Kunstgetreu - Catalogue Essay (Click here to go back)

How to describe the relationship between the seven 17th Century Dutch paintings by ter Borch, van Ruisdael, Rubens, Vermeer, Hals, and Rembrandt now hanging in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and David Schutter’s somber cycle of paintings? Is the act that connects them repainting? Re-imagining? Reflecting? Recollecting? None of these terms seem adequate to the fact- where “fact” is here meant in its original muscular sense of something made or done, as in “manufacture” or “after the fact”. Yet each captures an aspect of Schutter’s study.

A glance suffices to scotch the idea that his paintings are in any sense copies; they are originals in their own right and do not resemble the Gemäldegalerie paintings in the least. And yet Schutter’s copious and careful preparatory drawings of each Gemäldegalerie painting, as well as his attempts to approximate the 17th Century Dutch palette as closely as possible with modern pigments, steeped him in the geometry, the brush-strokes, the choices of color and composition made by the 17th Century artists. When he painted his own matched paintings, his eye and gestures followed theirs: a repainting, but only in a restricted sense. Certainly his paintings re-imagine those in the Gemäldegalerie, but this rather ethereal word does not do justice to the pains taken to remain faithful to body as well as spirit of the latter, in details such as their physical dimensions. This is art hung with the weight of self-imposed constraints, not a flight of fancy.

The paintings are indeed works of reflection and recollection, although these words also seem too pale. The departure point for Schutter’s project was the fact that the histories of the Gemäldegalerie paintings and that of the city of Berlin since the late 19th Century have been twisted together in remarkable and melancholy ways. “Together” is the operative word here. Since their acquisition as part of the art collection of the Prussian state, these paintings have stayed together: prize possessions of the Gemäldegalerie; hidden in salt mines during World War II; sequestered in Dahlem in West Berlin after Germany split in twain; displayed in the new Gemäldegalerie built to house the reunited collections of East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall- always together, silent witnesses to the jagged history of the city of Berlin for over a century. To reflect upon these paintings in light of that history is compulsively to recollect all this. Yet the paintings themselves resist the veil of associations that reflection and recollection interpose between them and the beholder. The girl trying on the pearl necklace in Vermeer’s painting is unmoved by Weimar hyperinflation or Nazi crime; Rubens’ plump, blond child remains oblivious to everything but its pet bird. To reflect and recollect honestly upon these paintings is to leave the paintings behind, for they are what they always were- itself a minor miracle given the tumultuous times experienced by their host city.

Perhaps the nature of Schutter’s study is better described by leaving all the “re”-prefixed words behind as well, with their echoes of eternal return. Least of all are his paintings representations: they neither mimic nor take the part of the Gemäldegalerie paintings. Rather Schutter’s study is just that, a study with all the connotations of absorption, concentration, even obsession that study implies. In contrast to the flickering hummingbird movements of attention governed by curiosity, flitting quickly from one object to the next, study demands deep, immobilized attention. Many cultural traditions the world over have practiced cultivated forms of attention, often in the context of religious and philosophical meditation. But it is characteristic of meditation that objects presented to the senses- the starry vastness of the heavens, a humble housefly, the stations of the cross, the Madeleine of Combray, a monument to war dead, the ornamental calligraphy of the Hagia Sophia- are only the lowest rungs on the spiritual ladder that initiates must ascend in order to reach the true focus of their efforts (the insignificance of human striving, the dignity of all life, the sacrifices of Christ, etc.). In contrast, the traditions of scholarly and scientific study- first of texts and later of nature- root attention to the spot. Eyes remain fixed upon the book, the moon, the caterpillar. For this reason, the studious have often attracted the suspicions of the religious, even if the texts were sacred and the naturalia were praised as divine handiwork. In study, initiates linger all to happily on the bottom rung of the ladder.

Schutter’s immersion in the Gemäldegalerie paintings parallels that of the scholars and naturalists. No detail is too minute, no structure too buried, no allusion too subtle to escape the gaze of the student, who spends days, weeks, and months with the objects of his attention. As in the case of naturalists since the Renaissance, drawings yoke and eye and hand together in a partnership. The hand sharpens the eye as the eye guides the hand. The exercise of both fortifies attention by rendering it active. Attention is only half-contemplation, the patient, yielding receptivity to what the object offers. Attention also reaches out, grabbing, analyzing, and framing its object, carving out foreground and background. Attention accepts experience, but also remakes it.

Schutter’s paintings remake the Gemäldegalerie paintings. Having taken the 17th Century Dutch works apart, piece by piece, in mind’s eye and on sketch pad, he reassembled them in his studio, with only his ingrained memories as models. His paintings are works of crystallized attention. But they are not works of verisimilitude; the bright colors and illusionist ambitions of the Dutch genre paintings have vanished in the remaking. The fabled mimesis of the Dutch masters did not call forth mimesis in their twenty-first-century student. In the place of the deceptive surfaces that so seductively counterfeit three-dimensional appearances, the shimmering pearls of delicate lace that are only gobs of white paint, Schutter offers gray surfaces, opaque and inscrutable. Yet these secretive surfaces command attention in their turn, yielding details of shade and texture only upon long and close inspection. It is the viewer who pays the tribute of mimesis, by imitating, however feebly, the artist’s own feats of concentration in plumbing the painting for every nuance.

Schutter’s “afterpaintings” are in some ways akin to translations, but less to those made between languages than from one sensory modality to another- for example, from the sense sight to that of sound. Of course this metaphor is inexact: Schutter’s paintings, like those in the Gemäldegalerie, still address the eye, not the ear. But the comparison to the images rendered in music does capture something of the simultaneous sense of estrangement and fidelity evoked by the juxtaposition of Schutter’s paintings with the Gemäldegalerie. The estrangement is obvious enough, but in what sense are Schutter’s paintings faithful, “true” in the old meaning of the English word still preserved in the cognate German word “treu”?

17th Century Dutch genre paintings and still lifes are virtuoso renderings of the appearances of things, the phenomena in all their pleasant, pied variety. Schutter’s study pays them the compliment of granting them noumena. As in the case of the students of books and nature, Schutter’s Herculean feats of attention aim to get at the essence of things. One need not be a Platonist to insist upon a distinction between realism and naturalism. The Gemäldegalerie paintings are masterpieces of naturalism, rendering the world as it appears. They leave open the question of how the world really is. Generations of painters have defined and redefined the meaning of realism in art since the 17th Century; is it the honest and inclusive rendering of the common and the ugly as well as the noble and the beautiful? the telling detail rather than the sweeping panorama? the abstract skeleton that holds up the figurative flesh? Long after art has abandoned the quest for the Beautiful, it retains a hankering for the True; it is in some ways more genuinely metaphysical than philosophy. Schutter’s study shares these metaphysical impulses, but directs them toward art itself: Kunstgetreu.

Lorraine Daston
Berlin, May 2006