inking about Velazquez's "Meninas" or a Pompeiian wall painting as they work - there's enough to keep their attention fully occupied with the process on hand. But the dialogue is still there.
THE works shown here - by Rembrandt van Rijn, Georges Seurat, and Giorgio Morandi - are all on paper and all in black and white. Morandi, the most contemporary of the three, admired and studied works by both Seurat and Rembrandt. Seurat is known to have been interested enough in Rembrandt to have among very few reproductions of old masters in his possession, reproductions of 13 of the Dutch artist's etchings, including the "Self-Portrait Drawing at a Window" of 1648.
The times and places to which each of these artists belongs could hardly be farther apart. The Italian Giorgio Morandi belongs to our century (1890-1964). A quiet, somewhat secluded artist, he worked with a virtually religious dedication, on an intimate scale. He transmuted the simplest objects - groups of bottles, tins, jugs - into small paintings, drawings, and prints that are unusual in composition, intensely sensitive in treatment, and surprisingly bold.
Georges Seurat was French and lived from 1859 to one year after Morandi was born. He was painter of some of the most classically ordered, carefully constructed figure compositions in Western art. He brought a systematic organization to the sketch-like freedoms of French Impressionism by meticulously applying color spots and scrupulously observed tonal values. And he made some of the most beautiful drawings ever made.
Rembrandt, that giant of 17th-century Holland, was a great individualist, vigorous, unmannered, humane. He was a painter of "history," of Bible stories notably, and a portraitist. He was an outstanding, almost obsessive self-portraitist. He painted landscapes also, but only rarely did he paint, draw, or etch "still life," a genre special to his Dutch contemporaries. Rembrandt was a highly original etcher; his etchings are given as much importance as his paintings.
And it is his etchings, particularly, that both Seurat and Morandi looked at. It has been said that Rembrandt's etchings are more like paintings than drawings. They are things of deep, subtly varied shadows and strong lights. His etching needle was like an extension of intuition, incisive and free, accumulating a range of tones from the darkest black to the pure white of the paper. Forms emerge from shadow into light. Or their surfaces seem to shift from clarity into an obscurity where the edge of a hat brim or the underside of an arm can't be seen, only assumed. The viewer's knowledge takes over from his eye and we agree, on trust, that the forms hidden in the rich darkness are actually there.
The process of making an etching is linear. But Rembrandt adapted, from earlier kinds of engraving on metal, a stock of hatching and crisscrossing techniques that in his hands produced a range of textures and shadows rather than outlines and edges. It is as though he wanted the needle to approximate the effects of the brush. He worked with a freedom of marks, lines, and movements that a craftsman intent on merely reproducing a picture would hardly have invented. Rembrandt treated the print as a primary f orm of art, a highly sensitive medium responding directly to the artist's hand.
Rembrandt was an avid art collector and was profoundly interested in the work of artists who preceded him. The way in which he transformed such closely studied precedents into works totally his own tells us much about the meaning of genuine originality.
Rembrandt also collected curiosities, and presumably the beautifully marked mollusk shell that was the subject of one of his rare still lifes - a small etching - was in his collection. Perhaps Rembrandt saw a parallel between the checkered patterning on this particular shell and the skills and potential of making an etching on a metal plate. That interest alone was apparently the reason he chose to make an etching of the shell.
And Morandi, in 1921, at just the point he is believed to have studied Rembrandt's etchings most cl