The Highly Opinionated Newsletter III
Vermeer at the National Gallery of Art This beautiful exhibit brings together 21 of 35 known Vermeers and confirms the artist's devotion to the poetry of the everyday. Vermeer is a magician whose brush transforms all it touches. Through the medium of flowing light, Vermeer modifies color and orchestrates composition. There is a hush to the paintings - the stillness of a momentary glance or action arrested forever. The figures are placed in interior spaces, the geometry of which functions much like a setting for jewels. These settings, often with lush fabrics delineating recessed areas, are about privacy. However a window or a map always connects these figures to an external world. The interior setting is highly ordered. Geometry patterns the floor and walls and the very panes of the windows admitting light. Emotional life is barely hinted at. Instead, Vermeer's figures concentrate intensely on whatever they are doing, both subsumed by and connected to some context larger than themselves. Early and late Vermeer seem relatively flawed. But the work of the 1650's and 60's is wondrous. The single disappointment for me, among work from these years, was View of Delft. I found Vermeer's unerring sense of color unification to be missing. Dense, opaque reflections lacked the extraordinary Vermeer luminosity of the scintillating overcast sky. So unaccustomed was my eye to the imbalance I perceived, that I could scarcely stop wondering whether this work had not undergone color restoration. Little Street is a beautiful, geometric dance of shape, a wondrous interplay of form. Arches and rectangles are ordered, reordered, then fragmented into series of still smaller units. A single red shutter ignites the composition. Patterned doorways - usually points of entry - serve to compartmentalize, separate, and finally link the various small figures busily engaged in work. The entire scene has an air of both liveliness and peace. Just as extraordinary is Young Woman with Water Pitcher. The woman is solid. Yet she is simultaneously monumentalized and dematerialized by the light around her. As she pauses momentarily, her fingers resting on the window pane, she becomes both connected to and a conduit for the light itself. Here, in the simplest of ways, Vermeer somehow links the corporeal and the incorporeal. The woman and the light source are one. Girl With the Pearl Earring is painted with scarcely a line or an edge, the head a composite of light-filled planes that emerge and dissolve. Only the shadow of a lid, nostril, ear and neck provide delicate, if distinct, contour. And that is sufficient. The eyes gaze at us through the centuries, and as we are gathered into their gaze, we are deeply touched. This exhibit has allowed us to enter Vermeer's world , a world fabricated of geometry and of light. These two very different elements are each essential to a vision combining the worldly and the otherworldly, the timely and the timeless. For it is Vermeer's unique achievement to see in the ordinary that which is extraordinary; to see in the secular that which is divine; to use light itself as a means of transfiguration; and to find in a moment all of eternity.
Gentle Indignation |