On the afternoon of Saturday 19th
August 2017, my sister and brother drove Carol and I into the National Gallery
of Ireland to see the touring exhibition Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration
and Rivalry. When we went into the exhibition space - my heart sank
- when I saw the throngs of people! In hindsight, going at 3pm on a Saturday
afternoon was not a good idea! Briefly, I was delighted to see that the walls
were not cluttered with text plaques. Then I realised that the names of the painters
and paintings were printed up at the very top of the walls - so you had to
crane your neck up to try and see them! It was all beginning to seem like an
insane curatorial exercise! Then I
realised what a room full of people looking up to the ceiling to try to read
the titles, listening to audio guides and reading exhibition guides - meant for
someone actually trying to look at the art! Instead of looking at a painting
and then graciously moving on to look at another painting - people stood in
front of paintings they were only looking at as part of a historical slideshow
- and only moved when their audio guide moved on to the next exhibit. It was a
nightmarish revenge of the philistines! I rapidly exited from the first few
rooms where there was a bottleneck of viewers and made my way further into the
exhibition were there was less people. But I could feel my hackles rising as I
struggled to get lost in the paintings. A few minutes later Carol came up to me
- and I explained my anxiety and frustration. Carol thought I was being
unreasonable and thought people had a right to listen to audio guides. But I
was adamant that an art gallery was a place to look at art not read or listen
to audio guides! It was as bizarre to me - as reading a book at a concert, great
fight or orgy! Carol gave me a hug and soothed by her, I calmed down and simply
started going back and forth in the exhibition wherever I saw an unblocked
painting - especially an unblocked painting by Vermeer. Still, I have to say it
was one of the most unpleasant viewings in an exhibition I had ever had - in
any museum in the world. That Vermeer’s paintings amidst the throngs of people
- still lingered in my mind weeks later - like the memory of the faces of long
lost loves - was a tribute to the transcendent beauty of Vermeer’s art.
The exhibition Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting:
Inspiration and Rivalry had ten
paintings by Johannes Vermeer and a further fifty paintings by his best peers
and rivals like Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen,
Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris. Accompanying the
exhibition was an incredibly detailed historical survey of the period that was
a must for Vermeer fanatics but my own interest in Vermeer was less obsessive -
since I had always preferred the dashing alla-prima brushstrokes of Franz
Hals’s portraits and the imaginative expressivity of Rembrandt the painter,
draughtsman and printmaker.
The
whole point of Vermeer and The Masters of
Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry
was to wreck revenge upon Tracy
Chevalier’s book Girl with a Pearl
Earring and in
particular the Hollywood film based on it. Since the Twentieth century there
has been antagonism between the artistic establishment and the Romantic
representation of artists in Hollywood movies. The depiction of an artist
battling for recognition against a hidebound art world is made for film as much
as the story of a boxer trying to achieve success in the ring. It allows film
makers to concentrate on human drama of the most personal kind. The trouble is,
the script for the average movie is eighty pages long and there is only so much
you can say about an artist in a little over an hour and a half. So historians
grumble about Romantic exaggeration, factual inaccuracy and lack of context.
Then they produce books like Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration
and Rivalry - which is the artistic
equivalent of a train-spotters guide to Dutch Genre Painting. It is laden with
the most obscure and pointless facts about Gerrit
Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van
Mieris and Johanne Vermeer; where they lived, where they may have travelled to, who they many
have known, how many paintings they painted, what kind of prices they achieved
in their lifetimes for each painting and after their deaths, what kinds of
pigments they used, how they painted fur, silk, walls, skin, and so on… The exhibition and
catalogue showed conclusively how Vermeer’s peers like Gerard ter Borch
invented many of the visual
tropes of Dutch Genre and how it was Frans van Mieris that was the most
successful and famous of the group well into the Eighteenth century. Well, call
me a boorish, but I ended up longing for the myth of Vermeer the exceptional
human being and genius. And to be spared the academic forest of influences and
symbols - and walls filled with paintings by minor painters - I did not give a
dam about! All I longed for was to be left alone in a room with just Vermeer’s
paintings! Despite all their efforts to create a liberal community of equal
artists – Vermeer stood out like a sore thumb with his singular genius,
evocation of soul and refusal to be deconstructed by academic hacks. So despite
all this contemporary research, I concurred with John Berger’s observation from
1966 that, “... the only thing Vermeer had in
common with the other Dutch interior painters was his subject matter, and this
was no more than his starting point.” (John Berger, The Painter in His Studio, John
Berger: Selected Essays, New York: Pantheon Books, 2001, P. 122.) Thus
sometimes, ‘myths’ tell us far more than the smart arsed retrospective carping
of academics devoid of connoisseurship and determined to make a point.
Since I
had already enjoyed an extensive exhibition of Metsu over six years ago and we
already had two of the finest Metsu’s in the world in the National Gallery - I
was not that interested in looking at his work again. And try as I might to
summon interest in the rest of Vermeer’s peers, I was left unmoved. They were
all technically fine painters – but as Berger noted, Vermeer was doing
something so much more than painting rich people enjoying their wealth. Yes,
Vermeer used and built upon many of the tropes of genre painting at the time,
for example; the depiction of women reading letters, playing musical
instruments or wistfully busying themselves with domestic chores or the use of
rooms seen through doorways from outside other rooms. But it was how he
constructed these scenes and then painted them that made his works speak in the
most sophisticated way about the philosophy of painting!
Apart from Vermeer, my favourite paintings
were by Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch - but I was shocked
by how uneven they were from painting to painting. I loathed the work of Gerrit Dou who was consistently technically smug and
aesthetically awful and to a lesser extent the inexpressive Frans van Mieris. Compared with Vermeer, the work
of the likes of Gerrit
Dou appeared too impersonal, fantastical, extravagant and technically
narcissistic, Gerard ter Borch’s work was too inconsistent, awkward, mundane
and superficial, Jan Steen too slick, anecdotal and trivial, Gabriel Metsu too
inconsistent, cold and tedious, Pieter de Hooch varied from imitative mastery
to shocking crudeness and Frans van Mieris was too slick, trivial and soulless.
Most
of the dramatic tableaus of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan
Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris were like amateur theatre compared
with the cinema vérité of Vermeer. Vermeer’s people went beyond mere people
posing - to people posing and actually exposing their souls despite themselves
- because of the human insight of Vermeer and his masterful lighting,
composition, and abstract painterly genius.
Overall
too many of Vermeer’s peer’s paintings were full of clunky symbolism and ham acting and
most importantly their painting technique was vacuously skilful. For example,
in Vermeer’s day Gerrit Dou a star pupil of
Rembrandt was one of the most successful painters of the day. But looking at
his syrupy detailed painting The
Dropsical Woman from 1663 - I found nauseating. Despite an obviously high
work ethic and technical command, Gerrit Dou’s work lacked any real humanity or
aesthetic vision – instead he looked to me like someone who today would be
making kitsch, fantasy illustrations - that are all style and no substance.
The ‘fine’ painting techniques of these
painters who strove for a kind of hyperrealism - were feats of skill. But
technique and skill are only part of the story of artistic greatness - without
personal vision, soul, ideas and humanity they mean nothing. Most of these
paintings were valuable only as historical records of the vanity of the rich at
the time. So the whole world of Dutch Genre painting left me feeling unexpected
Marxist disgust for such smug painterly servitude and such a decadent world of
material exhibitionism – it was like being forced to watch The Kardashians for hours on end.
Living and working in Delft a small town
ringed with canals with a population of a mere 25,000, Vermeer proved genius
can emerge anywhere. Long before the Impressionists, the first bourgeois art
movement occurred in Holland were artists created paintings about and for their
fellow citizens. Yet coming at the tail end of the Dutch Golden Age, Vermeer
had only a couple of decades to enjoy the buoyant art market in Holland before
the war brought an abrupt end to the Dutch Golden Age and catastrophe for tiny
Holland.
We know virtually nothing about Vermeer
the man, since he left no drawings or letters and no one recounted meeting him
or seeing him paint. At the end of his life, he suffered some sort of loss of
faith in his art, painted with less mastery and less often and suffered some
kind of physical collapse and died the next day at the age of forty-three. We
don’t even know where he was buried. Moreover, there are only thirty-five
paintings attributed to him that have survived and only three were dated.
Vermeer’s father had been an inn-keeper and picture dealer and many of the fine
objects in Vermeer’s paintings may have come from his father’s collection.
Vermeer also became a picture dealer to support himself because at a time when
many of his peers were making fifty canvases a year - he struggled to finish
two or three. We do not know who trained Vermeer but by the age of twenty he
was already a member of the artist’s guild in Delft. Vermeer’s early paintings
owed a debt to the recently deceased Carel Fabritius the painter of The Goldfinch who Vermeer may have known
before his death and some have speculated was trained by him. Vermeer had one local collector who
bought around two-thirds of his output. He only used the finest linen canvases
and ground his own paints like all other artists of the day. He was
particularly fond of lapis lazuli a pigment more valuable per ounce than gold.
To put that into context, today artists, buy paint in tubes, and use the far
more economical ultramarine blue which today costs around €11.25 for a 60ml
tube whereas a tube of lapis lazuli from the same maker would cost €94.65 for a
60ml tube! Born a Protestant, Vermeer, married the Catholic Catharina Bolnes in
April 1656 and I imagine he loved her dearly. His mature paintings combined a
love of feminine charms with spiritual questioning. A mostly housebound
painter, Vermeer lived for his wife, eleven children and his art. The most
common female model in his paintings may have been his wife and often she may
have been pregnant. Other models may have been his many daughters or maids.
Though he must have spent long hours in his studio at home, he must also have
travelled around Holland to familiarise himself with the art of his peers which
the exhibition showed he learned greatly from.
In Vermeer’s early canvases the attraction
and titillation between the sexes was made explicit sometimes too explicit. One
of his first canvases that survives, The
Procuress from 1656 featured two leering men, the one on the left may have
been Vermeer holding a glass of wine and laughing while looking out towards the
viewer, while his friend cups his left hand around the harlot’s breast and
presents her with a coin with the right hand - while in the background the sinister
madam oversees the exchange. The
Procuress was crude not only visually but also in terms of subject matter
and character. But Vermeer was to learn from the overly dramatic failure of
this work - that often it was better to leave things to the viewer’s
imagination. So in Vermeer’s later paintings, things have either just happened
or are about to happen and the viewer is left to wonder about the situation. In
fact, Vermeer became a master of sophisticated voyeurism - where the viewer is
allowed to secretly view a scene they are not supposed to. It is also notable
that when men appeared in his later works they were often artists, men of
science or learning – mirroring his own mature, cultured and thoughtful
masculinity - rather than the rouges of his early work.
Everything that we now prize in Vermeer,
the quiet, understated and detailed beauty of his work and its rarity - made it
almost impossible for him to make a big impact with his work even in the Dutch
Golden Age. Today, with the tsunami of artworks on the internet and in the
countless galleries around the world - he would have found it ever more
difficult. Vermeer was one of those introverted, neurotic geniuses that are not
even noticed amongst the noisy empty-headed braggarts and social whores of the
art world elbowing their way to money and fame. He did not paint the kind of
click-bait images we are bombarded with today - that are dead as soon as you
glance at them – but rather he created images that make you ceaselessly wonder.
In fact, if alive today to see ignoramuses becoming famous for doodles on
post-it notes and collections of junk - he may have given up art completely.
When you first start art, you think it’s
all about stylish affirmations and technical tricks but by middle age you
understand it is an endless series of questions. Vermeer was one of those few
painters who leave you speechless and questioning. Forgotten for nearly three
centuries, Vermeer was only rediscovered by the art critic Théophile
Toré-Burger who brought his work to the attention of art lovers in the late
nineteenth century. Since then Vermeer’s reputation has continued to grow to
the point where he is now considered one of the greatest painters to have ever
lived.
Having painted all my life and in all
kinds of styles, never mind, having read hundreds of books and magazines on art and visited
countless museums and galleries around the world - I find that I can understand
how most paintings are made - even if I could not do it myself. But there are
some geniuses of painting that I not only could not copy satisfactorily – I
still don’t fully understand how they did it. But at least I am honest, other
more deluded painters like Dalí tried to ape Vermeer - but just look at
Vermeer’s The Lace Maker and then at
Dalí’s copy and laugh! Yet Dalí thanks to his own hype, was hailed by many (who
should have known better) as the only painter in the Twentieth Century that had
the skills of an Old Master. So maybe now, you can start to wonder - at the
catastrophic fracture between the Old Masters and us!
With virtually all other painters, I find
that going from a distance to close to the painting to right up to its face -
makes the painting completely explicable. Yet with the true geniuses of
painting like; van Eyck, Rembrandt, Velazquez or Vermeer – coming up close to
the painting only increases the mystery! Vermeer’s idiosyncratic and
pain-staking approach to painting; his use of a camera obscura, his intricate
laying in of perspective lines, his subtle and soft painting technique with few
visible brush marks or impasto, his masterly blurring of forms and simultaneous
lightning spots of detail and his patient painting and endless looking - made
his work infinitely mysterious. Moreover, despite their immaculate, jewel like
perfection and detail – Vermeer’s work looks effortless. Yet, knowing just how
much craft, skill and patience even a square inch of his paintings required, I
must imagine that he often teared his hair out with the mental effort!
In 2001 in their famous book Secret Knowledge David Hockney and
Charles Falco made the not very original point that many artists since van Eyck
may have used a camera obscura or some form of optical device to plot their
paintings. While I believe that there is merit in this claim - especially with
Vermeer, because apart from the strange perspectives and collaged look of some
of Vermeer’s paintings - what is also notable is the way he seems to be
painting forms derived from images – resulting in forms that verge on the
abstract. Yet it is not as pronounced as it might be with a lesser artist -
because Vermeer had superfine, modelling skills and an intimate understanding
of form. It is also notable how ethereal many of Vermeer’s figures seem in
comparison to their surroundings - perhaps because while the room and settings
stayed put throughout the painting process - his sitters may not have been
present for long. It has been noted that after his death, when his wife had to
sell most of their possessions because they were bankrupt - there was no
mention of any optical devices in his possession. On the other hand, he was
friends with the lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who was also his executor
at his death. Leading to speculation that van Leeuwenhoek - omitted any
reference to a camera obscura device. So Vermeer may well have gained many insights
from looking at the world through a camera obscura - but I do not think it
played as big a part in the final work as Hockney and others claim. And even if
it did, it does not make Vermeer a copycat artist - it makes him an avant-garde
innovator! Countless artists since the nineteenth century have used photographs
of their own making or by others - but that does not make them lesser artists.
Only ignorant philistines believe that today.
It is not what technology you use that matters – it is what you do with
it that counts! I also think that contemporary artists like Hockney use the
supposed widespread use of camera obscuras by Old Masters - as an excuse for
why we draw and paint so badly today. When the truth is we simply do not have
the teachers, training, discipline, work ethic or lack of media distractions
needed to come close to even the minor painters of the past.
As an artist, I have drawn from other
artist’s paintings, my imagination, from life, from pre-drawn cartoons, traced
and worked from photographs, video screen-grabs and recently from my computer
screen and I have found that each method has its advantages and drawbacks. But
even when I paint from mediated images – I am aware that I am looking at an
image with the knowledge and skill of someone who has drawn from life in the
round. On the other hand, having traced images from my TV screen, I am aware
how strangely compelling a traced image can be – even though it fails most
traditional measures of fidelity. One can fall in love with the abstractions of
tracing - and I imagine that if Vermeer did use a camera obscura he also fell
in love with the abstract lessons he learned. So I am sure Vermeer also tried
different approaches to reality and it is that which makes his work so
enigmatic and original. Personally, I imagine that he may have initially used a
camera obscura to plot the perspective in his paintings then painted them from
reality but with the knowledge of what optics had taught him. Because, even if
some artists today choose to work from life all the time - they must on some
subconscious level - be affected by a lifetime spent surrounded by photographs,
TV, cinema and the internet.
Vermeer was the most brilliant architect
of forms on a domestic scale and even a square inch of one of his canvases -
can delight a painter with its uncanny brilliance. I was a struck by how much
of Vermeer’s paintings were in soft focus but how he made them come alive with
sharp pin point highlights. Vermeer’s
paintings were predominantly made up of shades and colours that have no proper
name. He was a master of muted silvery greys, creams, ochres, blues, reds,
yellows and greens. Like a visual poet he knew all of the things he could leave
out and exactly what had to be put in to a composition. Married to his
masterful craft and technique was a personality that eschewed flashy pictorial
declarations, expressive manipulations or intellectual bullying. His work had a
warmth and humanity nurtured by a life protected by female love and domestic
security. He may have struggled financially and died a pauper, but his life had
been rich in all those aspects of family life money can never buy. Like us,
Vermeer lived in a time of bloody wars, religious hatred, commercial decadence
and moral decay but in his modest home - he built an enchanted realm - were
masculine learning and artistry was glorified and female beauty and feminine
caring was worshiped. That must be why - we need moments in front of his
canvases - more than ever today.
Only a few decades ago it was popular for
many talentless abstractionists to insist that all painting was abstract. It
was a canard to justify their own pictorial inadequacy. It was also, almost
completely untrue for most figurative painting at least up until the
Impressionists and the emergence of photography. This cult for seeing all
paintings even figurative ones as abstract, I suppose really got going with
Cezanne in the late nineteenth century and his supposed obsession with
cylinders and cubes, as well as the emergence of photography that created a
mechanical form of reality that made artists aware how impersonal reality could
be. But any figurative painter taking this approach will only end up with a
world that looks like Lego. What such a cult of abstraction fails to realise is
that conventional drawing and painting requires an intimate understanding of
form in the round - in other words to not only know what feet look like seen
head on but also knowing what feet look like from all other angles – until the
artist can not only see what is in front of him or her - but also what is
hidden. Then they must also bring to their all-round understanding of form -
the ability to impart humanity and feeling to it. If they cannot do these three
things their work will be nothing more than the equivalent of an autistic
person who doesn’t speak a word of English trying to recite Shakespeare.
Yet obsessing about the abstract nature of
reality - was true for an idiosyncratic genius like Vermeer who had the ability
to see the world both in a conventional manner and in an avant-garde way -
influenced by the use of some kind of optical device like a camera obscura – so
that he could play with reality like a photographer, blurring parts of the
background, highlighting the centre ground and strangely abstractly blocking in
areas of the foreground so that they loom forward.
The result was paintings that not only
anticipated photograph they also supersede photography! To say that Vermeer’s
paintings are photographic is an insult to Vermeer! What photograph have you
ever seen with the kind of magic realism of Vermeer!
Because there was something odd about
Vermeer’s realism – it not only convinced completely at a distance – it also
baffled and bewildered up close. Much the way reality itself does - if
inspected closely! The only artist to match the fantastic realism of Vermeer
was Jan van Eyck who came nearly two centuries before Vermeer and who was
another artist that was suspected to have used optical devices.
How often do we look at our hands? All our
life I suppose - but mostly absentmindedly. Yet whenever we really look at our
hands closely we are shocked by their complexity and strangeness. A genius like
Vermeer did something very similar with bourgeois domestic scenes we may have
taken for granted. He showed us again and again, how strangely beautiful the
world is – even our own habitual environments that we do not appreciate or only
distractedly pay attention to. Vermeer a virtual studio hermit - albeit one
with a large and vibrant family - spent his life looking and looking and
looking into the world around him and discovered mystery and magic everywhere!
However, with all my misgivings about the
curation of Vermeer
and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, I would barely have given this exhibition and its
masturbatory-academic accompanying catalogue 4/10!