My Rem­brandt

In Fred­er­ick Wiseman’s 2014 doc­u­men­tary Nation­al Gallery, a belief is repeat­ed­ly returned to in the var­i­ous board meet­ings shown, that the appeal of the Old Mas­ters will nev­er die. Per­haps it’s that pop­u­lar appeal that some of the talk­ing heads in My Rem­brandt want con­trol over, to take away an image mil­lions flock to nation­al art muse­ums to see and give them­selves exclu­sive access.

What dis­tin­guish­es Oeke Hoogendijk’s film from Wiseman’s is her fas­ci­na­tion not in the pub­lic but in the pri­vate, focus­ing her lens on the own­ers rather than the paint­ings. While they may loan the art­works out for dis­play, there’s a cer­tain priv­i­lege and cul­tur­al sta­tus that comes with being the rights own­er, a pack­aged ver­sion of phil­an­thropy that can be bought by an elite few.

The inter­est in the wealthy and the desire to pos­sess what oth­ers can’t have echoes the Amer­i­can doc­u­men­taries of Lau­ren Green­field, such as The Queen of Ver­sailles and Gen­er­a­tion Wealth. Her Amer­i­can sub­jects rarely care for craft, moti­vat­ed to col­lect for the sake of collection.

They exist in My Rem­brandt as well. Amer­i­can busi­ness­man Thomas Kaplan, who claims to have acquired on aver­age a paint­ing a week for five years, says that he once grabbed Rembrandt’s ​‘Woman in a White Cap’ and kissed the sub­ject on the lips. Yet we are also shown their oppo­site, invit­ing us to dis­tin­guish them with the experts and gen­uine Rem­brandt enthu­si­asts vital in the preser­va­tion of not only as mate­r­i­al objects, but as cap­tured moments of a liv­ing past.

My Rem­brandt cements Hoogendijk as a vital scribe of cura­to­r­i­al his­to­ry, and by look­ing at a sin­gle artist she has paved the way for future doc­u­men­taries. As in her first film about the Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam, this is a film with its eye firm­ly fixed on the present and the state of art today. While the sub­jects might dis­cuss Rembrandt’s tech­nique and brush­work, we’re giv­en lit­tle time to appre­ci­ate that for our­selves – we should go to a gallery to do that, Hoogendijk seems to be saying.

Rather than try­ing to cov­er too much con­text, My Rem­brandt ben­e­fits from its sequence of inte­grat­ed por­traits of fas­ci­nat­ing con­tem­po­rary char­ac­ters rather than being over­whelmed by the broad­er land­scape of art history.