Curators
Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator in the Department of European Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts.
William W. Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator in the Department of Drawings
assisted by Willemijn Lindenhovius and Edward Wouk.
From the museum website
Selected primarily from Harvard University Art Museums collections, Rembrandt and the Aesthetics of Technique will invite visitors to engage intensively with more than 30 drawings, paintings, and prints by the master and his workshop. The exhibition will focus primarily on the role of technique—the artist’s manipulation of his materials—in enabling the innovative visual effects that distinguish Rembrandt’s creative achievement.
The skill of Rembrandt’s technique tends to be overshadowed by his mastery of so many other elements including invention, iconographical innovation, expression, and others. Yet technical factors—such as the use of pen strokes that are thick in some areas and thin elsewhere, broken or continuous, densely packed or widely dispersed—determine much of the aesthetic impact of his, or any artist’s production. The exhibition will feature several small groups of works whose juxtaposition will encourage the visitor to assess the contribution of discrete technical decisions to the realization of the artist’s intention. A brochure accompanies this exhibition.