Showing posts with label Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris. Show all posts

03/09/2017

Vermeer a Genius - Amongst Mere Painters

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!