Over the centuries Vermeer has captivated a lot of people, ourselves included.*
From The Walrus, July 9/22:
New techniques reveal hidden details in the Dutch master’s paintings
When Frederik Vanmeert stands in front of a Johannes Vermeer painting, the temptation to go close is irresistible. In Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, where he works as a heritage scientist, it’s not hard to satisfy this craving for intimacy; patrons are free to get personal with the art. Viewers of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch can approach within a metre of the canvas, while the museum’s four Vermeers, hanging nearby, offer an even more intimate experience. Viewers may, if the moment moves them, lean in within centimetres, though the security guard posted nearby will likely wag a disapproving finger.
Still, even millimetres are an interminable chasm for Vanmeert. He’s seen Vermeer’s work in finer detail than most—at the microscopic level, down to the crystal latticework of the pigments that structure the language of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter’s artistic vision. “These days, because of my work, when I look at a Vermeer, I can’t help but wonder: Are we really understanding what he intended?” Vanmeert tells me, approaching The Little Street, one of only two landscapes the artist is known to have painted. “I get drawn closer to, say, this area here—the dark area of the lady’s dress. It’s difficult to decipher which type of fabric Vermeer meant to depict here, and I wonder if this is the original colour.”
Fidelity of colour is Vanmeert’s professional obsession. As a chemist in the art world, he’s spent most of his career trying to understand colour: how it is produced, how it changes over time, how artists prepare the powders and substrates that become the medium through which they speak to us, and, ultimately, why they make the choices they do. If colour is the language of art, Vanmeert is its linguist.
As a scientist, though, he avoids such grand pretensions. It’s a touchy subject. The past two decades have seen an explosion of scientific enquiry into art, from chemical analysis for authentication and identifying forgeries to techniques for restoration and conservation. In the process, scientists have found themselves thrust into some of the art world’s most vexing debates, often controversially. Determining what an artist “intended,” for instance, can send art experts and enthusiasts into a tizzy. The artist’s intent is irrelevant, the purists say. Only the work matters, and what the work conveys.
Vanmeert is uninterested in these types of debates. What he means by “intention” is colour: Is the colour, as we see it today, the same colour the artist saw when they applied it to the canvas? And if it has degraded, what would the original have looked like? Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom, for instance, used many unstable pigments which degraded over time. Fortunately, in a letter to his brother, van Gogh described in detail the colours he used: “The walls are of a pale violet. The floor—is of red tiles. The bedstead and the chairs are fresh butter yellow.” Today, many of these colours have faded or, in the case of the walls, mutated into a different hue altogether. The colours van Gogh “intended” have been lost and, along with them, something of the feeling van Gogh was attempting to convey....
*Previously:
Big Dollar Art: For Fervent Fans of the Dutch Masters, ‘It’s a Dream Come True’
The best Vermeer site on the web "Essential Vermeer". And from Vanity Fair Nov. 29:
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
From the Times Literary Supplement:
It is a truism of responses to the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s life and works that what very little we know about the life stands in inverse relationship to how intimately we relate to the work....
Awwww, There Was A Hidden Cupid In One Of Vermeer's Most Famous Paintings And Now We Can See It
Van Gogh and Vermeer Together
It's a cult.
A very strange yet oddly compelling cult.
Together
"Rose Dugdale, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer"
One more Irish story...
The Museum of Online Museums
With the passing of Chicago's Coudal Partners, the MoOM is now relegated to the Internet Archive, itself an online repository, so the whole thing is getting a bit recursive....
