Lovely Etchings...

It's official. I am being followed around the world by exhibitions of Rembrandt's Etchings. This week in Innsbruck I accidentally stumbled upon my 3rd exhibtion of them in 2 months. It is the Dutch Master's 400th Anniversary, so it is suitable that his work is being celebrated worldwide, but I'm not really sure why there are so many exhibtions of his etchings! They are very good. Etchings are the sorts of thing that I can admire the technical brilliance of, but they don't move me or connect with me. Honestly, I'm not even really sure what an etching is. I know it has something to do with creating very fine lines in a piece of metal and then using it to print onto paper.

The first exhibition was at the Morgan Library in New York. I found it reasonably interesting, but it was quite a large exhibition and my relatively short attention span lost interest fairly quickly. I think the aspect of it that I found most interesting was the way the etchings developed as Rembrandt refined them. He would make changes to the original, occassionally major and then reprint. The exhibition in New York had a few works that showed the progression through the reprints. I would have liked to see the original plates too, but I guess these don't preserve very well or are destroyed quickly or something...

The second exhibition was in Schloss Gottorf in a small town in Northern Germany called Schleswig. The artworks on display throughout the Schloss (castle) were amazing, but the Rembrandt Etchings were really pretty dull (or at least very similar to the the first exhibition). I walked very quickly around the gallery and left. I was surprised that there was a second exhibition of Etchings and that it was in such a small place (with an admittedly remarkable gallery).

So to find a 3rd exhibition yesterday in Innsbruck was very strange. I mean, how many etchings did the guy make! And yes, they are very good. But if I've seen 3 exhibitions already without going to too many art galleries in that time, how many are there around the world?!?

Personally, I'd quite like to stumble across an exhibition of Rembrandt paintings soon...