AMSTERDAM — If you don’t have tickets for the Johannes Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseumyou’re out of luck: they sold out in a few days of the opening of the show. The elusive Vermeer remains elusive.
For those of us who have secured tickets, we can be, as the title of the exhibition suggests, “Closer to Vermeer” – or at least 28 paintings closer to seeing his entire oeuvre of 37 paintings, all in one vertiginous visit. (You can take the other nine with trips to Germany, Vienna, Abu Dhabi, new York, Englandand maybe a lair of the super villain art lover.)
Conscious of crowd control and perhaps thinking of jewelry, the curators have scattered the 28 paintings across eight black-walled, velvet-draped rooms, with as few as one per room, each snug behind its own half- rigid circle of railing covered with velvet. . The paintings are organized thematically, mostly in chronological groups, accompanied by minimal wall text. Given that Vermeer dated only three of his paintings, a strictly chronological classification could quickly become biased.
Yet the themes are exceptionally innocuous (e.g. ‘Gazing Out’, ‘Gentlemen Callers’) and the groupings also make it somewhat difficult to grasp his development as a painter. Since most of us usually only see Vermeer’s paintings in reproduction, the overwhelming sense of him is that of a photorealist before photography. He’s also so good at world-building – putting together just the right details of light or gesture to make his scenes both thoroughly fresh and deeply familiar – that it’s easy to get lost in his illusions rather than understanding the techniques used to create them. . Yet, there is a lot going on in his painting, and his craftsmanship is often significantly linked to the subjects of his paintings.
For example, early in his career, working on a surprisingly large scale compared to his later output, Vermeer explored a variety of painting styles and subjects. He launched into mythological painting with “Diana and her assistants“, trying a vague and sponged brushstroke. Everyone appears elegant but unapproachable, their faces in shadow. Maybe inspired by Rembrandt’s work of the same period, inChrist in the house of Mary and Marthahe experiments with more visible brushstrokes: long, placid strokes in the drapery of Mary as she sits at Christ’s feet; tortuous laces in the robe of Christ; and a series of choppy lines at Martha’s elbows that telegraph her irritation at her sister for letting her have it Household chores.
At first “matchmaker», a life-size brothel scene, he returns to the erased style of the Diana, but the painting is darker and more directed towards the viewer. It’s the story of four hats: a soft beret covering a musician with an awkward smile; a black headband enveloping a sneaky-looking matchmaker; a feathered hat emphasizing the grotesque build of a soldier; and a white, starched and lace bonnet, adorning a young woman with red cheeks. The wholesomeness of her face is undermined by her smile as she accepts a coin with one hand from the soldier while the other touches his chest. In a detail that looks telling, right at hand, Vermeer has applied the paint so thickly that it sags, as if melting on physical contact.
In these paintings, Vermeer does not yet look like Vermeer. He arrives at his formula with “Girl reading a letter by an open window” (1657-1659). He then painted 21 other variations of these elements – woman, window, corner – throughout his career. The next in the exhibition, “La Laitière” (1657-1661), depicts a woman pouring milk into a bowl, a basket of bread in the foreground. The bread is made up of tiny dots of raised paint, called “stipple”, a mark unique to Vermeer that possibly results from his use of the camera obscura. “The Milkmaid” contrasts particularly with his previous “Procuress”. While this painting is large, predominantly red, and vaguely sweaty, “The Milkmaid” is small (18 inches on its long side), bathed in cool light, and stitched with blue accents. It feels surpassing virtuous in comparison, with subtle suggestions of the Virgin Mary feeding the baby Jesus. Vermeer came home.
Vermeer’s two urban landscapes, “View of Delft” (1660-1663) and “The small street(1657-1661), although painted after those of the following pieces, opens the spectacle and gives an exterior to the interiors that follow. With a length of 46 inches, “View of Delft” is also a (brief) return to a larger scale, to better radiate the formidable tranquility of its scene.
The size of the painting makes it easy to ogle Vermeer’s mid-career brushwork. The gabled facade of the building with the clock is first painted matte brown, then punctuated with dots and strokes of fine gray and beige paint to effect the details of its masonry. The terracotta tiles on the left are smeared with a curious sandy texture and the trees with heaps of stippling. In the patch of sunlight hitting the houses in the far right, Vermeer depicts the roof tiles with rough lines of buff paint that evoke mineral encrustations left by evaporating water. The channel itself is slightly reflective, except where it is scuffed by the wind, which it evokes with a light smear of opaque paint.
In his later paintings, in the trend of Dutch art at the time, Vermeer becomes more refined. The lived-in quality of the kitchen in “La Laitière”, with its battered walls and grimy floor, is replaced by paintings like “Young Woman Standing at the Virginal” with smooth plaster and the cleanliness of the furniture catalog. Its surfaces are also smoother and less inclined towards the dotted lines. These have evolved into barely perceptible scattered disks of light, but they contribute strongly to the liveliness of paintings like the life-size “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “Mistress and Maid”. In both cases the background is glossy black, making the figures both more intensely illusionistic and, with their ineffably soft outlines, immaterial, as if fashioned from colored smoke.
The final piece includes a vital pairing, hanging from each other from the piece: “Woman with Scales” and “Woman with Pearl Necklace”. These little paintings show Vermeer’s formula at its most powerful. “Pearl Necklace” depicts a woman looking at herself in a mirror as she fastens a necklace with a long ribbon. A curtain adds a flash of canary yellow to the window that matches her yellow jacket. The curtain and mirror reappear in “Woman with a Balance”, but the curtain is now drawn. It makes the room darker, accentuated by the towering presence of a Doomsday painting on the wall behind her. Both paintings suggest and then transcend messages of moral judgment of vanity. Vermeer’s style is the most subdued there, gently drawing us into the moment. Yet we remain, inevitably, outside of them. Closer to Vermeer? Never.
Two other Vermeer-related exhibits are also on display, both less than an hour by train from Amsterdam. A, Vermeer’s Delft, is located in the birthplace of the artist. Although Vermeer lived his entire life in this city, it has none of his paintings, and this exhibition does not rectify that situation. However, if you crave the many biographical details omitted from the Rijkmuseum’s minimalist wall text or wish to see some of the paintings hanging from Vermeer’s backgrounds, take a close look at the examples of the upholstered chairs his wives sit on or examine some original documents that chronicle Vermeer’s marriage and the birth of his children, this well-constructed spectacle deserves attention.
The other is Jacobus Vrel, forerunner of Vermeer at the Mauritshuis. (From April 1, you’ll need to come here to see the “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which is back in its original institution for the summer tourist season.) Vermeer was much admired during his lifetime, but little known afterward. his death. It was rediscovered by the French art historian Etienne Joseph Théophile Thoré at the end of the 19th century. Thoré admired Vermeer’s frank naturalism, a quality shared by Jacobus Vrel. Thanks in part to their shared initials, Vrel and Vermeer were often confused. The illustration of Thoré’s first article on Vermeer in the Fine Arts Gazette in 1866 is actually a painting by Vrel.
What we know of Vermeer, which is less than we would like, eclipses what we know of Vrel, which is next to nothing. Only one painting bears a date, 1654, which shows him painting women in interiors when Vermeer was still dabbling in history painting. The ten paintings on display are clumsier than those of Vermeer but share the mystification of everyday life and a fascination for women and windows. Two of the most striking feature interior windows with a ghostly child appearing behind the glass. In one, a woman leans precariously on a chair, as if to touch the child through the window; in another, an older woman with a pince-nez and a book carefully ignores the presence of the child behind her. The naïveté of the paintings both accentuates Vermeer’s mastery and opens another door to the Dutch interior.
Vermeer continues at the Rijksmuseum (Museumstraat 1, Amsterdam, Netherlands) until June 4. The exhibition was curated by Gregor JM Weber, Pieter Roelofs, with the help of a team of scientists.
