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Oils, Psalms, and Scum: Anadyomene Paint and the Limits of Ekphrasis in Paul Celan’s “Einkanter: Rembrandt”

Critical investigations of the German-language poet Paul Celan’s interest in the work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn are usually limited to readings of the only published poem in which Celan mentions the artist by name, “EINKANTER: Rembrandt.” Celan’s engagement with Rembrandt’s corpus, however, went well beyond this single poem andwas considerablymore important to the development of Celan’s poetics and to the creation of individual poems than has so far been appreciated. Celan repeatedly visited museums expressly to see Rembrandt’s work, often sent postcards bearing representations of Rembrandt paintings, and when at the beginning of 1970, during the last months of his life, his childhood friend and by that time lover Ilana Shmueli asked for his photograph, Celan instead gave her a postcard of Rembrandt’s Cologne self-portrait. It is my contention that beyond these common gestures of appropriation and identification, an awareness of the ways in which Rembrandt manipulated paint, and the material qualities of that paint, are crucial for a more intimate understanding of a number of Celan’s later poems, including some of the more complex in the unfinished and largely overlooked Eingedunkelt cycle (1966). A reevaluation of the nature and extent of Celan’s engagement with Rembrandt may allow us to explore the implications of Celan’s poetics beyond its now familiar expression in the handful of theoretical pieces written in prose between 1958 and 1961. These canonical texts are perhaps not as essential to reading Celan’s later poems as many have claimed. As