’t touch a coffee stain. Water is stronger.”

Death by subtle swabbing. Gone, after hundreds of years, are the trapped eyes and ridiculous whiskers. Revived is Rembrandt’s confident gaze, under brilliant shadow. And there’s a silver lining: such hubris kept the hidden masterpiece in fairly decent condition.

I went back through the exhibition the other day and paused before this self-portrait, one of three in Rembrandt in America, feeling lucky to see something so fresh and new to the world. Thank you, modern conservators, for the years you put into your training; your willingness, given your considerable talents, to live out of the limelight; and your scientific devotion to art.

We owe you.

Now, can you lift those devil horns I drew coming out of my math teacher’s head in my junior-high annual? He was a very smart man and certainly more patient than I was good at understanding coefficients. I’m no art historian; but I may be something of a sheepish expert in early disgruntled pupil, and I say it’s no mystery how Rembrandt lost his dignity. For a time.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes, 1634, oil on panel. 27 7/8 x 21 3/4 in., Private collection, New York

Madonna and Child with Five Saints, Anthony van Dyck (click for info)

Naturally, novelists take great care in naming their works, and we all have our favorites. Some are borrowed: All the King’s Men, The Sun Also Rises, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Seductively pithy: The Big Sleep, Fifth Business, Atonement, Beloved. Vaguely intimidating, hinting at doorstop girth: The Corrections, The Recognitions, War and Peace, Gravity’s Rainbow. Funny: A Confederacy of Dunces. Declarative: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Things Fall Apart, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Impossible: The Man without Qualities, Infinite Jest, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Lofty shouts: Absolom! Absolom! and O Pioneers!

I once had a novel taken from my office at another job, or borrowed indefinitely, and I always thought the compelling words on the spine, I Am One of You Forever, played a part in the disappearance.

So what about naming visual art? Many contemporary and Old Master titles alike seem fittingly unobtrusive. Six Women. Blue Panel. Two Figures. Madonna and Child. Still Life with Flowers. One of our curators speculates that more interpretive titles in Western art started appearing in the 19th century, probably the invention of romantics, titles “suggestive of the proper mood for viewing” or relating “visual experience to other art forms, especially music.”

As an editor, I confess to preferring the more interpretive title, and many belonging to works in our collection do have a moody or literary tone. I’ve always liked Silence of Thought, Venice without Water, Face-Pink, and The Quintet of Remembrance (soft spot for the downright Proustian). I was curious whether our curators had any favorites, so I asked them:

Deputy Director for Art John Coffey: Homage to the Square. Night Flight of Dread and Delight. Pigeon.

Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Kinsey Katchka: Flying Apartment Flotilla, “Because it has elements of whimsy and militance at the same time.” Lines That Link Humanity, “Because it is universal and strikes me as optimistic, though there is a dark underbelly to those links.” Cabbage Worship, “Because it’s goofy.”

Curator of European Art David Steel: Rabble. Tippy Toes. Flight Research.

Curator of Contemporary Art Linda Dougherty: Askew. Rabble. Vertigo. “Hmm,” she said, “I think I like one-word titles.”

I was surprised to learn when I first began working in an art museum that, in addition to restoring lost stories to works of art, curators are responsible for naming works without titles. One curator estimates that in the NCMA’s collection, approximately 99 percent of the art before 1950 was originally unnamed. Even Monet didn’t title his works. “That was usually left up to his dealers or the collectors of his paintings,” said David Steel.

Quite often it’s about revising older, erroneous titles that have been floating out there in the art market for centuries. “First, you only retitle a work of art with just cause,” said John Coffey. “Panama Girls became Panama Dancers when I determined that Kirchner’s original title of the picture was Panamatanzerinnen.”

When Dennis Weller retitles a work, he tries “to better reflect the subject matter depicted, or to correct misinformation, such as the name of a sitter in a portrait or the identification of the biblical scene.” As works change hands and titles are revised, how do curators keep it all straight? “Minor differences in titles appear often in the literature, sometimes due to translation, and sometimes due to the whim of a curator,” said Weller. “Still, if the location, size, support, etc., remains constant, there tends to be little confusion.”

I wondered if there was ever any temptation to get creative. “Oh, please, no,” said one curator, the rest concurring. Hence the snoozy (forgive me) An Extensive Landscape with Cottages near a Lake or the startling Peasant Spreading Manure. Necessarily prosaic, these titles tell it like it is. And some seem to have a curious appeal on their own:

The Triumph of Chastity. Sawfish Headdress. Stag Hunt in a River. Mercury About to Behead Argus. A Man Scraping Chocolate. The Dentist. A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms. Costume for a Female Diviner.

Part of me is relieved curators feel no need to get fancy on us. Why detract from the uncommon experience of standing before an original Van Dyck?

11 am: Meet your friends at Rodin’s The Thinker in the middle of the Plaza, and move toward the new building, where you’ll see Mark Dendy’s Dendy DanceTheater performing an outdoor site-specific work that celebrates the connection of art and nature and includes more than 40 guest dancers from the N.C. School of the Arts. No worries if you arrive late; Dendy DanceTheater will be performing throughout the day.

11:45 am: Enter East Building (the “old” building), and take a left into the Museum Auditorium to see the world premiere of Robert Weiss’s Moving Life, presented by the Carolina Ballet. Stick around for an insightful conversation with Weiss after the performance.

Lunch: light and vegetarian options are provided by the Whole Foods vendor.

After lunch: Hit a few highlights in this Dance Lover’s Tour of West Building:

Contemporary Galleries

Tfila
As you enter West Building, look straight ahead, and you can’t miss El Anatsui’s monumental hanging metal sculpture. Take a peek behind it, where you’ll find a quieter but no less intriguing work by Michal Rovner called Tfila (Prayer, in Hebrew). From a distance what at first looks like an ancient stone tablet inscribed with mysterious calligraphy gets even more mystifying as you approach the case: the glyphs or “letters” on the stone are actually moving (via DVD projection): each character dances, and the dancer is the artist herself, dressed in black robe, curling up and bowing down in supplication to, we’re not sure what. The effect of all the “letters” moving at once but not in unison is mesmerizing.

“Dance Gallery”
From Tfila anyone can point you in the direction of the NCMA’s first Picasso painting. Seated Woman, Red and Yellow Background portrays a psychologically charged figure “in repose,” while the rest of this gallery features strong images of the body in motion. The ecstatic rites performed in Maurice Sterne’s Dance of the Elements, Bali contrast sharply with the high-stepping cakewalkers in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Panama Dancers on the opposite wall, but the stars of this gallery might be the neighboring illustrations by American artist Aaron Douglas. You be the judge.

African Gallery

Communal Dance
“There was no tribal box office,” remarks choreographer Mark Dendy. “You didn’t get up in the morning and go down to the box office and get your tickets for the rain dance.” Dendy says he’s drawn to creating site-specific works because “it gets back to the original function of dance, which is public ritual.” Perhaps no better evidence of the purpose of communal dance can be found in the NCMA’s collection than the gorgeous Yoruba Egungun Masquerade Costume at the front of the African Gallery. Curator Kinsey Katchka tells us the masquerade dancer, in a ceremony venerating his ancestors, is hidden from the onlooker but can see out through the net face panel, adorned with cowrie shells, beads, and coins. When dancer-priests perform this ceremony that continues today, they spin rapidly so the fabric panels fly out, “revealing the colorful layers of the costume.”

European Galleries

Not-So-Still Lifes
Choreographer and former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, Robert Weiss says he loves still lifes for their “juxtaposition of shapes,” “arrangement of objects,” and interesting sources of light. To Weiss still lifes are “like a frozen moment of choreography.” Wander through these galleries and find a few new favorites. Ballet fans should not miss the small Raphael in the first European Gallery: nearly every foot in St. Jerome Saving Sylvanus and Punishing the Heretic Sabinianus is properly turned out, even the executioner’s!

American Galleries

Black Mountain Connections
Modern dance pioneer Merce Cunningham’s name is often associated with the adventurous Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C., where he formed his first company. In the American Galleries, you’ll find work by two of Cunningham’s fellow Black Mountain colleagues, Josef Albers (Homage to the Square) and Jacob Lawrence, whose Migration series has inspired several modern choreographers, including Rennie Harris and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. (On your next visit, view the work of more Black Mountain artists in the Contemporary Galleries: Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Lyonel Feininger, and Franz Kline.)

Rodin Court And Garden

Masterful Technique
Like Rodin, she influenced everyone who came after her. You may see the choreography of Martha Graham in some of the dramatic angles of Rodin’s bronze figures. Both artists claimed their work expressed the language of the soul. Strike a similar or contrasting pose at the Picture Yourself station in the garden, and take home a souvenir photo of your trip to the new NCMA.

Before you leave: be sure to drop off your donated art supplies at the upper lawn of the Museum Park Theater, and thanks for your contribution!

Modeled in 1880, greatly enlarged and installed outside Paris’s Panthéon in 1904, The Thinker was already used in an advertisement by 1908. The visual cliché has been around so long that, unless we see the sculpture in person, it’s hard for us to fully appreciate the one work Rodin deemed so vital he asked that it be put over his grave in Meudon, France. In April visitors to the NCMA will have the unique opportunity to see both the original and the enlarged versions of this most familiar of sculptures.

Before visiting, it might help to clear away some of the commercial cobwebs by considering what Rodin originally called the sculpture: not The Thinker but The Poet, according to Curator of European Art David Steel.

In his new book Rodin: The Cantor Foundation Gift to the North Carolina Museum of Art, Steel says The Poet was likely the first sculpture Rodin created for his famous The Gates of Hell. It sits high atop these bronze doors initially inspired by scenes in Dante’s Inferno. Steel tells us Rodin first imagined the poet to be Dante himself, “thinking of the plan of his poem.”

As an editor it touched me that this famous thinker was initially a writer, a poet facing the blank page. Rodin’s poet thinks so hard about his work of art that his toes grip the rock he sits on. Hardly cerebral, the poet is visceral, grounded, and heavy: the monumental cast installed in front of the NCMA’s new West Building, a loan from the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford, weighs nearly 1,500 pounds.

I was curious what a true poet would have to say about Rodin’s original title for the sculpture, so I cold called a fine translator of Dante’s Inferno, former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who remarked on the deceptive ease of creating a poem, or any work of art. Pinsky likes Rodin’s original title “as a corrective to 19th-century and older notions of Orpheus or Dionysus or wild-eyed Highlands bards with their beards sideways in the Scottish wind.”

“It’s interesting,” Pinsky said, “to think about [Rodin’s] image of [The Poet]: hunched, not dancing or lyre-strumming, muscular, not epicene, and working hard. An image of composition and inner work, not of performance.”

Rodin labored on The Gates of Hell for more than 20 years. Gradually the work strayed from the Inferno, and Rodin included stories from the Bible and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Slowly the Poet became the Thinker. “Guided by my first inspiration,” Rodin wrote, “I conceived another thinker, a naked man, seated upon a rock, his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth, he dreams. The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He is no longer dreamer, he is creator.”

In April you can learn more about The Thinker and other figures on The Gates of Hell by visiting the NCMA’s new Rodin court and garden. After seeing these magnificent sculptures in person, pick up a copy of Steel’s book in the new Museum Store or online. Rodin: The Cantor Foundation Gift to the North Carolina Museum of Art also includes a DVD documentary on the collection, created by Emmy Award–winning producer-director Art Howard and coproducer Julie Dixon.