by Barbara Rose
He's a walking contradiction
Partly truth and partly fiction
Kris Kristofferson,
The Silver-tongued Devil
We're living in the realm of the
imagination. All that information is
still under ground.
- William Dunlap, Homecomings, 1989
In 1973, four years out of the University of Mississippi (where he ran the art school foundry) a promising young sculptor named William Dunlap drew a big charcoal portrait of Rembrandt screaming. That an ambitious artist might wish to pay homage to the great Dutch master is natural. But why is Rembrandt screaming?
References to art history are compressed in the large charcoal sketch with which Dunlap announced his style as a figurative artist. "I was thinking of Bacon when I drew Rembrandt screaming," he remembers. Soon, wise old Rembrandt became a staple of his growing repertoire of personal images. A large horizontal triptych, Rembrandt in the Blue Ridge, painted in 1994, summarizes Dunlap's concerns as an artist. The center panel is occupied by an appropriated image of a familiar and widely reproduced self-portrait by Rembrandt done around 1660. It is an archetypal image of the weary, aging, and beknighted artist, and Dunlap intends it to serve as a synecdoche for the painterly tradition of Western art. Its triptych-like structure, normally reserved for religious altarpieces, gives a further clue to the contemporary role of Rembrandt, who is now not only a cheap reproduction but also a popular icon worshipped in the temples of art.
To bring home his point that his thrice removed and decontextualized image is a painted imitation of a mechanically reproduced reproduction of an old master, Dunlap carefully traces a redundant craquelure pattern on Rembrandt's hoary face with trompe l'oeil precision to emphasize further the discontinuity between Rembrandt and his startling new landscape context. The implication is that not only the illusory depicted subject, but also the painting, as a physical object, has withstood and survived the ravages of time.
Of course, neither Rembrandt nor this self-portrait have ever been in Virginia, where Dunlap lives and works. The impastoed scumbled head mimics the trademarks of Rembrandt's style, but the master's self-portrait is displaced from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to the lyric landscape of Dunlap's beloved Blue Ridge mountains. The result is uncanny. The effect recalls what might be the masterpiece of kitsch, Gutzon Borglum's colossal portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, hewn right from the rock of Mt. Rushmore and immortalized by Alfred Hitchcock in North by Northwest.
In Dunlap's work, the play between ironic mockery and sincere admiration creates a tension that is consistently intriguing. The association of Rembrandt with the Virginia hills suggests multiple meanings: perhaps the great European painter, whose name is synonymous with the idea of the masterpiece, may be on the losing side of the battle between art and nature at the very heart of the American aesthetic. For a man like Dunlap, who loves art and nature equally, choosing one over the other must surely have been difficult. His reconstructed Rembrandt dominates a weirdly uninhabited Blue Ridge landscape painted in a documentary factual style reminiscent of nineteenth-century American painting.
By choosing an image of the aging artist and referring as well to the techniques of restoration, Dunlap does not create an antique patina. Rather than an elite pedigree, he evokes general feelings of decadence, dilapidation and deliquescence. The altered "reconstructed" self-portrait is a doubled, overlapping reference to the painter's old age as well as to the aging art tradition of easel painting, which the more aggressive members of the avant-garde pronounced dead at about the time Dunlap started painting. Another reason, perhaps, why Rembrandt is screaming.
Rembrandt is not Dunlap's only screamer, of course. In a recent interview, the artist recalled other screaming portraits-including one of George Washington tinted with garish makeup reminiscent of Warhol's political portraits-that he showed in 1974 in an exhibition at the Adams Davidson Gallery. "I was looking for irreducible images even then, images that 'held,' held your eye and your mind," he has explained. He did not have to look too hard to find these images in the mythology and reality of the South where he was born, raised and schooled. Resonant memory was to become the theme of his work.
Haunted by the ghosts of art and history, both its own as well as that of the Western tradition of painting, the mountainous Rembrandt is eerie and portentous. The word unheimlich or "uncanny," frequently used to describe German Romantic painting, comes to mind. Dunlap likes to characterize his images as "charged" with multiple associations. Like the Romantics, he is a painter of mood. The Blue Ridge dream landscapes are sentiment-loaded images that, we instinctively feel, no artist north of the Mason-Dixon line would have painted. Indeed, Dunlap's unlikely juxtapositions of memorabilia, charged with personal and collective memory, resemble nothing else--not even Larry Rivers' effort to put history painting back into the mainstream, probably their original inspiration.
Rivers, a source of Pop iconography, refused the hard-edge poster-like
style of Pop, retaining ties to earlier traditions of painting, drawing
and history painting, a category of narrative subject matter that had
become taboo because of its beaux-arts academic associations. By looking
behind Pop to its roots, Dunlap found a way to branch out in a direction
that suited his own style and subject matter.