Vermeer doesn’t just break records at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The hit show – 450,000 tickets sold in two days – was also filmed for the hit documentary Vermeer: The greatest exposure. Produced by company Exhibition on Screen, the new film about the Dutch Old Master will be shown on more UK cinema screens than any previous art film.
The 90-minute film offers a “private view of the sublime retrospective”, says The Sunday Times, and “generates a frenzy on a par with that of the exhibition itself”. More than 310 cinemas across the UK are screening Vermeer’s film, from Everyman in Winchester in southern England to the Robert Burns Cinema Center in Dumfries, Scotland. The number of screenings is the highest of any art film in the UK, the report adds.
Exhibition on Screen declined to comment on the number of tickets sold, but the Vermeer documentary is the company’s highest-grossing release after two days in theaters (released April 18), a statement said. The Rijksmuseum did not respond to a request for comment on whether it received a fee for its participation.
In an online interview Exhibition on Screen Executive Producer Phil Grabsky discusses the film with documentary director David Bickerstaff. Pointing out that there are 28 Vermeer paintings on display at the Rijksmuseum, Grabsky asks, “If the exhibit had only been 15 Vermeers, do you think that’s a slightly weaker film?”
“There’s absolutely no doubt…When you see them one after the other…you can see the progression of his mastery and the themes he keeps developing,” Bickerstaff says.
Grabsky points out that the team had privileged access to the exhibit while the director says he found paintings he had never seen before made an impression. “I did not see The Allegory of the Catholic Faith (circa 1670, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in front of which is one of the last paintings… he brought all his art to it, the theatrical setting, the central figure with a dramatic gesture.
The next Screen Exhibition project is Stories from Tokyo (May 23) which deals with the TOKYO exhibition organized at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2021.
