Move over, Pollock, there’s a new art superstar in town. Johannes Vermeer, the 17th century Dutch realist who wowed them in Washington, D.C., five years ago, has quietly opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show has nearly half the known works by the much beloved master, along with a cartload of some by his Delft contemporaries.
Jan Vermeer’s “View of Delft.”
Unlike Pollock, Vermeer rarely dripped. In fact, he hardly left a brushstroke. He disappears behind his paintings like a magician stepping through a mirror. His pictures of young women in private reveries – holding pitchers, sitting at a keyboard, or reading a letter – have a perfection akin to the music of Bach. Vermeer’s visual truth is a beauty that eludes very few eyes.
Yet, for all his quiet ways, Vermeer can stir up as much controversy as Pollock. There are only about 34 Vermeers in existence, and scholars are forever disagreeing on which ones are genuine. Half a dozen pictures in this show have been contested at one time or another, and the curators have unearthed a new candidate, a small painting of a woman at a keyboard that few scholars have seen, labeling it as “attributed to Vermeer.”
Then there’s the big to-do about the camera obscura. More than 300 years after his death, scholars are still hotly contesting just how Vermeer achieved his stunning verisimilitude. His work has an uncanny optical precision that can appear somewhat photographic, and a controversial new book, “Vermeer’s Camera” by Philip Steadman, argues that Vermeer’s entire style stems from his reliance on a device capable of projecting a traceable image onto the canvas.
The facts of his life are as brief as a newspaper death notice. He was born in 1632 in Delft. He married at 21, fathered 15 children (four died in childhood), and died at 43, in debt. He left no sketchbooks or drawings, letters, or diaries. A 19th century French journalist called him “the Sphinx of Delft.”
“Vermeer & the Delft School” tries to penetrate the Vermeer mystery by shedding light on his artistic milieu and dispelling the popular myth of genius hatched in total isolation. Delft, we learn, was a more cosmopolitan city than is commonly thought, only three miles from The Hague and with thriving industries in luxury goods such as textiles and the famous blue-and-white pottery known as Delftware. It had artists of the caliber of Pieter de Hooch, another great of the Dutch Golden Age whose works have sometimes been confused with Vermeer’s.
The exhibit builds gradually, acquainting us with the arts and crafts of Delft and providing numerous views of the picturesque city with its charming canals and arched bridges, its skyline of peaked roofs, finials, and majestic church towers. Like Venice and other watery cities, Delft had a special reflective light that almost certainly inspired Vermeer’s art. The city’s luxurious tapestries often found their way into Vermeer’s paintings, showing off their rich and muted colors in sensuous folds.
The definition of interior space, a cornerstone of Vermeer’s art, is shown to have been a preoccupation of other Delft artists, including Emanuel de Witte, Gerard Houckgeest, and Hendrick van Vliet. There was apparently a big market for interior views of Delft’s two primary churches, the Nieuwe Kerk and the Oude Kerk. In renderings of these grand, complex spaces, colossal columns soar upward and light streams in through tall tracery windows, streaking across vast checkered floors. Far from being religious pictures, these are typical Dutch genre paintings in which people go about ordinary daily activities. We see men repairing a broken floor tile, children playing, a beggar begging, and almost always a few dogs. In a typical Dutch touch of humor, one dog raises its leg next to a column.
De Hooch is seen as a sometimes-kindred spirit of Vermeer’s. He delighted in the picturesque possibilities of Delft’s narrow streets, alleys, courtyards, and closely clustered houses. Vermeer’s “The Little Street” is similar to De Hooch’s compositions, but with Vermeer’s greater attention to surfaces. It’s a long, leisurely essay on mortar and brick, white-washed walls, roof tiles, and green shutters. Looking at this painting, you get the feeling that there’s nothing Vermeer couldn’t make beautiful.
In showing how his art developed, the exhibit has three early paintings that don’t look much like the Vermeers we’re familiar with. Two, “Diana and Her Companions” and “Christ in the House of Mary and Martha,” are in the tradition of mythological and biblical narratives. A third, “The Procuress,” belongs to the Dutch genre of humorous tavern paintings. A young gallant, hat askew, gropes a red-cheeked prostitute while deposting a coin in her outstretched hand. The black-hooded procuress supervises the transaction with an avaricious smile, while to one side, another merrymaker looks out at us with a leering, complicitous grin, his hand holding the neck of a lute in a phallic gesture. This leering young man, some scholars believe, is the only known portrait of Vermeer.
It’s not surprising that some have questioned the authorship of the painting. Coming from this painter of silent rooms, this is a raucous, bawdy picture filled with hoots and cackles, clinking glasses, and lurching, drunken movements.
Within a year, in 1656, Vermeer’s art does a sudden about-face. He turns away from these loosely painted narratives with the zeal of a reformed carouser hanging up his tankard. Paintings such as “The Maid Asleep” and “The Milkmaid” depict a young woman who, by virtue of sleep or revery or deep concentration, is alone in her private world. Subsequent pictures – “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher,” “Woman With a Lute,” and “Woman With a Balance” – carried on this theme, introducing that magical, almost granular light that always seems to pour in from a leaded window on the left.
What caused this sudden change?
Some scholars – of which this show’s curator, Walter Liedtke, is not one – point to the camera obscura. This was a darkened box or room with a small hole on one side. When bright light passed through the hole, the scene outside the box was projected inside, inverted, as it is in the human eye. Some camera obscuras of this time were fitted with mirrors to right the image, or lenses to better focus it. In “Vermeer’s Camera,” British author Steadman goes to great lengths to re-create what he believes was Vermeer’s studio setup, speculating that his camera obscura was a darkened cubicle, big enough to accommodate him and his canvas, and positioned in front of the model. This, he maintains, accounts for the stillness of the models, and for the similarities in many of the pictures, which, he says, were painted in the same room, from roughly the same vantage point.
Most scholars believe that Vermeer relied to some extent on the camera obscura, but are quick to emphasize that this was only one facet of his process and far from an “explanation” for the art. Still, it does account for such anomalies as the absence of much under drawing in X-ray examinations of the paintings, for the utter stillness of the subjects, and for an optical character that sometimes looks the way things do when viewed through a telescope.
The show’s climax comes with “The Art of Painting,” one of Vermeer’s biggest canvases, and one he kept in his studio until his death in 1675. The painting is a demonstration of painting’s expressive and descriptive powers. It is a view of the artist’s studio, an elegant room with a chandelier, chairs, a lush curtain, and a large map of the Netherlands on the back wall. The artist’s model wears a crown of laurel and holds a trumpet and a book of Thucydides.
The painting has allegorical messages about the role of the artist, the attainment of fame, and the hierarchy of the arts, but what’s equally wonderful are the demonstrations of the rendering of different fabrics and surfaces, the tricks of composition, and the creation of space. The map on the back wall with its creases and ripples is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil painting.
However he achieved his images, Vermeer brought to them a meditative quality. He took something simple, such as a woman pouring milk from a pitcher, and raised it to the level of a holy, sacramental act. Yet, the light on people’s faces is not the mystical light of so many religious paintings. It is ordinary daylight, but observed with a keenness that was unparalleled in art up to that time.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
2001
