Wolfgang Kemp's “The Honorable Deceivers”

II walk every day through the sway of a large crowd with as much joy and comfort as you do through your avenues, and I look at the people I see there no differently than I look at the trees in your forests or the animals that pass by there .” So René Descartes wrote in 1631 to an acquaintance in France who lived in seclusion at his castle in Angoulême. At that time, Descartes had already been living, on and off, for two years in Amsterdam, which was significantly smaller than Paris, but large enough to allow him, as a stranger, to live the hidden life, unnoticed by those around him, for which he had left France.

It is impossible to say whether he heard Rembrandt spoken of in his way of using the city, at least in his later years. Maybe, because Rembrandt, who also came to Amsterdam in 1631, quickly became a sought-after and successful artist with a flourishing workshop. It is obvious that he gained different advantages from the hustle and bustle of the city than Descartes.

Which is why it's not easy to think of linking Descartes and Rembrandt. Wolfgang Kemp does it anyway, using their shared place of residence as a basis and choosing the year 1641 as the focus – that's when Descartes published his “Meditations on the Foundations of Philosophy” and Rembrandt painted the picture “Girl in a Picture Frame” that now hangs in Warsaw. The motif mentioned in the title of the essay is played back and forth between these two poles: deception.

Painted hands, shadows, frame

In Descartes, both the “genius malignus”, the deceiver in extremis brought into play for the purpose of philosophical foundation, is called upon, as well as the sensual properties of the perceived things, which are ultimately deceptive about their ontological secondary status, which are swept aside as secondary qualities in favor of mere extension to leave the stage for the new natural philosophy. But the Cartesian maxims of masking their author, the “larvatus prodeo” or the (unsustained) bracketing of his daring story of the creation of the world as a mere “fable” in the posthumous treatise “Le Monde” also come into play.

On the other hand, with Rembrandt, the deception is already present through the contemporary literature on the art of painting through well-established topoi: images as deceptive imitations, with the paradigmatic genre of trompe l'oeil. What is special about Rembrandt has not yet been reached, which is what Kemp is primarily concerned with, namely the economical, but precisely because of that captivating use of the eye-deceptive breaking through of the picture plane in a play of painted hands and frames, with which an increased presence of the shown is achieved. In the case of the selected image: one hand preparing to touch this painted frame while the other has already rested on it.

Paul Valéry as informant

One cannot say that Kemp's subtle and catchy interpretation of Rembrandt's picture, which draws on a number of other works, is a link or much more a contrast with Descartes – after all, the philosopher resolutely relegates to the second rank what is prima materia for the painter, the color – really crucial. Nevertheless, it is extremely attractive, as it makes unexpected connections, for example from the well-heated room in which Descartes pursues his described exercises, to the cold or fired fireplaces of the painted Dutch interiors, from Descartes' “larvatus prodeo” to the paneling in Rembrandt's studio and the variations of the portrait genre that are tested there, or from a woodcut from the “Dioptrique” to Rembrandt's method of allowing the gaze to emerge from a shadowed zone.

Especially since the art historian Kemp has certainly looked into the literature on Descartes. Perhaps even more important in this regard is his choice of an intermediary who advocates a reading of Descartes that enthusiastically followed all the rhetorical moves of his zero-point fiction of fundamental intellectual self-reform (“semel in vita”), namely Paul Valéry. Reading his texts about Descartes again or for the first time is a stimulus that this elegantly written, precisely crafted essay also provides.

Wolfgang Kemp: “The Honorable Deceivers”. Rembrandt and Descartes in 1641. Loops Verlag, Berlin 2023. 155 pages, illustrations, br., €23.20.