Are you sure he was funny?

Your assignment:

Write the catalogue copy for the exhibit/auction before this was thought to be a Rembrandt and after it was authenticated. Go.

Day 30--Abstracts of Additional Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Augusta Savage leaves her Art in the skilled hands of Harlem’s young because the Body is a Harp, No Matter who Plows it under and tries to forget

Thomas Cole on The Course of Empire and the Eventual Superiority of Nesting Birds

Edward Kemeys discourses on wild beasts who lurk in public places for public purposes such as assisting humans in offering perpeptual prayers for rain

Carl Milles defends the scale of his bronze gods, particularly Poseidon’s privates, while standing beneath the Sun Singer in Allerton Park.

As a brass band marches by, Charles Ives sings his favorite hymn and sells me life insurance, though he has been long dead.

The dead lead singers from several mediocre bands denounce Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain but sing the praises of Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday, and, oddly, Elvis. They do this in harmonies worthy of a Bach chorale.


Hannah Cohoon sees heaven again with its rounded fruits, its blazing leaves of vision, and offers it to me as a token, but I am too busy humming “Simple Gifts” to hear her







Finally:

Rembrandt challenges Thomas Kinkade to a cage match in the Mall of America over fair use of the phrase Painter of Light®

Fourth of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Rembrandt Addresses the 1960s and 70s

You will move from black
 and white to color, 
  from an etched world

to an urban landscape of vivid oils
 that will scare and stun
  everyone already

drawn in her best grays and blacks on paper,
 line and outline of a leg,
  her covered curves so clear.

Look back, I think, rather than ahead
 to the glossy magazine and the Soup Cans,
  and the neon Dutch Masters

on the billboard just outside the Queens Tunnel.
  You will find your way into photographs
  and acrylics, and will paint

so fiercely at times that your arms
 will go numb. This will go ahead and happen.
  So you’ll need your rest. Lie down.

I will come to you in a series of dreams and whisper
 die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt 
  and you will believe until you wake

that I really did see Christ being lifted from the ground,
 heavy as a plastic sack of seed, fallen from a truck,

that I really did see his guards (like the men
 in the grainy video of Vietnam, Munich, 
  Selma, El Salvador, the Moon)

confounded by the sudden appearance of flesh and color,
 that I knew their desire to return to a world 
  of shades and shadow rather than this one,

its ridiculous deaths and resurrections everywhere, 
colored in a television light so harsh I cannot begin
  to find it in a human eye.

Two by Stephen Frech

Poet Stephen Frech has written an entire collection of poems based on the life and paintings of Rembrandt. A number of these could be seen as, in part, ekphrastic midrash, a faithful, fervent troubling of scripture for meaning and insight through the further refraction/commentary of Rembrandt's many biblical paintings. Here are two.


Christ at Emmaus—Stephen Frech

One asked the stranger to divide the bread
and the flame wavered as if a breeze crept in.
Pausing for a moment, the inn’s day done,
he listened to the distant kitchen clatter,
a woman bent over a basin
scrubbing the day’s grime from new pots—
tomorrow, who can discern yesterday’s from today’s?

So the stranger took the loaf in both hands,
measured with his thumbs the seam
where he intended to break it,
showed it to one many saying, “This is for you.”
As the crust tore, the cup tipped
and spilled its wine that ran the length
and seeped through the cracks of the table’s planks.

Knowing him at last, am I the one froze in surprise
or the other, fallen to my knees, my eyes cast down
seeing some far field I’ve never lost sight of
and that, if only I’d set out, a day’s walking
would have brought to me.




The Adoration of The Shepherds—Stephen Frech

They entered slowly like birds wanting bread.
Unlike any other seed they know,
it stirs a hunger a day of feeding won’t sate,
a longing so desperate that, skittish, with quick eyes
watchful for the other fist,
they risk feeding from your hand.

The smell of the barn fouled the nostrils:
the day had been long and hot,
the animals labored hard.
Crushed bindweed dried on the hooves of cattle;
the horse’s collar hung on the wall,
its padded leather still damp and rip with horse brine.
And hay, just on the far side of fermenting,
spike the air and kept the cows dreamy and docile.

An old man carries a dim lamp into the light of the barn
and the flame is merely flame now—a busy sliver.
It hardly casts shadows of its own;
its light barely reaches the rotting loft boards.

He hadn’t expected this, not at all:
a new mother, so young and at ease
with the baby as only young mothers can be,
generous with all the strangers craning to take a look.
She doesn’t know—how could she?
The shadow on her breast is only of her hand.


from If Not for These Wrinkles of Darkness (White Pine Press, 2001

Rembrandt: Midrash and Icon

See the power point on Rembrandt: Midrash and Icon from Tuesday's class. Also, Ryan Pendell's blog. Much more to come.