Rembrandt Project Funding Woes - Rembrandt Research Project in financial trouble - Brief Article

The Rembrandt Research throw (RRP), which since 1968 has been engaged in individual of the most ambitious art-historical enterprises of all time, will no longer be capitaled by the Dutch government after the extremity of the year. Piet van Slooten secretary of the humanities division of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) told the Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad upon June 24 that NWO, which has supported the throw out from the start, cannot justify continued subsidy. Funding has also ceased from corporate sponsor DSM the privatized State Mining Company that for eight years paid for laboratory research into the composition of pigments in 17th-century paintings.

The main function of the RRP is to publish A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, a monumental catalogue which rigorously--all too rigorously, in the view of many scholars--separates authentic Rembrandt works (those exclusively through his hand) from the inauthentic (forgeries, copies, homages, misattributions, and level workshop and "school of" paintings). The inspiration for the Corpus, as described in Anthony Bailey's work Responses to Rembrandt: Who Painted The Polish Rider? (1994) reaches back to 1956 At that point, the Amsterdam art historians who conceived the throw out (Bob Haak, soon joined through Josua Bruyn) hoped to have it finished by dint of 1969, on the 300th anniversary of the master's death. still they did not actually receive funding until 1968 at which time they planned to full the Corpus within 10 years. by means of the late 1980s, however, alone three volumes of the casted six had been issued. upon the condition that the Corpus be done through the year 2000, NWO increased the amount of the annual research subsidy, one time in 1989 (to $107,000) and again in 1995 (to $161000) Still, convolution IV has yet to appear. Van Slooten now says, "The publication of contortion IV will follow upon turn III [1989] by ten years. It is an illusion to think that the remaining sum of two units volumes can be completed in sum of two units years." No total figure for the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of the RRP--which would have to include production expenses--has been calculated, on the other hand the amount is certain to be above $5 million (not counting the salaries of participating scholars, who have various independent professional appointments). The art historians upon the NWO advisory committee decided they could no longer approve giving funds to the RRP at the outlay of new research proposals. NWO did not eliminate the possibility that it will subsidize turns V and VI in an abbreviated form--i.e., with truncated versions of the extremely detailed entries that have previously characterized the project

The near leader of the RRP is Ernst van de Wetering, a professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam. He took above the project in 1993, when his four older collaborators resigned. In a alphabetic character to The Burlington Magazine, the four (Bruyn Haak, Simon Levie and Pieter van Thiel) wrote that they were unable to "generate the enthusiasm necessary for [the] concocted change of course" proposed through van de Wetering. This change included abandoning the strict division of the corpus into three classes of authenticty: A (undeniably by the agency of Rembrandt), B (undecided) and C (definitely not by the agency of Rembrandt).

In an interview in the Dutch daily De Volkskrant, van de Wetering, 60 voiced his frustration at having been overrul for a like reason often by the other four. Now working alone, assisted through junior researchers, he has revers the tend of the last 70 years, which has seen a steady reduction of the number of accepted paintings. Indeed, demotion in the status of many long-rever works has been a controversial feature of the Corpus cast to date [see A.i.A., Jan '93] above the past two years, van de Wetering has given his blessing to a certain number of seven paintings rejected or ignored in convolutions I-III. The most spectacular change in penetration concerns The Polish Rider, Rembrandt's authorship of which was doubted through Bruyn, van de Wetering's predecessor.

For possessors of rejected Rembrandts there is fresh hope, since van de Wetering plans to try to find other funding to continue his highly regarded throw out As we go to pres the University of Amsterdam, which houses the RRP announced a guarantee of $145000 The university will pay the difference between that amount and whatever aggregate amount van der Wetering can raise externally, in order to full the fifth (and final) turn of the Corpus by 2002

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