The real thing.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Go to Portland this summer and get real.

The real thing - not some postcard image in a book or on the Web - is precisely what you'll get at the new art spectacular, "Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art," which has just opened at the Portland Art Museum.

Walk in the front door of the exhibit and there he is, Rembrandt van Rijn himself, in that famous "Self Portrait as the Apostle Paul," showing the artist at the height of his expressive powers.

Unless you've spent your life locked in a sardine can, and maybe even if you have, you have seen this painting - or at least one of the approximately 8 billion reproductions of it that float through our culture.

But, without a lot of expensive travel, it has been impossible to see the real thing, face to face, nose to canvas. Now you can, and believe me, it's different. The best reproduction of a painting like this is always a thin substitute.

"When you see this painting, you will never forget it," said Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, the museum's European curator, who was still vibrating last week as she talked about unpacking the Rembrandt self-portrait from its shipping container when it arrived in Portland this spring.

"It was incredible to see," she said. "That really is the experience of the real thing."

The exhibit is one of those wonderful happenstances of the art world. The Rijksmuseum, which normally houses these works, is in the midst of a major remodeling and needed to find a place to store some of its masterpieces.

Enter John Buchanan, the fast-talking former director of the Portland Art Museum, and Portland became one of three U.S. cities - and the only one on the West Coast - to host ``Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art.''

The exhibit contains 90 works, mostly paintings and prints, including six paintings and eight prints by Rembrandt. The show also has work by such artists as Jan Steen, Frans Hals, Jan van der Heyden, Pieter de Hooch and Jacob van Ruisdael.

The exhibit is organized thematically. It opens with portraits of artists, including that incredible Rembrandt canvas.

It also offers a self-portrait by Steen and, most wonderfully, an elaborate self-portrait by Adrian van der Werff that shows the artist holding a palette and brushes and a framed painting he had done of his wife and child.

Talk about virtuosity.

From there the show has rooms dedicated to still life painting, to city scapes, to rural landscape and to religious paintings and objects.

The exhibition then winds up with more portraits - this time of the business leaders and aristocracy whose money helped support the artists, and concludes with the curious genre of Dutch genre painting.

"Genre" here means scenes of everyday life, but with a twist; these genre paintings often contain visual and symbolic riddles, which were read easily by their intended audience but which prove a bit more perplexing to you and me.

In Nicholas Maes' broody painting ``Girl at a Window,'' for example, you and I are happy enough to see the girl at the window. Maes' viewers, though, would have seen a statement about the deadly sin of sloth.

The Rembrandt in this section is among the most curious. Painted in 1626 - when the artist was 20 - ``The Music Lesson'' shows a group of four people, surrounded by musical instruments and scores. But this is no ordinary group. The players are dressed in Oriental costumes that would have been outrageous to Rembrandt's contemporaries; a viola da gambist wears a colorful turban and bright tunic; a young harpist stares at the viewer as if annoyed by an intruder.

Hunter-Stiebel says the complex allegory of this painting remains a riddle. With its musical theme, it could be about love; it could be about the transitory nature of life.

We'll probably never know what Rembrandt had in mind. It turns out the real thing can be mysterious as well as thrilling.

ART REVIEW

Rembrandt and the

Golden Age of Dutch Art

What: 17th century Dutch paintings, prints and other art works, including six paintings and eight prints by Rembrandt, on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

Where: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland

When: Through Sept. 16

Admission: Adults $15, seniors and students $13, ages 5 through 18 $6, age 4 and under free; admission is by timed entry tickets at 30-minute intervals.

Museum hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays