Georg Simmel: Rembrandt

An Essay in the Philosophy of Art

Alan Scott, Helmut Staubmann, Alan Scott, Helmut Staubmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135773830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

First published in 1916 in German, this important work has never been translated into English--until now. Simmel attacks such questions as "What do we see in a work of Art?" and "What do Rembrandt's portraits tell us about human nature?" This is a major work by a major thinker concerning one of the world's most important painters.

1

THE EXPRESSION OF INNER LIFE

CONTINUITY OF LIFE AND THE MOVEMENT OF EXPRESSION

Practical necessities and the division of labor between our receptive and productive forces seldom allow us to experience life in its unity and totality, rather than in its individual contents, fates, culminations: the fragments and parts of which compose the whole. This is based on the fact that our life takes the form of a process with changing contents. The contents, however, besides being aligned in a life course, can also be classified into some other sequences: logical, technical, ideal. For example, a viewed object is not only an act of representation, but is located in a system of physical knowledge; a decision is not only an inner act, but represents a certain point in a series of objective moral values; marriage is not merely the experiences of the two persons, but a component of a historical-social condition. Insofar as these discretely emphasized contents count as “the life,” the latter appears to be their accumulation, as if they had divided its character and dynamics among themselves. This notion of life as the sum of all sequentially occurring moments, however, cannot be articulated within the continuous flow of real life. It replaces life with the sum of those contents of life that can be described according to substantive concepts; that is to say, contents that do not count as life, but as ideal or material configurations that have somehow become fixed.

Yet I still believe in another possible perspective on life: one that does not separate the whole and the parts in this fashion, one for which the category of the whole and parts is not applicable to life at all but that takes that life to be a unified process whose nature it is to exist only in moments that can be differentiated by their qualities or contents. The former perspective gravitates toward the “pure I,” or the “mind,” that are, so to speak, something for themselves beyond emerging contents expressible in discrete terms. It seems to me, however, that the entire human being — the absolute of mind and I — is inherent in each separate experience. This is because the production of changing contents taking place within human subjective experience is the way life is lived. Life does not reserve a somehow separable “purity” and being for itself beyond the beats of its pulse. In a similar line of thought, concerning the “character” of the human being and his individual actions, Goethe once said, “The spring can only be thought of insofar as it flows.”¹ We are concerned here with overcoming the opposition between plurality and unity; the alternative is that the unity of diversity either lies beyond unity — as something higher and more abstract — or remains in the sphere of diversity and assembles itself piece by piece out of its elements. Life, however, cannot be expressed in terms of any of these formulas, for it is an absolute continuity in which there is no assembly of fragments or parts. Life, moreover, is a unity, but one that at any moment expresses itself as a whole in distinct forms. This cannot be deduced further because life, which we attempt to formulate here in some way, is a basic fact that cannot be constructed. Each moment of life is the whole life whose steady stream — which is exactly its unique form — has its reality only at the crest of the wave in which it respectively rises. Each present moment is determined by the entire prior course of life, is the culmination of all preceding moments; and already, for this reason, every moment of life is the form in which the whole life of the subject is real.

If one is searching for a theoretical expression of Rembrandt’s solution to his problems of movement (whether great or small), it is to be found within the frame of this conception of life. Whereas in classical and, in the narrower sense, stylizing art, the depiction of a movement is achieved via a sort of abstraction in that the viewing of a certain moment is torn out of its prior and concurrent stream of life and crystallizes into a self-sufficient form, with Rembrandt the depicted moment appears to contain the whole living impulse directed toward it; it tells the story of this life course. It is not a part of a psycho-physical movement fixed in time where the totality of this movement — of this internally unfolding event — would exist beyond the artistically shaped being-in-itself. Rather, it makes evident how a represented moment of movement really is the whole movement or, better, is movement itself, and not some petrified something or other. It is the inversion of the “fruitful moment.” While the latter leads the movement for the imagination from its current state into the future, Rembrandt collects its past into this here and now, not so much a fruitful moment but a moment of harvesting. Just as it is the nature of life to be at every moment there as a totality, since its totality is not a mechanical summation of singular moments but a continuous and continuously form-changing flowing, so it is the nature of Rembrandt’s movement of expression to let us feel the whole sequence of its moments in a single movement — overcoming its partition into separated sequential moments. From the way in which most painters represent these movements, it would seem as if the artist had seen, either in imagination or from a model, how a certain movement looks, and had arranged, realistically or not, the picture according to this outcome — perfected in terms of the phenomenon that had reached the surface.

With Rembrandt, however, the impulse of movement — as it emerges from its kernel laden with or guided by its inner meaning — seems to form the basis. And out of this germ — this concentrated potentiality of the whole and of its meaning — the drawing develops part by part, just as the movement unfolds in reality. For him, the starting point or the foundation of the depiction is not the image of a moment as viewed from the outside, as it were, in which the motion has reached its portrayable zenith — a self-contained cross-section of its temporal course. Rather, it contains from the outset the dynamic of the whole act concentrated into a unity. The entire expressive meaning of the movement, therefore, lies already in the very first stroke. This stroke is already filled with the viewing or the feeling that is contained, as one and the same, within the inner life and the external movement. In this way it becomes comprehensible that the figures in his sketches and roughly sketched line etchings (even more noticeably than in the paintings) in which there is only a minimum of lines — one might almost say that nothing appears on the paper — still convey an absolutely unambiguous attitude and movement, and hence the inner condition and intention in its full depth and with full persuasive force. Where the movement is regarded in the definitive state of its representation — in the extensiveness of its phenomenal moment — it requires, in principle, a completeness of its appearance in order to achieve its full expression. But here it appears as if a person wants to express the deepest emotion pervading him completely. He does not have to utter the entire sentence that logically displays the content of that which moves him, since the tone of voice of the first words already reveals all.

Naturally, that does not mean that there is an absolute difference between Rembrandt and all other artists. We are dealing with differences of principle. As principles, they are diametrically opposed, but empirical phenomena represent a greater or lesser degree of participation in both principles. This is all the more evident as movements of expression in the younger Rembrandt commence from the mere exterior perspective. This can be seen, for example (referring now only to the paintings), in the way the bodies move in The Rape of Europa of 1632, or the slightly later Mene Tekel,² or The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Here we find only the fixed appearance of a moment of movement. Then, around the time of the St. John the Baptist Preaching (in Berlin),³ the movement animated from within itself, prepared in the deepest psychic stratum, begins to appear as that which, with variations right up to the 1640s and even the 1650s, finally bestows unique character on his paintings.

His artistic vision contains not simply the visibility of the gesture in the moment of its representation. His vision’s meaning and intensity originate, so to speak, not first on the level of viewing, but already direct and fill the first stroke that, therefore, completely reveals the totality of the inner-outer process (in its characteristic artistic inseparability). Just as it appeared as the deeper formula of life that its totality does not exist outside of its individual moments, but, on the contrary, exists fully in each of them because it consists exclusively in the movement through all these opposites, so the moving form in Rembrandt reveals that there is no part in the self-realization and self-presentation, as it were, of an inner fate; that, moreover from a certain perspective of representation, each isolated part is the totality of this inner and expressive fate. That he is able to represent each small part of the moving figure as its totality is both the immediate and symbolic expression of the fact that each of the continuously connected moments is the whole life as it becomes personalized in the form of this particular figure.

BEING AND BECOMING IN A PORTRAIT

The same formula that governs the relationship between the representation of a moment of motion and of the expressed whole inner event determines Rembrandt’s fashioning of the portrait as such. The ultimate and most general intention of the Italian portrait belongs to the metaphysics of value of classical Greece: the meaning and value of things lies in their being, in their clearly circumscribed essence as expressed in their timeless concept. The tidal flow of becoming, the historical change of forms, development without a definite point of perfection — all this is at odds with the sculptural sensibility of the Greeks, oriented as it was toward the self-sufficient value of form. The Renaissance portrait aims to capture the self-contained being, the timeless qualitative essence of an individual. The traits of the person are spread out, side by side, in a steadfast form; and although, self-evidently, fates and inner development have led to the represented appearance, these factors of becoming are excluded. Like the steps of a calculation where only the result is of interest, they are of no concern. The Classical portrait captures us in the moment of its present, but this is not a point in a series of comings and goings, but designates a timeless idea beyond such a series: the trans-historical form of the spiritual-physical existence. On the one hand, this corresponds to conceptual realism, which draws together the spatial and temporal dimensions of existences into a unique construction that is supra-individual and yet real. On the other hand, it corresponds to our idea of external-natural reality. Although in it each phenomenon is strictly causally determined by a preceding one, the latter is completely and selflessly, as it were, dissolved into its effect. As a thing of the past, it has disappeared and became indifferent simply because combinations of other causes might, in principle, have resulted in the same effect. The Renaissance poses the problem of the portrait in terms of this — partly metaphysical, partly physical — analogy. The fashioning of the inner life as such is different, however. In its course the cause is not dissolved into its effect, nor is it irrelevant to its special destiny. Instead, in the total development of the inner life we sense each present as only possible through this specific past (although singular, artificially isolated, partial courses may display that physical analogy). Here the past is not only the cause of what comes later, but also its contents sedimented layer by layer as memories, or as dynamic realities whose effects, however, could not have been derived from any other cause and therefore, paradoxical as it might sound, the sequential form becomes the essential form of each present state of the totality of the inner life. Thus, where the inner life determines the giving of form in accordance with its real characteristics, it does not result in its summary manifestation, in that mode of evident abstraction in which all specific traits represent themselves once and for all in a timeless essence.

In the physiognomies of Rembrandt’s portraits we feel very clearly that the course of a life, heaping fate on fate, creates this present image. It elevates us, as it were, to a certain height from which we can view the ascending path toward that point, even though none of the content of its past could be naturalistically stated in the way that portraits with a psychological slant might seek to suggest. This would be of anecdotal or literary interest beyond the boundary of art as such. Miraculously, Rembrandt transposes into the fixed uniqueness of the gaze all the movements of the life that led up to it: the formal rhythm, mood, and coloring of fate, as it were, of the vital process. We are not dealing here — as some interpret Rembrandt — with psychology in paint, because all psychology grasps individual elements or aspects of the totality of the inner process according to their contents. Art, where it is dominated by psychology, presents a logically graspable element, as it were, as representative of this totality.

A psychological orientation always results in a particularization, and thereby a certain solidification that distinguishes itself from the present, but continuously fluid, totality of life within each moment. In Rembrandt, the portrayal of a human being is filled with inner life to the highest degree, but is not psychological. This is a difference of far-reaching consequence that can easily be overlooked if one is not aware of life as a totality at all times, and as a continuously changing form as opposed to each isolated locally determinable individual quality. For only this dynamic of life, but not its content or character describable in terms of individual concepts, is the architect of our traits.

Just as Rembrandt depicts and brings to mind in the single movement of an expression the unity of its history, beginning with the mere potentiality of its first impulse, so he at the very same moment — “in capital letters” — called up the entire course of personal development into the now of intuition [Anschauung]⁴ in such a way that it is immediately given and can, despite and because of its serial form, be read in a peculiarly intuitive manner from this now. In this way, Rembrandt achieved a previously unheard-of artistic expression, though one that cannot become a method or style but remains bound to personal genius. The portraits from Florence or Venice certainly do not lack life and soul. There is a general design however, that tears the elements away from the immediacy of their experience and thereby from the order of their succession. The form is closed off in itself putting only the results of the movement of the inner life at our disposal as data. That typifying style does not need to create a similarity of individuals (although admittedly people all look somehow similar in the art of Sienna and, partially, of Umbria), but it effects a special kind of “generality,” namely the representation of the ideal individual, accomplished by the abstraction from all of its singular moments of life. In the case of Rembrandt, the generality of the individual human being means the accumulation of these moments that somehow retain their historical order.

This highly problematic expression comes close to the addition of singular moments that has just been rejected as an expression of life. This is only valid insofar as one accepts such a dismantling as a psychological-technical tradition, and wishes subsequently to reshape it into the totality of life. Rembrandt’s portraits contain the movement of the inner life by way of, or as, this accumulation, while the classical portrait is not only timeless in the artistic sense — that is, independent of the location between a before and after in earthly time — but also possesses in itself an immanent timelessness in the ordering of its moments. Therefore, the richest and most moving portraits of Rembrandt are those of old people, since in them we can see a maximum of lived life. In portraits of young people he achieved this only in a few depictions of Titus via a rotation of the dimension: by garnering to a degree the future life with its developments and fates, and by making visible the future succession of events in the present, just as, in the former case, the succession of past events is made visible.

THE SERIES OF PORTRAITS AND DRAWINGS

And now the continuity of the flowing totality of life, as focused in a single portrait, extends beyond it and is expressed, as real and symbolic, in Rembrandt’s evident inclination to capture in painting the same individual at various stages of life. Here on a larger scale we feel once more that life cannot be captured in a single moment of its formation. In the series of pictures of a single person — that is, in the fact, that it is one series — what the single picture displays in the form of intensity is laid out in succession. Here we must think first and foremost of his self-portraits and how these, precisely as a series, contrast with the classical conception of the human subject. Titian, Andrea del Sarto, as well as Puvis de Chavannes and Böcklin, each left a few self-portraits in which they intended to capture their unchanging nature once and for all. But, as in Rembrandt, just as the whole life flows into each moment that is represented as a picture, so it also flows further into the next painting — dissolving, as it were, into an uninterrupted life in which the paintings rarely denote a pause. It never is; it is always becoming. I know very well that one wants to deduce the extraordinary number of self-portraits and family portraits from purely artistic problems in painting. Assuming that all these arguments are correct, this isolation of a “purely artistic” interest seems to me to be a completely artificial and quite unreal abstraction in view of the logic of intuition in the representation of human beings in each portrait. This is intelligible only in the context of a period in which a per se quite justified response to an art that conveyed anecdotal and some nonartistic “ideas” severely damaged the sense for the unity of a work of art. The absolutely unique power and depth with which these paintings situate the whole person would be too strange a coincidence had Rembrandt really only intended what today the abstract artistic view calls the “pure artistry of painting.” In any case, as the paintings stand there, their painterly problem appears simply to be the depiction of the totality of a human life, but as a problem of painting and not as a psychological, metaphysical, or anecdotal problem. Just as this was already accomplished in individual paintings beyond the crystal-like limits of classicism, so it became, as it were, explicit in or expanded into the majority of portraits of a single model of whom he could not have enough. Through each of, or rather as, these series resonates a life that is always new in its unity and always a unit in its novelty. It would be wrong to say that the components of these series respectively “complement” each other, for each of them is in its own right already an artistic and living totality, because the secret of life is just this: that the whole life is in each moment, and yet each moment is unmistakably different from any other. Therefore, the revelation of his view of life, though admittedly such a theoretical formulation would have been far from his thoughts, is only completed through the artistic fact of these series — in the first place through his self-portraits. Finally, this knowledge of life, which speaks through artistic creations and not in theoretical concepts, is once more symbolized in a quite different turn in his series of drawings. However much the expressive movements of his paintings and etchings display the continuity of life, they are as a whole still closed, self-sufficient constructions that place creative life out of itself and within firm boundaries, into the objectivity and detachment of the completed work of art. The drawings, however, are more like stages through which this life passes without a pause. They are like individual consummations of life’s course, instead of somehow being dammed up as in the paintings. Many exceptions not withstanding, their totality has a different character from drawings by other masters. Either these are more like paintings — their intention, whether realized or not, is the construction of art that stands for itself, delimited by an ideal frame — or they are sketches or studies, fragments or experiments, whereby their meaning resides in contexts of a technical or preparatory nature.

Rembrandt’s drawings draw back from this alternative. They have something characteristically unfinished about them, as if one follows immediately on from the other, like one breath to the next. And yet, none has the quality of a sketch — of pointing beyond itself. It is at the same time totality and being in a state of flux: a quality that is inherent in our every living act, and only in this. One may well say that only Rembrandt’s drawings in their totality reveal the fundamentally living essence of his art, which has concentrated itself in his paintings and their expressive movements into an individual objectification.

RESERVE AND OPENNESS OF THE PORTRAIT FIGURE

Perhaps another characteristic contrast to the Renaissance portrait can now be clarified. I said that the latter displays its character timelessly, as it were, in an abstraction that eliminates the vital movements of its development and only records its pure contents. Whether or not that which is so recorded is represented within this style with utmost clarity, the distinguishing feature of the mystery or enigma of the personality thereby determines its impression to a greater rather than a lesser degree. For there is something dark and clouded in our inner-exterior being...