"Inspired by Rembrandt" Exhibition at Rembrandt House Museum

Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam is currently presenting its exhibition 

"Inspired by Rembrandt: 100 Years of Collecting by The Rembrandt House Museum"

Below is the text about the exhibition on its website:

"Rembrandt has always fascinated us—not just in this Rembrandt Year, 350 years after his death, but down through the centuries. Rembrandt’s etchings have motivated artists in all kinds of ways, and Inspired by Rembrandt explores his impact on their art. This time The Rembrandt House Museum is dipping into its own collection, for the museum is not just his former home and workshop. For more than a hundred years it has also been collecting art on paper—the collection now contains more than 4,000 prints. And not just Rembrandts, but art by his followers—from his own time and contemporary artists."

Faxart Tribute to Rembrandt on the 320^th Anniversary of His Death

My serigraph “Digitized Homage to Rembrandt: Day Angels” is in the collection of the Rembrandt House Museum. It was part of my event applauding the great master by faxing his digitized angel around the world via AT&T satellites on October 4, 1989.  In the photo above, dressed as Rembrandt’s friend Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel, I am holding the “Day Angels” print in his studio.

I flew to Amsterdam to meet with Eva Orenstein-van Slooten, Curator of Rembrandt House Museum, the artist’s home and studio.  With trepidation, I proposed having a fax machine placed on Rembrandt’s etching press to receive the angel that would fly there from New York.  She thought it was a wonderful idea.  It would make her museum, a quiet place, come alive as Rembrandt’s angel rematerialized in the place he had originally created it. 

On the morning of October 4^th, his angel ascended from the Chippendale top of the AT&T building in New York.  It flew to Amsterdam to Jerusalem to Tokyo to Los Angeles, returning to the former New Amsterdam (New York) on the same afternoon.  It took an hour in each city to receive 28 pages of angel fragments and fax them on to the next city.  After a five-hour flight around the planet, the deconstructed angel was reconstructed for the fifth time at its starting point.  

When it passed through Tokyo, it was the already the morning of October 5^th.  After the line printed out on the top of the fax “Tokyo National University of Arts and Music, 5 October 1989” was the line “Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 4 October 1989.”  Cyberangels can not only fly around the globe, they can fly into tomorrow and back into yesterday.  They reshape our concepts of time and space in ways that correspond to the vision of kabbalists centuries ago.

Digital Tribute to Rembrandt on the 350th Anniversary in the Age of Smartphones and Social Media

This blog will be active during the current "Year of Rembrandt" by documenting multiple global events that demonstrate the major changes in art and technology 30 years later.  I present the conceptual background for them in my 2019 book Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights on Smartphone Photography and Social Media.  

The book cover shows the same Rembrandt inspired cyberangels flying into Rembrandt House Museum 30 years ago.  However, here they are ascending from a NASA satellite image of the Land of Israel on a smartphone screen. See praise for the book at Israel365.