Looking beyond the beauty of a Vermeer

This spring I stood before ‘The Milkmaid’ again in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and returned 33 years after that day in Lagos to her humility, her solidity and the perseverance of her housework. I love it – I love her – no less than I ever did. It was she who inspired Wisława Szymborska’s epigrammatic poem “Vermeer” (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak from Polish):

As long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted peace and concentration
continues to pour milk day after day
from the jug to the bowl
the world has not deserved
The end of the world.

The curators of the Rijksmuseum have assembled the largest number of Vermeer paintings ever in an acclaimed exhibition, about 28 of the remaining 35 agreed to be his. It is a show of coordination by the organizers and generosity by the funders, a gathering that is unlikely to be repeated in this generation on such a scale.

But I hadn’t liked the exhibition and the reasons why not began to pile up. The entire run of tickets, some 450,000, sold out within a few weeks of opening, and even if I managed to get my hands on one, the galleries would certainly be crowded. I was also skeptical about the exhibit’s downright narrow focus: one Vermeer painting, followed by another, followed by another; most successful exhibitions need more context than this. But what really started to annoy me was the breathless rave reviews. The name Vermeer has become an abbreviation for artistic excellence and so much praise for the exhibition also sounded like an emotional abbreviation. Grandeur, perfection, sublimity: the right vocabulary for a certain kind of cultural experience. Those who had seen the show were envied by those who hadn’t. That it represented a “once in a lifetime” experience was considered gospel. (And yet, how many of our best encounters with art have taken place in a small museum on a quiet day? What moment, fully inhabited, isn’t “once in a lifetime”?) The idea that the images were great was on one somehow arose mixed with the dogma that the images were nothing but beautiful. In the midst of all this sweeping consensus, critical opinion was hard to come by.

But some Dutch friends arranged entry for me, which weakened my resolve. Subsequently, Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis (home of “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and one of the major museum lenders of the exhibition), invited me to walk through the exhibition with her after closing time. Refusal at that point would have been absurd. Late in the afternoon on March 13, we entered the exhibition with a friend. The last wave of regular visitors was ushered in and there we were, three lucky viewers, with 28 Vermeers.

He was not prolific: he is thought to have produced only 42 paintings in all. It is reasonable to assume, as art historians have long done, that this slow rate of production was the result of particularly meticulous technique. But X-rays and infrared images show that he quickly made underpaintings and very few preliminary drawings. So what did he do with all that extra time? For example, he had a day job as an art dealer, the profession he had inherited from his father. For another, he himself was the father of no less than 15 children (of whom 11 survived him). The household must have been noisy. Against the implicit background of that noise, the astonishing and self-assured photos come in, two or three a year. These are photos that seem to do things with light that had never been done before in photos. The art historian Lawrence Gowing describes it as a certain carelessness of the subject, a certain fidelity to pure appearances: “Vermeer hardly seems to care, or even know, what he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What do we know about its shape? For Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light.”