“Rembrandt Is in the Wind” by Russ Ramsey

Some 15 years ago, my wife and I signed up for an unusual tour of the St. Louis Art Museum. Rory McClure, a student from Ireland studying at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, hosted an art tour seen through the eyes of faith. Not to press the metaphor too far, it was eye-opening.  

Paintings we had previously considered for their beauty, subject matter, or technical skill became stories. McClure guided us in understanding not only the power of ideas in culture, but how those ideas were represented in art. It was a museum tour you wished would never end. It also changed how we understood art and prepared us for the many visits we’ve made to art museums since that time.

 

Russ Ramsey, a pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tenn., has done in book form what our Irish student did on the tour, and then some. The subtitle of his Rembrandt Is in the Wind tells the story: “Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith.”

 

Ramsey tells the stories of nine artists: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Jean Frederic Bazille, Vincent Van Gogh, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Edward Hopper, and Lilias Trotter. He provides the back story, but he usually focuses on a specific painting by each artist. 

 

In the case of Rembrandt, for example, he discusses “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.” It’s a wonderful painting, and it is indeed “Rembrandt in the wind,” as the title suggests. It was stolen with 12 other works in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The total value of the artwork involved exceeded $500 million; the paintings have never neem found. The museum has left the empty frame of the Rembrandt painting as a kind of memorial.

 

This is a discussion about art as only an art lover, and a man of faith, can have. Ramsey talks about art, the artist, faith, culture, and meaning. He tells some wonderful, and some agonizing, stories. In his hands, artists and paintings covering 400 years of Western culture come alive. And the book is a physically beautiful publication, a delight to read and just look at. (I have the limited Edition from The Rabbit Room, but it is also available from Amazon and other distributors.)

 

Russ Ramsey

Ramsey is a pastor, author, and speaker. He’s previously published Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death, The Advent of the Lamb of God, The Passion of the King of Glory, and The Mission of the Body of Christ. A native of Indiana, he is a graduate of Taylor University and received his M.Div. and Th.M. degrees from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He lives in Nashville with his family.

 

Rembrandt Is in the Wind is a pure delight of a book. Well-researched, highly readable, and beautifully presented, it tells a story of art that informs, surprises, and resonates. I’d put in in my “top five books I’ve read this year” list.

 

Top painting: The Storm in the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt van Rijn.

“Unveiling” by Suzanne Wolfe

Dr. Rachel Piers is an expert in restoring art, especially medieval and Renaissance art. She has left a rather good job in New York City, although “fled” might be the operative word. She’s left behind problems with a successful museum expansion and a recent divorce from the man whose firm did the expansion. She’s going to Rome to work with the Ferrara Museum, and she will be focused on one specific project -- a triptych in a small church.

The triptych may turn out to be a work by the Flemish master Rogier Van Der Weyden. If it is, it will be a huge boost in Rachel’s career, fame for the museum, and the likely permanent loss of the work for the church.

Rachel discovers she’s been given a good team: Nigel Thompson, who run the “forensic” laboratory for art; Pia Amata, a research assistant; and Donati, an expert in pigment analysis. As they undertake their research, study, cleaning, and conserving the work, the indications are that it is indeed by Van Der Weyden. But there are also indications leading to doubt.

Unveiling by Suzanne Wolfe reads almost like an art history mystery (the mystery novelist Iain Pears comes to mind) but it’s not. It doesn’t include murders, thrilling suspense, or a heroine chased through the streets. It does include a museum looking to enhance its reputation, with much concern for cutting ethical corners, and a corporate sponsor that wants to enhance reputation as a champion for the arts.

Most of all, it is a personal story, the story of a woman whose left a wrecked personal life, who’s tempted to give the museum and the corporate sponsor what they want, and who finds herself falling in love with a member of her team. It’s a story about breaching boundaries – ethical, professional, and personal.

Suzanne Wolfe

Wolfe grew up in England and read English Literature at Oxford, where she was a founder of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society. She and her husband Gregory are the founders of Image Journal. She is the author of The Confessions of X (2016) and the co-author of Books That Build Character: A Guide to Teaching Your Child Moral Values Through Stories (1994); Circle of Grace: Praying with – and for – Your Children (2000); and Bless This House: Prayers for Families and Children (2004). She is writer in residence at Seattle Pacific University and lives in Richmond Beach, Washington.

I wanted more of this story. It’s not a long novel, but I would have been perfectly happy if it had been. I wanted to know more about the divorce, more about Rachel’s mother, more about the research trips Pia the assistant makes to Bruges, and more about the not-quite-villains of the story. Wolf tells a good story, with deep understanding of the art identification and conservation process (and it’s fascinating). I was so wrapped up in the story’s characters that I wanted to know more about them.

Unveiling is a story of art, love, professional temptation, and what it takes to be successful in the highly politicized world of arts, museums, and corporate involvement. And it is a well-told story.

Painting: The Crucifixion Triptych, oil on panel (ca. 1440-1445) by Rogier Van Der Weyden, Museum of Art History, Vienna.

“Edward Hopper: Portraits of America”

I attended the School of Journalism at LSU from 1970 to 1973. It was a kind of twilight time for journalism; the upheavals of the 1960s hadn’t left LSU untouched but it was certainly less than elsewhere. And journalism was still framed by what was called objectivity – a philosophy developed by Walter Lippmann and others. According to the American Press Institute, “Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”

Objectivity was the child of modernism, which had replaced realism. And it had quite a long run, as did modernism itself, which wasn’t limited to journalism but also affected literature, poetry, science, culture, architecture – and all of American and Western culture. In poetry, the “big three” modernists were T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens.

It was modernism that framed education and understanding for my journalism teachers, and which in turn framed my own education and understanding. (Journalism would change dramatically with the Watergate scandal of 1973 and then yet again with the rise of post-modernism in the 1980s and 1990s.) But I believe the “modernist” influences on me is one reason why I’m so attracted to the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967).

In Edward Hopper: Portraits of America (originally published in 1995 as Edward Hopper: Images of America), Wieland Schmied (1929-2014) borrows the phrase “transcendental objectivity” from the painter Max Beckmann and applies it to Hopper’s visual world. And he quotes Hopper himself as once describing his work as “the objectivity of inner visions.”

Part of objectivity is putting distance between one’s self and the object being studied (or painted). You can see and sense that distance in Hopper’s paintings; the artist is separate from the scenes and people he’s depicting with his brush. Even the more intimate paintings, Like the women in their bedrooms and the usherette in the theater, have an air of detachment about them, as if Hopper couldn’t get too close or he might lose himself. 

But these paintings are American paintings, or paintings of America, snapshots of almost six decades of scenes and people distinctly American. It says much about Schmied, who was an Austrian art critic, art historian and for a time the director of the National Gallery in Berlin, that he has captured the essence of Hopper so well.

The book is less a formal book and more a long, extended essay, surrounded by Hopper’s paintings, walking the reader through the decades of the artist’s working life, watching him as he grew artistically and developed into one of America’s foremost painters of the 20^th century. We can see the stories the paintings tell but the artist’s objectivity doesn’t allow us to enter the stories. We watch, we observe, we understand, but we only imagine our own feelings.

Painting, top: Chop Suey by Edward Hopper, oil on canvas; 1929. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Painting, bottom: Self-Portrait by Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1925-1930; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Noah Charney’s “Stealing the Mystic Lamb”

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see the movie The Monuments Men, about the U.S. military team assigned to protect art and monuments as the Allied forces invaded France on D-Day and rolled (and inched) toward Germany. I’m not usually a fan of World War II movies, but this one had George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Hugh “Downton Abbey” Bonneville and a number of other stars, and so we went.

Based on a true story, it was the Monuments Men who stumbled upon the Nazis’ vast looting of art from across Europe. The looting came from museums of conquered nations, churches, Jewish families like the Rothschilds, and even German citizens, forced to surrender valuable works to Hitler’s plan for an ubermuseum in Austria (and Hermann Goering’s personal collection).

The extent of the looting was enormous. Some of it was deliberately destroyed. Some was never found. But much was recovered, and it is largely due to the work the Monuments Men, art museum clerks like the Frenchwoman Rose Volland (played by Cate Blanchett in the movie), and even a group of salt miners in Austria (who didn’t get any billing in the movie, although their salt mine did).

As the movie ended, I realized I had a book at home that was partially about this story, sitting on a bookshelf waiting to be read. The book was Noah Charney’s Stealing the Mystic Lamb. When we got home, I went straight to the book and started reading.

The book is even more enthralling than the movie.

“The Mystic Lamb” is the title given to a work of 12 panels by the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, completed in 1432 for what came to be called Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent. It is an extraordinary work, one of the first oil paintings, and it evoked as much awe and wonder in 1432 as it does today.

It also evoked the desire to possess it. As Charney describes in the book, “The Mystic Lamb” has been associated with some 13 crimes, a “kidnapping” and ransom demand, several outright thefts, and an attack during the Protestant-Catholic religious wars following the Reformation (a Calvinist mob came very close to destroying the work). Over the centuries, the painting has assumed an important place in the region’s history and culture, and is considered (by Belgians) to be their country’s “national painting.”

Charney details the story of the artwork, beginning with its creation, who Jan van Eyck was, the possible involvement in the artwork by his brother Humberto, the benefactors who commissioned it, and why it inspired and thrilled from the very beginning. He then goes on to make a convincing case why this work is the most coveted artwork of all time. Given how many tiems it was stolen, partially stolen, hidden so it wouldn’t be stolen, and transported to keep it out of the clutches of thieves like Hitler, it’s amazing that the panels have survived. But survive they did.

Most of Stealing the Mystic Lamb is devoted to the three most spectacular thefts involving the panels collectively and individually – Napoleon (France’s Revolutionary Army and its successor the Army of the Empire anticipated and perhaps provided the model for the Nazis); the 1934 “kidnapping” of one of the work’s panels (a crime never officially solved); and the Nazis. Charney puts each of the thefts and criminal activities surrounding the painting in their historical context, so that the reader gets a solid overview of what was happening in Europe.

In the case of the Nazis, Hitler wanted to build the world’s greatest art museum in Linz, Austria, his hometown. This involved not only selling off art works deemed decadent but also identifying and purloining the works worthy enough for the museum, mostly art by northern European artists (Nazi ideology and propaganda fully embraced the role of art).

The extent of the Nazi looting boggles the mind. Some 1500 caches of art, each with thousands of paintings, sculptures, rare books, jewels and other valuables, were found in salt mines, castles and often unexpected locations. (Much of what was in the Uffizi Museum in Florence was found in a small jail in northern Italy, left behind by the German troops that had stolen it.)

“The Mystic Lamb,” sent ahead of the German invasion to the Vatican for safekeeping, was sidetracked to France when Italy joined the war. There it was found by the Nazis, and then it disappeared. It was one of the works found in the Alt Ausee sale mine in Austria, but not before it came very close to being destroyed as a final act of Nazi outrage.

Charney does an excellent job of telling the story of this artwork. Stealing the Mystic Lamb is a riveting story, exhaustively researched, carefully crafted and utterly fascinating.

Painting: Top, the paneled artwork by Jan van Eyck in Saint Bavo Cathedral. Bottom, the central panel depicting the Adoration of the Lamb.