Damon Winter/The New York Times
Shin-Ichi Fukuoka, center, an avid fan of Vermeer, is flanked by works by that Dutch master at the Frick Collection’s popular show “Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis.”
Shin-Ichi Fukuoka, a molecular biologist from Tokyo, really — really — loves Johannes Vermeer. He has traveled around the world to visit 34 of the 36 paintings known or believed to be Vermeers.
And last year he accepted a visiting professorship in New York in large part to witness an extraordinarily rare occurrence: the Frick Collection’s own three splendid Vermeers and three Rembrandts joined briefly by 15 works on loan from one of the world’s best Dutch collections, the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, including one of the most famous faces in Western art, “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”
A halo surrounds Golden Age paintings from the Northern Netherlands more than almost any period of art. The Dutch masters of the 17th century — among them Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, Fabritius — draw loyal and obsessive museumgoers who rival those Wagner fanatics who travel the world to hear every “Ring” cycle.
Like Mr. Fukuoka, they arrange their vacations, their business trips, their reading, their friends and a good portion of the rest of their lives around seeing the quiet masterpieces created during one of the high points in painting’s history. The Frick show “Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals” — made possible because the Mauritshuis is loaning out its treasures during an extensive renovation — broke a single-day attendance record during the exhibition’s first weekend. But a convergence is also driving traffic to the exhibition: With four Vermeers at the Frick through Jan. 19, five in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, four at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and one attributed, in whole or in part, to Vermeer now on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Eastern Seaboard temporarily features 38.8 percent of all known Vermeers, accessible by Amtrak. (A reported 37th painting has long been disputed.)“It’s a dream come true,” Dr. Fukuoka said during a recent visit to the Frick, explaining that, as a young man, he fell in love with Vermeer’s work while researching the history of the microscope in Delft, the artist’s hometown. “He doesn’t try to interpret the world,” he said. “There’s no egocentrism. He just tried to describe the world as it was. I think of him as a photographer in an age before photography.”
Dr. Fukuoka was so moved that he organized his own Vermeer exhibition in Tokyo last year, displaying high-resolution framed photographs of the paintings in a gallery that he rented, drawing 150,000 visitors over 10 months despite having not a single actual painting. (A show of Mauritshuis works on view at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum last year, including “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” drew more than a million visitors over just two and a half months.)As devoted as Dr. Fukuoka is, there are fans who have done him one, or two, better. Tracy Chevalier, who wrote “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” the 1999 historical novel that inspired a movie and transformed the painting into a bona fide cultural phenomenon, has seen 36 Vermeers in her travels around the world and recently came to New York for the Frick show.
“The opportunity to see four Vermeers in one building was too good a chance to pass up,” she said in a telephone interview from London, where she lives and often goes to see the four Vermeers in and around her own city. “I think one of the reasons people are drawn to Dutch painting now is because it’s not religious, by and large,” Ms. Chevalier said. “It’s people sitting around playing cards or a woman mopping the floor, or it’s a fish market or an interior of a home. I think we like to see that window onto a middle-class world that is not all that different from our own. There’s something like us in there.”....MOREAlso at the Times, 14 of the 36:
The best Vermeer site on the web "Essential Vermeer".
Reverse-Engineering a Genius (Has a Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?)
David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera
obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his
photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how
such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An
inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn
& Teller—may have solved the riddle.
In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic “Sphinx of Delft” is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909—their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.
Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius....MORE
