ESSENTIAL VERMEER TIME

Part of the reason why Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute is not anyone’s darling is that the picture shows its age: it has been rubbed, scrubbed and pretty well deprived of nuance anyone would expect of a Vermeer. It is a bare-bones canvas, a sea of brackish browns and unattractive grays with only a lick or two of what anyone would call color. Moreover, the young lutenist is no Hollywood starlet. She is “mousey,” if you like the picture, or “homely” to downright “ugly” if you don’t. Visitors at the MET nod at her respectfully— she is after all a Vermeer— but quickly move on to one of the museum’s more amenable images.

Oddly, I have always found it one of Vermeer’s most moving canvases. Caught between a spacious map of Europe, a massive oak table and a hanging slate blue curtain, the girl’s lute turns one way and her face another in search of something the painter does not reveal. To those few attuned to the picture and able to set aside its pitiful state of conservation, it coveys a sense of hope, of searching for something of great value, but also of potential loss.

When the Woman with a Lute came to Rome last year I counted on renewing our dialogue but didn’t expect to receive anything more than what I had already gotten although the passing of time frequently allows us to see new things in familiar pictures. On this rendezvous, I was particularly struck by the monochrome map which I hadn’t thought about too intensely because I had always taken it primarily as a compositional device, a means for focusing the viewer’s attention on the girl or, perhaps, an allusion to her fanciful dreams of a faraway land or a faraway man. As coincidence has it, the map features Italy, the country where the picture was for the moment being exhibited for the first time after it left Vermeer’s easel.

As I stood in front in front of my favorite Vermeer girl (love is blind) and her big brown map of Europe I could not help but wonder what the artist thought of as he sat on a wooden stool and carefully painted the Italian shoreline. What did he know about Italy? How many Italians had he met? Who were his favorite Italian painters? Was he familiar with Petrarchan love poetry? Had he ever desired to visit Rome or Venice or was he, like his most illustrious colleagues Rembrandt and Frans Hals, content to remain where he were born? Or perhaps, for the painter the Italian coastline was just a boot-shaped contour to be rendered as accurately as possible with a fine brush and a bit of black and raw umber. One thing is almost certain, he could have never foreseen that 350 years later more than 300,000 Italians would have queued up in Rome, the heart of the grandiose Italian Renaissance, to see his meek little girl.

Click here for a high-resolution image of the painting.

Dave Collins (Saskatchewan Leader-Post) reports that the seventy-six-year-old Robert Gentile, a reputed mobster, has failed a FBI polygraph test when asked if he knew the whereabouts of priceless paintings, including Vermeer’s mid-career Concert, which were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. According to the polygraph expert, there is a 99 per cent chance that Gentile knows something about the heist. Moreover, when Gentile’s house in Manchester, Conn. was searched last year, they found a handwritten list of the stolen paintings, their estimated worth and a newspaper article about the heist a day after it happened.

Frankly, it is hard to understand how happy we should be that the FBI is getting closer to a solution. While it does represent a chance that the painting could be finally recovered, the chances are just good that we will find out it was destroyed.

See part 2 and part 1.

The most straightforward and articulated “attack” on Vermeer’s mystique was delivered in a thought-provoking article* by the Princeton specialist of Early Modern European History, Theodore K. Rabb, in which the artist’s acclaim is challenged via a comparison with Peter Paul Rubens, the grandiose baroque painter who not only defined a good swath of painting his own age but left a lasting impact on the course of art history. Rabb questions why modern viewers prefer to quietly “ponder, explore and relish the limited but subtle beauties of Vermeer” rather than the more “enthralling, universal” values of Rubens. According to Raab, the characteristics which determine Rubens’ artistic greatness, and which can be marshaled to demonstrate Vermeer’s limits, may be encapsulated in five points. The parentheses are mine.

1. Rubens had a dominant role in the development of the art of his time. (Vermeer didn’t.)
2. He commanded an enormous range of subject matter. (Vermeer didn’t.)
3. He commanded a wide range of expressions. (Vermeer didn’t.)
4. He had an enormous output. (Vermeer didn’t.)
5. His technical versatility was extraordinary. (Vermeer’s wasn’t.)

Here is the historian’s explanation as to what might have favored Vermeer’s apotheosis and Rubens’ downgrade.

“That such deification [of Vermeer]  has taken place prompts an obvious speculation: why should this be? Taste is, of course, ineffable, but two considerations may be worth pondering. The first is the steady devaluation of history in both British and USA culture. As a serious pursuit it is in steady decline, shrinking as a classroom subject and as a basis for public discourse. In that context an artist’s historical importance is easily devalued. That Raphael, like Rubens, owed huge debts to his forerunners, and in turn shaped the future, gives him little credit when aesthetic judgment comes to the fore. A second consideration is that recent generations have lost the capacity to appreciate the Biblical, classical and historical references that infuse Rubens’ paintings. As cultural horizons contract, the private and domestic supplant the public and the grand. It may not be irrelevant that a Vermeer is likely to be visible only to a few people at one time, whereas a Rubens can tower over a crowd. We may be living, in other words, in an age that prefers small pleasures to large. We cannot settle into dreamy contemplation of Rubens. He overwhelms. He demands soaring, energetic attention.”

Although it is impossible to negate Raab’s principle points, and his unflattering explanation of why our cultural background may have undermined our appreciation of Rubens is worth serious thought, the historian’s challenge will appear to most as an unprofitable, judgmental apples-and-pears comparison at best; at worst, an unsolicited invitation to return to the rigors of academic regime where black was once black and white was once white. After all, in comparison to any preceding time, ours is an “everybody is a winner” age that dreads once-and-for-all cultural definitions, hierarchy and, perhaps equally important, winding up on the wrong side of the fence. How many players in the art world prefer to carve out a safe haven crafted with a subtle, but restricted range of grays rather than risk being remembered as a Van Gogh heckler or a true beleiver of Van Meegeren’s horrid Vermeers?

I believe that Raab’s head-on dealing with the matter of who is better than who, on the contrary, is interesting, legitimate and useful. If nothing else, the historian underlines how peculiar and how uniquely ahistorical Vermeer’s standing appears when set aside those of Europe’s towering masters. And this should guard us against lulling into a certain loving-to-be-in-love complacency which, perhaps, has tinted the proper understanding of this artist for a good half century.

*Theodore K. Rabb. “Why is Vermeer so revered?” The Art Newspaper 208 (01 December 2009, pp. 39-40.

Dave Collins* of The Boston Globe reports that the FBI believed that Robert Gentile, convicted of receiving stolen goods, carrying a deadly weapon in a motor vehicle, and possession of illegal firearms, had information on the the half-billion dollars heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, which included Vermeer’s Concert. FBI officials said earlier this year that they believe they know who stole the paintings, but still do not know where the artworks are. Gentile, 76, has denied knowing anything about the heist but the assistant US Attorney John Durham wrote in his sentencing memo that Gentile has been identified by several people as a member of a Philadelphia crime family. Authorities also searched the Gentile’s property with ground-penetrating radar in an attempt to find the stolen artworks, but did not come up with the paintings.

Please take this news with a grain of salt: I am tiring of reporting “breakthrough” announcements that lead nowhere.

drawn from:
*Dave Collins. “Man FBI tied to art heist faces sentencing.” The Boston Globe. May 07, 2013.

See part 3 and part 1.

Adriaan E. Waiboer, curator at the National Gallery of Ireland and leading expert in Dutch painting, recently addressed Vermeer’s superstar status in a perceptive study* of the historical fames of Vermeer and Gabriel Metsu. Metsu was one of the most accomplished painters of the time and was enthusiastically collected by his contemporaries: Vermeer less so. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Metsu not only maintained but, perhaps, improved his standing as one of the most celebrated painters of the Dutch Golden Age.  Metsu’s works were snatched up for noble collections throughout Europe. Vermeer’s name, instead, had all but vaporized. In 1783 Louis XVI of France spent a fortune, 18,051 francs, on a Metsu after he had declined two Vermeers, the Astronomer and the Geographer. Sixty years later, the writer John Smith declared “the superiority of Metsu over every artist in the Dutch school” and dubbed Vermeer as one of Metsu’s “imitators.” In order to increase market value, some Vermeers were attributed to painters including Metsu himself.  This state of affairs was completely reversed by the end of the 19th century when Vermeer was “rediscovered”  and his reputation and monetary value soared. The Dutch painters Metsu, Frans van Mieris and Gerrit Dou, who had commanded unlimited approval for centuries, were unceremoniously relegated to lower rungs of the Dutch art ladder almost to the embarrassment the triumphant image of Dutch art established by the “moderns” Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn and Vermeer.

Although recognizing the values of Vermeer’s art, Waiboer posits that the reevaluation of the Delft master has been skewed by a modernist penchant for “streamlined and stylized aesthetic, as evidenced by contemporary design and architecture,” and that this fact has unjustly penalized Metsu. Metsu, then, has been largely viewed through a “lens colored by their admiration for Vermeer,” thereby inhibiting the “appreciation of the true qualities of his [Metsu's] work.” While not officiating an outright revision, the savvy art historian nonetheless declares that the game is far from over. “As artist’s critical fortunes have always fluctuated and will do so in the future, our views on Metsu and Vermeer will undoubtedly change. The question is in what way? Will Vermeer’s fame continue to grow in the next centuries, or will Metsu’s eventually superseding that of his contemporary again?”

There can be no doubt that modernist values, which confer a premium to pictorial values while penalizing explicit narrative and moralistic finger-wagging,  have greatly benefitted the reevaluation of the supreme Dutch triumvirate. What remains to be seen, however, is if it will be Metsu or Gerrit ter Borch to challenge Vermeer’s position. For while the compositional originality, supreme technique and level of psychological introspection that Ter Borch gave to his figure pieces may be reasonably weighed against Vermeer’s talents, the chameleonic nature of Metsu, who openly and with amazing ability cloned the work of his cutting edge contemporaries, makes it difficult to understand just which version of Gabriel Metsu—Mestu-Dou, Metsu-Ter Borch, Metsu-Van Mieris or Metsu-Vermeer—will rival Vermeer-Vermeer.

By the way, Waiboer has recently published a catalogue raisonne of Metsu. Although I have not yet had the fortune to read it, I imagine will be of great help in redefining the role of this valuable and quintessential Dutch painter.

*Adriaan E. Waiboer, “‘Why buy a Vermeer when a Metsu is available?’ The Relationship between Two Dutch Genre Painters”, Gabriel Mestu, New Haven and London, 2010, pp. 29-51.

In his book Vermeer’s Family Secrets (Routledge in 2009), Cooper Union art history professor Benjamin Binstock proposed that four paintings by Vermeer, including the Girl with a Red Hat,  might actually have been painted by his daughter, Maria, who he further identified as the model for the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. Thus far, however, Binstock’s thesis has been met with silence in the art historical press—itself a fascinating response.  But what if we were to take Binstock’s claims seriously, or at least allow them a fair hearing? How might we go about doing so? Beyond that, what if we in turn were to think about how such theories make their way through the art historical vetting process? How generally does scholarship evaluate such claims, and in turn how ought we evaluate how it does so? And if Binstock were proven right?

An all-day symposium will address Binstock’s unorthodox theory and related questions will be held at the NYU Cantor Film Center, Saturday May 18, 2013 (11:00 a.m. – 6: p.m.). The symposium will attended by Benjamin Binstock, Anthony Grafton, Linda Nochlin, Chuck Close (painter), James Elkins (art historian), Vincent Desiderio, Rachael Cohen and Ulrich Baer.

Entrance is open to the public and free. For further details click here or download the PDF, which features a brief account of Binstock’s theory.

See part 2 and part 3.

Vermeer’s popularity has risen above fame and become mystique. An estimated 330,000 viewers braved freezing snow and 24-hour queues to catch a glimpse of 21 Vermeer paintings at the Washington National Gallery of Art. The miniscule Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (hardly a masterpiece by anyone’s estimate), was auctioned in 2005 for $30,000,000: buyer, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas billionaire casino mogul known for his dabblings in the high end of art collecting (Wynn is remembered by art market elites for having accidentally punctured his $48,000,000 Picasso, Le Rêve, with an elbow). Vermeer devotees even get silly. A foremost art scholar and powerful dealer in Dutch art, whose life-long dream has been to uncover one of Vermeer’s lost cityscapes, drives his SUV around NYC sporting a customized “VERMEER” license plate.

While Vermeermania is a fact, not everyone is in love with the idea of being in love with this artist. His “hitherto dominant standing as one of the two premier Dutch painters, Rembrandt for drama and Vermeer for transcendence,”¹ no longer goes publicly unchallenged. Lamenting the twentieth-century censure of Gabriel Metsu from the first-tier of Dutch painting masters, one critic wrote unapologetically, “the winner-takes-all syndrome operates as much in the arts as it does in business and politics, and no artist has benefited more than Johannes Vermeer” and “if you spend enough time with Metsu’s work, Vermeer’s accomplishment seems a little narrow, and the mechanics of art-world popularity even more arbitrary.”² After a prolonged visit to eye-opening Gerrit ter Borch exhibition in Washington, another critic claimed, “Ter Borch is a greater, more important artist than Johannes Vermeer” and that the latter’s “eccentricities and weaknesses,” rather than intrinsic artistic worth, were the primary ingredients for the recipe that made him “the perfect” painter for the modern age.”³ Even the famous twentieth-century English painter Francis Bacon had once complained, “Everybody likes Vermeer, except me. He doesn’t mean anything, he has no significance.” While the most commonly attributes of his art— restraint, equilibrium, and a certain measure of mystery are not discounted, some serious art historians hold that the best works by Pieter de Hooch can stand comfortably next to the canvases of Vermeer, a high-treason proposition for any Vermeer devotee.

It may be that Vermeer’s super-star status has not only monopolized public interest and obscured other meritorious Dutch painters, but has drained already dwindling funds for alternative research and exhibitions for less glamorous artists. On the other hand, a temporary exhibition with a mediocre Vermeer and a fold-out brochure continues to guarantee the cash-strapped cultural institutions a dramatic increase in ticket sales. If three or four paintings, or a particularly likable work by Vermeer, can be leveraged for a temporary exhibition (with or without a worthwhile thematic agenda) the museum may have a major cultural event on its hands with winding queues, photo ops, banging museum shop cash registers and an increase of institutional prestige. Until Vermeer stops paying off, very few have a vested interest in tampering with his mystique.

1. Kennicott, Philip. “Gabriel Metsu at the National Gallery, out-Vermeering Vermeer.” Washingtom Post. April 8, 2011.
2. Kennicott, Philip. 2011.
3. Gopnik, Blake, “Exquisiteness In Plain View.” Washington Post. November 7, 2004.

Click here for a preview of the Vermeer gallery box that I have been working on for hat last week or so. It should be completely finished ready in a few days. You can slide through all 36 Vermeer paintings in four modes: in chronological order, with their frames, in scale and a detail of each work. It still loads slowly but I am working on that. Would enjoy hearing any comments or suggestions before I upload it to the Essential Vermeer.

Before the outbreak of World War I, Adolf Hitler was a practicing artist and on two occasions was denied admission to the Academy for Art Studies in Vienna. It is estimated that during WWII he had plundered over 750,000 artworks. Among his most prized possessions were Vermeer’s The Art of Painting and the Astronomer. Hitler had not only intended to display the stolen works of art in the monumental Führermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz, but to destroy all the “degenerate” works he despised. The Astonomer, which was meant to be the focal point of the Führermuseum, still bears a black swastika stamped on its back.

In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

Dragnetting the web I came by the image above, which I had never seen before, of American soldiers recovering the Astronomer. For more information, read, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

drawn for the AAMM website:

The Academy of Ancient Music has announced it will be will be Resident Ensemble at the London National Gallery this summer and will perform at the Gallery on the hour, every hour on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays in conjunction with the exhibition Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, which runs from 26 June to 8 September. The AAM will perform within the exhibition space itself, enhancing viewers’ appreciation of the art and recreating the sociable and informal atmosphere for which much of the music was written. A wide range of range of chamber and solo works, including music by Netherlandish composers such as Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck, Willem de Fesch and Johannes Florentius a Kempis, will be performed.

The AAM’s discography comprises over over 300 CDs features Brit- and Grammy-Award-winning recordings of masterworks from Purcell to Mozart and from Bach to Beethoven. The ensemble’s aim is to energize baroque and classical music returning to the style and spirit in which this music was first performed on old instruments—flutes made out of wood, trumpets without valves, strings woven from gut.

The exhibition will feature paintings by Johannes Vermeer, including the gallery’s A Lady Standing at a Virginal, A Lady Seated at a Virginal, The Guitar Player and the magnificent Music Lesson.

Click here for exhibition press release.

A solemn oath to cover all Vermeer-related news requires me to report that sixteen iconic artworks from the Rijksmuseum will adorn millions of gallons of milk, cream and yogurt produced by the Albert Heijn dairy company. Six of the company’s one-liter packs features a colored Empire Stamp: save four and get 5 euro discount on a ticket to the Rijksmuseum. The image above is a screenshot from an Albert Heijn promo video having fun with Vermeer. There is no way to imagine how Vermeer would have reacted if he saw his Milkmaid reproduced on a milk carton, but there’s no doubt Jan Steen would have had a great big laugh.

In December 2003, the main building of the Rijksmuseum was closed for a major renovation based on a design by Spanish architects Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz. Many of the old interior decorations were restored and the floors in the courtyards were removed. On 13 April 2013, the main building was reopened by Queen Beatrix.

During the ten year restoration, many of the musuem’s artworks were stored away, a few were kept on display but some (all four Vermeers)  were shipped all over the globe.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid made only one trip, to New York. The Little Street saw Tokyo and Rome. The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter saw Kyoto, Sendai, Tokyo, Shanghai, São Paulo and Los Angles. The smallish Love Letter, perhaps Vermeer’s least appreciated work for the general public, was shipped to Dublin, Greenwich (Connecticut), Frankfurt, Melbourne, Rome, Vancouver, Paris, Doha, St Petersburg and Istanbul.

No one really complained about this state of affairs: there, was after all, except for the paintings’ safety, less to be gained by keeping the paintings put in Amsterdam. On the other hand, from what one might imagine, millions of tickets, Vermeer posters, postcards, mugs, umbrellas, pencils, scarfs, notepads and refrigerator magnets were sold all around the world. Miles, tickets and heads can all be counted: what benefit all this brought to the millions who saw the paintings for a few moments is anybody’s guess.

In any case, welcome back to Amsterdam, Mr. Vermeer.

Although most would fault me for the dreadful photograph to the left, it does have the merit of conveying how if often feels to view a Vermeer at a blockbuster exhibition.

As I had promised in a post below to express some of my Vermeer-going experiences, here is one that deals with a Vermeer exhibition that took place a 35-minute walk from my house here in Rome last year. Perhaps a bit whiny for positivists (those who believe anything that promotes art is good…BTW, I don’t) but it is nonetheless an experience that many of us have shared at blockbuster exhibitions.

Considering their Girl with a Wineglass of great value, the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum demanded it be enclosed in an acclimatized case during its Rome sojourn. This meant that the thick protective glass of the box and the glass of the picture’s frame obediently reflected an “EXIT” sign, various overhead spotlights and a nearby gilt-framed De Hooch. There was really no way of eliminating the reflections unless once one stood obliquely to the side of the picture and danced a bit from left to right, the few times room for maneuvering was available.

The picture was so distant and so dimly lit that I was unable to show (off) to a fellow exhibition goer that in the miraculously depicted stained-glass window motif, Vermeer had represented a figure holding a bridle which, according to art historians, is the picture’s iconographical key. Although iconography is not a language that fires my imagination, the three curious ducks under the bridle do but were invisible as well. I shall spare you descriptions of the dots, dashes and flicks Vermeer’s majestic brushing that were impossible to make out.

Having been strapped before and easel and painted  for more than four decades, I feel safe to say that I can usually tell the difference between a painting and a reproduction. And yet, had I not knelt down in front of the Vermeer and seen the glare reveal the irregularities of the canvas weave near the borders of the painting, I would not have sworn that the it was the real Vermeer rather than a state-of-the-art preproduction. At this point, it does not seen whiny to ask why tens thousands of dollars for insurance should be spent and a pictures should undergoe travel risks in order to  exhibit  a picture that people can’t really see.

Mind you, the Anton Ulrich has every  right to protect their painting as they see fit, but paintings are usually better seen than taken on faith.

It is true, Vermeer had virtually no impact on his contemporaries and negligent impact (actually none) on the course of art after his death. None of his children were moved to carry on his profession and it is doubtful that he even had a single apprentice although he was well known within the environs of Delft during his lifetime.  Contemporary Dutch paintings that plainly show signs of his manner are fewer than twenty and most of them were produced by moderately-talented, provincial painters known only to well-informed Dutch art historians (e.g. Jacobus Vrel or Cornelis de Man). Michael van Musscher—an enterprising fellow who was able to recycle just about any motif he set his eyes on—did a relaxed remake of Vermeer’s solemn Art of Painting, hardly an event which drives forward the course of art. The more talented Gabriel Metsu painted two works that are clearly inspired by Vermeer, but it wasn’t much of a love affair: Metsu’s career is largely based on skilful makeovers of his contemporaries.

Although Vermeer’s name has been continually associated with the values of modernism, there are exceeding few 19th- or 20th-century artworks that are recognizably inspired by the Delft master, except for forgeries which instead, abound.   Perhaps, Vermeer’s only legacy in modern times in the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 –1916) whose Ida in an Interior with Piano, (1901) will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s on 23 May 2013.

Estimated price: £1,000,000-1,500,000.

Personally, Hammershøi is not my cup of tea. More than Vermeer emulations, his melancholic, bourgeoisie interiors seem  to be a modest prelude to the solitude of Edward Hopper’s offices and cinemas. Is £1,000,000 for a Hammershøi  sane? For some reason that escapes me, it is in this market.

Although after years of Vermeer-going I would love  to take a side once and for all, my feelings about traveling Vermeer exhibitions remains as ambivalent as ever. On one hand, I, and obviously millions of other worthy souls, would have never experienced certain Vermeers had they not been shipped closer to home. On the other hand, expenses and risks exist.

The possibility of a plane carrying the Girl with Pearl Earring to Japan might crash on Siberian permafrost, a terrorist attack  or some other unforeseeable event might occur while the painting is on tour cannot be ruled out. Don’t roll your eyes, an earthquake actually happened while Vermeer’s Geographer was hanging on a Tokyo museum wall and the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter escaped by a few months one of Japan’s greatest national tragedy, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The recently restored painting was, in fact,  headed to Sendai, one of the most damaged cities. The risks of fragile, centuries-old canvas being damaged through handling, climatic jumps or road bumps would appear relatively simple to evaluate, but as you would expect, there is great debate as to what really happens to globe-trotting canvases. It is rumored that some museums have declined reporting damages to loaned artworks. But things can surely go wrong at home as well, whether home be the tiny,  off-the-beaten-track Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum where Vermeer’s Girl with a Wineglass is permanently housed  or the Metropolitan Fortress of Art. The Love Letter was stolen, the Guitar Player was stolen, the Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid  was stolen and The Concert stolen and never recovered, all from the museums where the works are permanently housed.

Let’s get back to people who are looking at the paintings. Heads can be counted, what goes on inside them cannot. Is it more desirable that ten out of ten thousand  visitors have life-changing experiences while the others more or less forget and move along to the next blow-out exhibition or is it better if that the ten thousand might have a mildly significant experience but no one gets too riled up? And if just one lone visitor among the millions who have attended the last decades’ Vermeer exhibitions were to receive the inspiration to become the world’s next Vermeer?

In essence,  the problem boils down to opportunity. We must calculate the money spent (usually lots and lots), add to it the risks and compare that sum to the results of a rather bizarre average: the overall quality of visitor experience divided by the quantity of visitor experiences. If this isn’t  a pit of snakes….what is?

One thing is certain, the impossibility of evaluating with any objectivity what goes on inside heads of hundreds of thousands of traveling art exhibition visitors (and the effect that this cumulative experience might have on the common good) is a blessing to those who support the exhibitions (i.e. museums and their staff). It is, instead, a curse to the arguments of those who see in traveling exhibitions more potential for damage than good.

I will follow with a few posts on my variegated Vermeer going experiences hoping to give some color to the gray picture above.

Although as early as 1930 (Italian Art 1200-1900, London) art exhibitions had begun to generate wide-reaching public acclaim, the term “blockbuster” became associated with special and spectacular exhibitions in a museum or art gallery in the 1980s.

Whether sanctified or demonized, blockbuster art exhibitions are not going to go away any time in the near future and will likewise become increasingly controversial among professionals in the field. Museums claim that despite their high costs and nightmarish organizational logistics, blockbusters bring the uninitiated public closer to the art experience, keep regulars coming back and gather critical finances necessary to keep them running. Detractors, who are routinely accused of snobbery, hold the blockbuster has more to do with fast food than haute cuisine and, in real measurable terms, do not benefit the public: on the contrary. In any case, some specialists have begun to hypothesize that the era of blockbuster shows is coming to an end if not for other than the for fact that the business model on which the are based may be ultimately unsustainable.

Here’s a brief rundown of the principal pros and cons of the blockbuster exhibiton and below a few intersting articles.

Here are some interesting articles on the subject:

• The rush to the box office: Museums are feeding an addiction for shows that put works of art at risk and allow visitors no time to reflect – The Art Newspaper, March 2013
• Top Ten Reasons why the Blockbuster Art Show is a Bad Idea – Art Smacked Feb 2012
• Death by Curation: Why the Special Exhibit Isn’t So Special Anymore (CASE STUDY) – Know Your Own Bone, March   2012
• Blockbusters: too big to fail? – The Art Newspaper, May 2011
• Is the blockbuster exhibition dead? – The Guardian May 2011
• Blockbuster art shows are no cash cows – The Australian, August  2010
• The CEO Art Museum Director: Business as Usual? – Transatlantica, Feb 2010
• To Blockbuster or to not Blockbuster – F Newsmagazing, April 2009
• Blockbuster Exhibitions – Why? – INTERCOM: International Committee on Management, October 2004
• The truth about those mega-exhibitions: the best works are absent, the curator has an axe to grind and you’ll learn nothing about the artist. – The Guardian, Jan 2001
• The trouble with blockbusters – The Economist, Nov 2000

Cheered by thousands, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands reopened today her country’s national museum after a 10-year renovation. And after years of whizzing around the world, the four Rijksmuseum Vermeers have finally come home for a much needed rest. Actually, the Milkmaid and Little Street logged only one trip aboard each, but the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter made a last minute trip around the globe while the travel lof of the Love Letter is too long to list (if you are up to this kind of thing I keep track of all Vermeer exhibitions here). Sending Vermeer’s Woman in Blue to Japan funded a highly detailed catalogue of Dutch Golden Age paintings, a three-volume set on artists born between 1600 and 1630. Meanwhile, the spectacular online database featuring 280,000 objects, half with accompanying images, has been completed.

The renovation of the Rijksmuseum took twice as long as expected and costs rose much higher than planned. Among the glitches, designers had to grapple with asbestos and the obligation to incorporate an existing bike path into their design. Administrators hope to double the attendance from one million pre-restoration visitors per year, to two million.

After traveling blockbuster art exhibitions, art enthusiasts can begin queuing up to enjoy the great masters in front of their local cinema. The silver screen, let’s remember, has traditionally dodged the company of great painters except for a few Hollywood films of questionable educational value: Rembrandt, 1936 starring Charles Laughton; Van Gogh, 1956 starring Kirk Douglas and Vermeer, 2003 starring Colin Firth.

Three new movies, featuring “superstars” (lets get used to the hard-earned status) Manet, Munch and our man Johannes Vermeer, will air in over 1,000 theaters worldwide. The art art historian-narrator Tim Marlow calls them “VIP guided tours.” Aside from the fact that the domination “VIP” is overwhelmingly synonymous with bad taste, the high-definition documentaries aim at bringing the arts closer to unsuspecting millions around the world.

The films will feature Marlow explaining why each artist, sorry, superstar, is special, interlaced with curator interviews, artist profiles and backstage tours in 90-minutes, for an average price of $12.50. Julie Borchard-Young, co-owner of BY Experience, the company distributing the broadcasts, believes it is “a way for an armchair traveler to come to the arts world, have it brought to them.” The new BY Experience films will attempt to build upon niche success of its live series from the Met Opera and London’s National Theatre.

Whether one can define cinema and blockbuster art exhibitions as private or public experiences, it would be interesting to investigate if they factually stimulate viewers to seek out art on their own and form individual points of view or encourage them to take a passive posture and wait for the prepackaged experiences to be delivered at their door like the latest Amazon order via FedEx.

In any case, marketing fine art seems to be good money. The MET realized $11 million from the opera broadcasts last year, Rigoletto took in $2.6 million in North America, ranking it No. 12 in the weekend box office, beating Argo and Lincoln. Next stop, Vermeer vs. Transformers IV.

A reminder, the paintings are still there, where they always were.

Traux Studio has ingeniously reconstructed 3D models two historical Delft buildings: Mechelen, where Vermeer grew up, and the Old Men’s House, directly behind Mechelen which Vermeer presumably represented in his his early masterwork, The Little Street. Obviously, the model of the Old Mens House is based on Vermeer’s painting while the Mechelen was drawn from an engraving of c. 1720 by Leonard Schenk. Mechelen was one of the largest constructions on the Market Square. The reconstructed views can be viewed in hight-resolution and purchased online.

The Old Men’s House was torn down to make way for the new Delft St Luke Guild building during Vermeer’s lifetime. Mechelen was demolished in 1885 to make the way clear for fire-prevention equipment and no building stands in its place.  If you are into the finer points of the historical location of Vermeer’s Little Street, go to Philip Steadman’s online essay.

film screening:
April 12, 2013 – 6:15 p.m.
Proust + Vermeer
(Dir. Richard Voorhees, 30 mins., in French with English subtitles)
Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park. 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco

If you are in the San Francisco area and are a Vermeer devotee, an evening at the De Young might be worthwhile. Arguably, the greatest French writer of the 20th century, Marcel Proust and one of the most fervent early admirers of Vermeer, wove many observations about the painter into his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. The most famous was the narrative of Bergotte, an aging art critic who leaves his sick bed in order to go see The View of Delft, suffers an attack and dies while admiring Vermeer’s painting and contemplating on the mysterious “petit pan de mur jaune.” Perhaps more than any other, Bergotte’s final thoughts before dying faithfully reflect Proust’s idea of art. (But which part of Vermeer’s View of Delft, if any, picture corresponds to the noted “petit pan de mur jaune”?) Click here.

Afterwards (7:00 p.m.) Kate Lusheck, Assistant Professor of Art History/Arts Management (University of San Francisco) and a specialist in 17th-century Northern Baroque art, discusses issues of artistic meaning, representation, and tradition in the paintings and prints of the Dutch Golden Age: Looking Beneath the Surface: Dutch Art and Meaning in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Ticket information.