Is Vermeer That Good?

Vermeer is a beautiful show, but he’s not the greatest thing since sliced suikerbrood. 

I s Vermeer a great artist? Or a consequential artist? I’d say no to both questions. I’m happy I saw Vermeer, the Rijksmuseum retrospective. It’s a lovely exhibition, and I enjoyed the catalogue. Getting as many loans as it did is a credit to the director and the curators.  The show sold out.

Is Vermeer that good?

I read art criticism by my peers, but if I’m planning to review an exhibition, I tend to pass on what others say unless, and this is a big “unless,” I’m thinking that the show seriously and with gross abandon went off the rails. Then, after I’ve written my review but before I’ve filed it, I’ll read what others wrote to check whether or not I missed some essential point.

With Vermeer, my two previous pieces and this piece are, for me, positive. That said, I couldn’t miss the critical gush pouring from the art press. Every variation of “It made me quiver” got ink and pixels. You’d think that Elvis had come to town, in a ruff and broadbrim hat instead of tight leather pants and heaving hips.

But where’s the beef? Putting aside the immobility of his figures, Vermeer is uncanny in creating what the catalogue calls “liveliness” by other means. He learned to master perspective, yes, but he learned it from the older Delft artist Pieter de Hooch and many others. De Hooch used a mathematical formula to find a vanishing point on a canvas, stick a pin there, and painting away he went. We can still see Vermeer’s pin mark on the expanse of empty wall in The Milkmaid from the late 1650s. Vermeer used the decoration on tile floors, too, leading to a vanishing point.

Vermeer’s very good at enhancing a sense of “you are there” by blurring or sharpening focus, much as photography does. This and his refined proportions create a convincing reality. His shadows are brilliant, sometimes lapis lazuli, sometimes blue mixed with yellow, sometimes green. That’s light reflected on color. The best term — bathed in light — is a cliché, but it’s correct. It works with scenes such as The Glass of Wine, from 1659 to 1661, which is multi-figure and places the viewer at a distance, and also with such closeups as The Lacemaker, from ten years later and one of the best things in the show.

I didn’t realize how painterly Vermeer was. Seeing this is one benefit of isolating so many objects on a single wall, as Vermeer does, promoting a close look. The bread in The Milkmaid is mostly pearl-shaped dots of paint. He uses dots to suggest folds in table carpets in The Astronomer and The Geographer, from the late 1660s. It’s very modern.

I love Vermeer’s maps in pictures such as Officer and Laughing Girl, from around 1657, and Woman with a Lute, from a few years later. They’re indoor/outdoor paintings with a twist, working with windows to bring a huge chunk of the outside world into the scene. Vermeer’s maps are identifiable, published in his lifetime. In Officer and Laughing Girl, one of the best things in Vermeer, a giant map of Holland and the North Sea is juxtaposed against the giant figure of a man, back to us, dressed in red and wearing a broadbrim hat. We don’t see his face.

In the middle of the sandwich of man and map is the small figure of a smiling woman. The man is large and in charge, he’s of the wider world, and he emphatically and literally elbows us out of what he wants to be his moment. It’s very effective.

So Vermeer’s recipe starts with perspective. He adds the quotidian — bowls of fruit, a broom, a pitcher of milk — and deletes distractions. Dollops of luxe follow. We can argue about whether the ubiquitous white and spotted black fur in, say, The Guitar Player is ermine, rabbit, or cat. His settings are more Park Avenue than Bourbon Street. He finishes with those magic modern ingredients: introspection and equivocation.

Was Vermeer consequential? He didn’t spawn a school of followers, and neither did El Greco, but El Greco was an artist of consequence to Modernist painters from Picasso to Franz Marc to George Bellows to Thomas Hart Benton. Vermeer blended so thoroughly into a broad school of Delft that his work was often confused with De Hooch’s, Gabriël Metsu’s, and Gerrit Dou’s. Avant-garde artists after, say, 1850 didn’t look at his work, and hardly anyone looked at it before. After a body of his work was identified in the 1860s, his American collectors were Henry Clay Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Marquand, and Collis Huntington — hardly trailblazers. George III bought The Music Lesson thinking it was by Franz van Mieris.

One troubling puzzlement about Vermeer is his relationship with Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, a married couple in Delft who owned about half of Vermeer’s total output of paintings. I’m sorry to be a crass American — not that sorry — but when you’ve got a couple buying half your work, it’s a partnership, with some direction from the buyers. The art becomes a product less of the artist’s genius and more of the buyer’s idiosyncrasies. Titian haggled with Philip IV, and Raphael and Michelangelo took advice from popes. Vermeer shooting ideas past a merchant couple in Delft makes him less fascinating.

It’s not a decisive issue since what matters most today is what Vermeer says to us — the living, not the dead. Still, who were these people? The catalogue is mostly a reprise of past scholarship, which is fine, but inquiring minds want to know the current state of knowledge about this mystery couple.

Vermeer couldn’t help dying when he did, at 43, or that the Delft art market died a couple of years before that. The Allegory of the Catholic Faith, dated to 1670–72, which is in the show, and The Art of Painting, from the same time, which isn’t, are large, complex paintings. The Allegory of the Catholic Faith belongs to the Met. I’ve seen it many times. Vermeer hadn’t done a straight religious picture since the mid 1650s. Since then, he’d become close to Delft’s Jesuit community.

Delft was a Protestant town and, technically, Catholic worship was forbidden, but it happened. The painting’s nice enough but very obvious, with a serpent symbolizing evil squished by a church cornerstone. The big, swooning woman symbolizing the faith looks ersatz Wagnerian. To use my mother’s term to describe Barbra Streisand, she’s shouts. Once Vermeer moves from the cryptic to the momentous, he goes awry.

Putting these two late paintings aside, his subject matter is mostly limited to bourgeois and gentry women reading letters, playing music, musing about life while dressed in ermine and pearls, and entertaining dashing men. Here and there, I felt I was seeing a gauzy enactment of a Jane Austen novel.

Dutch artists tend to specialize, I know. There’s only one Rembrandt — for breadth, depth, and pathos — but there’s a lot of formula in Vermeer’s art as well as refined reticence. We can’t know where he would have gone, much as can’t know what Carel Fabritius, his brilliant Delft colleague, would have done had he not died in the Delft Thunderclap explosion. We can only judge Vermeer by what we think he really painted. I suggested to a dear friend planning to see Vermeer to go to Haarlem and the Frans Hals Museum for some razzmatazz.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of three, or possibly four, tronies — the genre of up-close, single-figure busts. Vermeer painted them in the mid 1660s. The genre was a staple in Dutch art so there’s nothing extraordinary about them. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, her pearl has no contour and doesn’t seem to have a hook, either. As illusionist painting goes, it’s impressive. The girl, really a young woman, and The Girl with a Red Hat are speaking likenesses, pink lips slightly open, and eyes focused on us. Seeing them both is the one moment in Vermeer when I was made to quiver.

What do we have, then, in Vermeer? Taking out the early clunkers such as St. Praxidis, about the woman who specialized in sopping up the blood of martyrs, and Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was returned from Vermeer to the Mauritshuis Museum on March 30, we’re at 23 pictures. The Girl with a Flute is likely not a Vermeer. The four late drawing-room paintings of women playing musical instruments are redundant and boring. The Allegory of the Catholic Faith left me unmoved. It’s average Jesuit propaganda and exposes Vermeer’s limits.

This leaves us with 15 or so paintings including The Lacemaker, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, among other letter readers and writers, The Milkmaid, Woman Holding a Balance, the two scientist pictures, and four or five other things. All very beautiful, to be sure, and they look great. Given the small numbers, though, more interpretation — and more scholarly discoveries — would have made Vermeer worth the Herculean effort. The catalogue and the exhibition on view are almost entirely divorced from each other. They’ve got to be two sides of the same coin.

The Art of Painting, from 1666–68, isn’t in the exhibition, which must have been heartbreaking for the Rijksmuseum. It depicts an artist, back to us, sitting in a lavishly appointed studio while he paints a model posed possibly as Clio, the muse of history in Greek mythology. On the background wall hangs a huge map of Holland. A drawn curtain between the viewer and the studio adds drama. It’s one of Vermeer’s biggest pictures. He never sold it, possibly using it as a demonstration piece for prospective clients.

The picture, Vermeer’s most ambitious and his Las Meninas, lives at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and in Austria even a Vermeer can have a Nazi past. This one’s a doozy. Hitler himself once owned The Art of Painting, or, more precisely, he acquired it from Count Jaromir Czernin in 1940 for the planned Führermuseum in Linz. Czernin’s wife was Jewish, but the painting was purchased, not seized. His family had bought it in 1804 as a De Hooch.

The Art of Painting, like many of the works intended for Hitler’s museum, stayed in a salt mine for the war’s duration. The Americans liberated it in 1945 and eventually gave it to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The current count is claiming that Jaromir’s 1940 sale was coerced. A report on the website of the Kunsthistorisches Museum acknowledges that there’s a dispute and notes that provenance research is under way in accordance with Austria’s 1998 restitution law. The report adds that “it is impossible to say how long this research will take.”

Until the end of time, the twelfth of never, Kingdom come, death do us part, pigs fly, and the cows come home, they hope.

I’ve dealt with the Austrians on Nazi-restitution issues. They’re not implacable anymore but, rather, very difficult. The Art of Painting is a destination picture for them, I’m sure, but they have a trove of destination pictures. As long as there’s a dispute over ownership, the Austrian government won’t let it leave the country.

The Art of Painting would have made a smashing end to the exhibition and would have changed it from start to finish.

The catalogue essays are very good — short but meaty and with thorough footnotes. I’m looking forward to reading Gregor Weber’s new biography of Vermeer. He is one of the two curators of Vermeer and has done deep research on the artist and the Jesuits in Delft.