Rembrandt van Rijn is never out of fashion. This week the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam launched the second iteration of the Poor Man’s Rembrandt Project, when the museum hosts a pop-up tattoo parlour inspired by the great artist. Until 7 November members of the public can stop by and get inked for between €100 and €300, with design options including several portraits and self-portraits, such as the famous open-mouthed self-portrait of 1630 in the Fitzwilliam; one of his imperious lions; a background detail from one of the landscapes, such as a windmill, carriage or plant; or even the great artist’s signature. As if that weren’t tempting enough, one of the artists involved is Henk Schiffmacher, who has tattooed Lady Gaga and is known in the biz as Hanky Panky.
The thinking behind it is that tattooing is essentially a form of etching – only one that ‘you can take to your grave’, says Schiffmacher. The most eye-catching (and toe-curling) part of this story, however, is that one lucky man, 28-year-old Bo Kwakernaak from Amersfoort, is being treated to not merely a small figure, but a full version of Rembrandt’s monumental etching The Descent from the Cross (1633) across his entire back. The feat will apparently take 20 hours in total, in what Rakewell assumes is an elaborate performance art piece designed to recreate how Jesus felt in that scene.
Rembrandt died more than 350 years ago and is therefore sadly not around to see this worthy act of tribute. But several other artists have consciously incorporated tattoos into their work, and tattoo specialists have also strayed into the realm of fine art. In 2016 the celebrated inker Scott Campbell (clients: Sting, Orlando Bloom, Courtney Love and others) came to Frieze in London and offered six lucky volunteers the chance to get a free tattoo, the catch being that they could not choose the design, which was picked at random.
In 2007 the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye tattooed a man’s back – what he called ‘the human canvas’ – with an image of a haloed Madonna topped with a skull, before selling the piece to the German art collector Rik Reinking: when the tattooed man dies, the skin on his back will be officially owned by Reinking, in what sounds like a deleted scene from The Silence of the Lambs. (A film based on the episode, The Man Who Sold His Skin, was released in 2020 and was nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars). Delvoye was inspired by the plot of Roald Dahl’s macabre story ‘Skin’, first published in the New Yorker in 1952, in which a man gets a back tattoo in which the ink is ‘applied so heavily it looked almost like an impasto’. Kwakernaak’s feat of endurance might sound painful, but he should be grateful that the design was based on an etching and not on, say, a Pollock.
