Genius dissected – Rembrandt

Times

Fashions in morals, aesthetics, technologies and even media change, like all else. But from this standpoint at the start of the 21st century, as the National Gallery displays 60 Dutch portraits from 1600-1680, we can put forward a compelling claim that Rembrandt is the greatest painter since the Renaissance.

He is figurative, unheroic, republican, a democrat, humanitarian, postFreudian, pro-narrative, antimisogynist, pro-feminist and certainly postmodernist. He’s a history-remaker, an eclectic, an ironist, with bags of self-reflexive knowledge and know-how. He draws and paints the man in the street, the woman next door, the cripple, the vagrant, the exile, the immigrant, the Jew, the negro, the plump female with garter marks on her calves, the plain vulnerable and the vulnerable in the mighty. He has pathos without sentimentality, humour without guile and infinite sympathy. He’s a family man, painting wives lying in bed and babies frightened by dogs.

And he can be very sexy. His paintings of the female nude are highly commendable. There are very few male nudes indeed – a 16-year-old son of Isaac with a knife at his throat, four tortured crucifixions and a couple of male corpses stripped of clothes and skin for two anatomy lessons. Male nudity and violence appear to go hand in hand with Rembrandt.

Balkh, Afghanistan – Masjid-i No Gumbad (Noh Gumbad, Nuh Gunbad, Nu Gumbad)

Built in the first half of the ninth century, the No Gumbad Mosque (Nuh Gunbad) to the southwest of Balkh is one of the oldest known monuments of Islam. Its modern name, No Gumbad, refers to the nine vaults or domes that covered the original structure. These domes have since fallen, and the walls and columns of the mosque are buried in a more than a meter of mud-brick fragments. With one of its two remaining archways in danger of collapse, the structure is in urgent need of stabilization and restoration.

The mosque is aligned with qibla on the northeast-southwest axis and measures twenty-meters per side on the exterior. Inside, the prayer hall is divided into nine bays — three rows and three aisles — with triple archways. The arches rest on four thick columns at center and pairs of columns (single at the corners) that are embedded into the southeast, southwest and northwest walls. The northeast wall opposite qibla opens to the exterior with a triple arcade carried on two additional columns. Three arched openings were pierced into each side wall, while the southwest wall — which contains the semi-domed mihrab niche — was left blind. Only the columns and two arches remain today of the interior arcade, while the exterior walls have crumbled down in many places. A metal roof was erected recently to protect the ruins.

Fascinating Narcissism – Leni Riefenstahl

The New York Review of Books

That Leni Riefenstahl was rather a monster is not really in dispute. And if it ever was, two new biographies provide enough information to nail her. Bad behavior began early. Steven Bach, in his excellent Leni, tells the story of Walter Lubovski, a Jewish boy in Berlin who fell madly in love with Riefenstahl after meeting her at a skating rink. In a fit of teenage cruelty, Leni and her girlfriends tormented the boy so badly that he slashed his wrists at the summer cottage of Riefenstahl’s family. To stop her father from discovering what had happened, she shoved the bleeding boy under the sofa. He survived and ended up in a mental institution before escaping to America, where he went blind. All Riefenstahl had to say when she heard was: “He never forgot me as long as he lived.”

Always a romantic about herself, Riefenstahl promoted the idea that all men were slavishly in love with her. Enough were, it seems. Working in a man’s world, Riefenstahl made the most of her charms, and her tantrums; tears came easily to this tough operator. But in her casual and, it seems, often callous promiscuity she behaved more like a typical man than a woman of her time. Whether or not Béla Balázs, the Hungarian critic and screenwriter, was one of her love slaves, he was smitten enough to write much of the screenplay for The Blue Light, Riefenstahl’s first film as a director, and to direct several scenes as well. He even agreed to defer payment until the film earned money.

A section from Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Olympics. A supreme example of editing where physics are transcended and somehow weightlessness is achieved.