See beyond the beauty of a Vermeer

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This spring, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I once again stood before “The Milkmaid”, returning 33 years after that day in Lagos to her humility, her solidity and the continuity of her domestic work. I love her, I love her, no less than ever. It was she who inspired Wisława Szymborska’s epigrammatic poem “Vermeer” (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak from Polish):

While that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted stillness and concentration
keep pouring milk day after day
from jug to bowl
the world has not won
World’s End.

The curators of the Rijksmuseum have brought together, in a highly praised exhibition, the largest number of Vermeer paintings ever reunited, 28 of the 35 survivors generally agreed to be with him. It’s a feat of coordination on the part of the organizers and of generosity on the part of the lenders, a meeting unlikely to be repeated in this generation on such a scale.

But I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing the exhibition, and the reasons why I didn’t started piling up. The entire ticket circulation, some 450,000 of them, sold out within weeks of the opening, and even if he managed to get one, the galleries would surely be full. I was also skeptical of the strictly narrow focus of the exhibition: one Vermeer painting, followed by another, followed by another; The most successful displays need more context than this. But what was really starting to irritate me was the breathless critical acclaim. The name Vermeer is, by now, shorthand for artistic excellence, and much of the praise for the exhibition also sounded like emotional shorthand. Greatness, perfection, sublimity: the appropriate vocabulary for a certain type of cultural experience. Those who had seen the program were envied by those who had not. That it represented a “once in a lifetime” experience was taken as gospel. (And yet, how many of our best encounters with art have happened in a minor museum on a quiet day? What moment, fully inhabited, isn’t “once in a lifetime”?) The idea that images they were wonderful had somehow become mixed with the dogma that images were nothing more than wonderful. Amid all this enthusiastic consensus, critical dissent was hard to find.

But some Dutch friends arranged the entrance for me, which weakened my resolve. Then Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis (home to Girl with a Pearl Earring and one of the main museums lending to the exhibition), invited me to tour the exhibition with her after hours. Well, refusing at that point would have been absurd. Late in the afternoon of March 13, accompanied by a friend, we entered the exhibition. The last wave of regular visitors came out and there we were, three lucky spectators, with 28 Vermeers.

He was not there prolific: it is believed that he made as few as 42 paintings in total. It is reasonable to assume, as art historians have long done, that this slow pace of production was the consequence of particularly meticulous technique. But X-ray and infrared images show that he did quick primers and very little preparatory drawing. So what was he doing with all that extra time? For one, he had a day job as an art dealer, the profession he inherited from his father. On the other hand, he himself fathered up to 15 children (11 of whom survived him). The house must have been noisy. Against the implicit backdrop of that noise come the stunning, self-assured images, two or three of them a year. These are images that seem to be doing things with light that no image has ever done before. Art historian Lawrence Gowing describes it as a certain indifference to the subject, a certain fidelity to sheer appearance: “Vermeer seems almost unconcerned, or even unaware, of what he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? One finger? What do we know of his shape? None of this matters to Vermeer, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing worries him but the visible, the tone, the wedge of light.”