Greenaway’s Gone Away: End of the Authorized Attack on “The Night Watch”

Today’s a special day for art lovers who believe that we should just let Rembrandt be Rembrandt. For two months, ending yesterday, visitors who made the pilgrimage to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, during the master’s 400th birthday year, saw the museum’s most famous painting, “The Night Watch” of 1642, transformed into a sound-and-light show, courtesy of a brash theatrical intervention by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway.
“Nightwatching,” as the installation was called, turned museum visitors “into a theater audience…bringing to life the figures in “The Night Watch” in an unexpected way, using light, sound and moving images,” as described by the Rijksmuseum.
My peripatetic daughter Joyce (who, as CultureGrrl readers may remember, rarely visits museums at home but spent several weeks this summer visiting them abroad) enjoyed the presentation, which souped up Rembrandt’s masterpiece with a sound track, a story line, and changing lights that emphasized one figure or another as the plot thickened. At the end of Greenaway’s saga, audience members did get to walk up to the unanimated painting for a few moments of conventional viewing, before the next theatergoers trooped in.
These presentations were continuous, from June 2 to Aug. 6. There was no other way for art lovers to experience the painting. It might be interesting to present such fanciful conceptions as occasional diversions, but most visitors attend art museums for the opportunity to contemplate artists’ unmediated work.
Not Greenaway, it seems. He recently told the Financial Times that “the worst thing you can do to a painting is to put it on a wall, because within three days everyone will have forgotten it. Perhaps part of the brief here is to make people look at the bloody thing.”
Well, now you finally can.