Displaying items by tag: Jorg Von Uthmann

Did Jesus sport a beard? Painters have held different opinions on that subject.

Following Roman custom, early Christian art in Western Europe favored a clean-shaven Savior while Byzantium portrayed him with a beard. Only in the 12th century did the bearded Christ become universal.

Rembrandt, too, painted him with facial hair. Unlike his predecessors, though, he presented him as a contemporary human being, not an idealized hero.

For the first time since the Dutch master’s death in 1669, the Louvre has brought together the seven portraits of Jesus attributed to him. (Only two are signed, which could mean that some are studio works.)

It’s generally assumed, though by no means certain, that the sitter was a young Jew from Rembrandt’s neighborhood. As evidence, art historians cite the inventory taken after the painter’s bankruptcy, in 1656, when his house and effects were sold at auction: One of the items was listed as “Head of Christ From Life.”

Much has been made of Rembrandt’s close relationship with Amsterdam’s Jewish community, mostly immigrants from Portugal. Four years ago, an exhibition at the city’s Jewish Historical Museum exploded that myth. No more than three of his male portraits are pictures of Jews.

Hazelnut Hair

What the seven portraits do have in common is that they seem to be inspired by the description of Christ in the so- called Lentulus Letter, allegedly written by a predecessor of Pontius Pilate. That is, in fact, a devotional tract from the late Middle Ages when the image of the bearded Christ also had caught on in the West.

“His hair is the color of a ripe hazelnut,” the letter says, “parted on top and falling straight to the ears yet curling further below.” And: “His beard is large and full but not long and parted in the middle. His glance shows simplicity adorned with maturity, his eyes are clear and commanding, never apt to laugh but sooner inclined to cry.”

Around the portraits, the museum has grouped some 80 related works -- paintings, drawings, prints -- by Rembrandt and other artists.
Among the highlights are Rembrandt’s two versions of “Christ at Emmaus.” The early version, from 1628, is one of his most daring paintings: The main figure is seen only as a silhouette while the light falls on his dinner companion who raises his hand in astonishment.

Not every Dutch artist who came to Paris failed, went mad, sliced off his ear and killed himself.

Kees van Dongen (1877-1968), who arrived in 1899, some 13 years after Van Gogh, was tremendously successful and became the portraitist of the Roaring Twenties.

The exhibition at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which was first seen in Rotterdam, Van Dongen’s birthplace, covers the first half of his career, up to 1931.

Ignoring his later work, which is more conventional and often banal, also spares the organizers the trouble of dealing with the low point of his career -- his trip to Nazi Germany in 1941 as a guest of the regime. After the war, he and his fellow travelers were temporarily excluded from the Salon.

Van Dongen didn’t start out as a society painter. In his young years, he was an avowed anarchist.

Picasso, whose neighbor he was in the legendary cluster of shabby Montmartre studios, nicknamed him -- after the blue- blooded Russian agitator -- “the Kropotkin of the Bateau- Lavoir.” Together they explored Paris nightlife, the cabarets, brothels and watering holes.

Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s mistress, became Van Dongen’s model. In response to Picasso’s five “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” he came up with twice as many “Tabarin Wrestlers,” muscular ladies you wouldn’t want to mess with.

Van Dongen did his best to conceal the fact that he was a brilliant draftsman and that he had worked as a cartoonist for magazines. He preferred to be viewed as having miraculously emerged from nowhere as a painter.

Wild Beasts

In 1905, he appeared with Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and others in the historic Salon d’Automne that led a horrified critic to attack them as “fauves,” or wild beasts.

In a way, Van Dongen was the wildest of the beasts. His deliberate primitivism, crude vigor and strident colors were close to the German Expressionists. No wonder German galleries welcomed him with open arms.

Another scandal broke out at the 1913 Salon d’Automne: The police removed as obscene a nude of his wife Guus with the black triangle of her pubic hair very much in evidence. In 1920, Anatole France, probably the country’s most revered writer, was shocked to find out that his neighbor had portrayed him as a decrepit old man.

At that time, Van Dongen had moved to a chic private street near the Bois de Boulogne where he lived with Lea Jacob, manager of the haute couture house Jenny, who introduced him to Parisian high society.