Flying Fox

from Prospect:

The prices of contemporary art works have risen to astonishing levels in recent years. Insiders say it’s because we have been living through a golden age of art. Nonsense, argue Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford, it is a classic investment bubble.

from the: Norton Simon press release

Vermeer’s Painting Techniques: Time Stilled and Light Made Tangible
Melanie Gifford, Research Conservator, Scientific Research Department, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, January 3, 2009, 4:00 p.m.

Vermeer’s paintings suggest that time has been momentarily stopped, giving the viewer leisure to explore his light-filled rooms and contemplate his pensive figures. Technical study of Vermeer’s materials and methods has revealed painting practices the artist developed to achieve these luminous effects, and artistic choices he made to create a timeless and self-contained world. Melanie Gifford explores A Lady Writing in the context of Vermeer’s techniques throughout his career, illustrated with close details and microscopic images of the paintings that give a new view of his extraordinary gifts.

Vermeer,  Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum
Vancouver Art Gallery
May 9 to September 13, 2009

This exhibition will highlight works of art of the 17th c. Dutch painting masters of the Golden Age. It will feature well over 100 works by many of the most celebrated masters of the period such as Aelbert Cuyp, Gerard Dou, Franz Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer, as well as an extraordinary selection of decorative arts, including furniture, silver, glassware, porcelain and textiles.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum and will include Vermeer’s late masterpiece, The Love Letter.

I would not miss the lecture or the book.

The Man Who Made Vermeers:
Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren
Sunday, January 11, 2009, 2:00 p.m.
East Building Concourse Auditorium, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Jonathan Lopez discusses aspects of his recently published book, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Han van Meegeren’s Life in Forgery. Book signing to follow. Sunday Lectures at the National Gallery are free and open to the public on a first-come-first-serve basis.

BTW, The Man Who Made Vermeers is fifth of the 10 Amazon Best Books of 2008 in the Arts & Photography section. Well deserved.

It is surprising to discover that the stark white-washed wall in Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace was not a part of the artist’s original plan. Neutron radiography reveals that the girl’s silhouette was initially embraced by a large, decorative wall map of the United Provinces (identical to the one in The Art of Painting). Modern viewers do not regret the map’s disappearance. Other than being an extraordinary poetic statement in itself, Vermeer’s blank wall is a tour de force of pictorial technique.

Portraying the volume and play of natural light on white objects has always been problematic for painters. Aside from the rendering human flesh, no other motif challenges an artist’s technical skills and visual sensitivity more than a banal but elusive expanse of flat, uniformly blank wall illuminated with raking light. By comparison, analogous passages in Dutch genre paintings seem merely descriptive.

Although there are many ways to portray a nude white wall, Dutch 17^th century painters habitually used a simple combination of three common pigments: white lead (a bulky pigment made by the renowned Dutch stack process), raw umber (a low-key, greenish brown made of natural earth) and black (usually selected wood, vegetable prod­uct or animal bones which have been calcinated).

Obviously, the most intensely illuminated area near the widow is painted with the greatest quantity of lead white although pure white pigment seems to be reserved for the shiny lid of a nondescript container of the still life. As the wall receives less light moving from left to right, the near-white paint mixture must be gradually toned down by adding small quantities of brown and black. However, it is extremely difficult to calculate the correct proportion of the base pigments so that the wall appears darkened rather than simply dirtied. Too much black creates a sullen, brackish effect which bears little relation with the overall warm harmony of the painting spoiling the illusion of light. If too much brown is added the wall fails distance itself from the foreground figure and create the subtle pocket of air which flows throughout the painting. At the same time, the paint must be carefully brushed on and delicately blended without overworking the paint layer so as to avoid producing a mechanical smoothness.

As much as I have observed Vermeer’s wall and probably understood how it was painted, in front of the real painting its effect is so commanding that I am unable to separate the pictorial artifice from the illusion of a sunlit white wall, perhaps the most perfect wall ever painted.

Although art theft is a fairly fashionable topic, it is not one of my favorites most likely because it has less to do with art and more to do with theft. So the upcoming book about the sordid Gardener theft (which netted Vermeer’s Concert among its victims) is off my reading list for the time being.

Moreover, the loss of The Concert saddens me in particular because it was the first Vermeer I ever saw and one that taught me a big, free lesson as an art student at RISD.  The painting convinced me that, instead of opening doors, my painting teachers had more simply replaced old dogmas with new dogmas which were more or less as restrictive as the first.

Then, as throughout most of the 20th c., one of the most entrenched mantras of realist painting technique was that black pigment would single-handedly destroy the luminosity of shadows. Black was in fact an inexorable sign of the Sunday painter.  But even after my first glance at the real Concert, it seemed obvious that Vermeer had made abundant use of it to render the play of light on the background wall lending this passage a rare pearlessence full of mystery and nuance. Moreover, black was one of the principle components of the composition’s deepest shadows. Scientific analysis reveals that in one form or another, black is the only pigment which can be found in every canvas by Vermeer.

Back to the book:

PW Daily lets us know about the upcoming The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser. In a pill, here’s the story.

BBC’s Simon Worrall reports that the faceless, special Agent Robert “Bob” Wittman retires. Why should this regard anyone who reads an art blog?

Vermeer’s Concert, stole on March 18, 1990 has yet to be recovered.

Read the Worrall’s article here.

Although the European Union’s new Europeana digital library may be a boon for art historians, it will remain shut down until January instead of mid December as previously announced. Inspired by nothing less than the ancient Library of Alexandria, the ambitious project will eventually employ the state-of-the-art technologies allowing users to access to films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers, and documents as well as books held in European libraries. A quick search on “Rembrandt,” for instance, turns up 1,747 paintings, etchings and drawings all in one place.

The downed prototype contained roughly two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain. However, some will be inevitably be plagued by issues linked to copyright and online use.

If you happen to be interested in the tech side of Europeana’s setback, this article is reveals what went on behind the scenes: Obvious Mistakes Caused Europeana Site Failure.

Philip Steadman, the English architect who stirred up so much discussion with his book about Vermeer and the camera obscura, will be giving a lecture called Anamorphosis in Holland in the 17th Century: Van Hoogstraten, Fabritius and Vermeer at the National Gallery in London, Saturday 13 December, 10.30am – 4pm.

I expect he will be examining the intriguing lid of the painted virginal in Vermeer’s Lady Standing at a Virginal.

See my interview with Steadman here.

The other evening I attended the opening night of an exhibition of 25 oils which I have painted in the last three years.

Openings have their pros and cons. One valuable pro is that they have taught me that is it possible for a painter to form a realistic idea of his works only when they have been taken from the studio, framed and hung on the stark white walls of a distant gallery.

The moment I first set foot in the gallery (an hour or so before the public started to trickle in) it was apparent which were the most autonomous pictorial statements able to fend for themselves deprived of my personal expectations, affections and prejudices.

Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the public generally concurs with my view.

Above, I believe, is one of the mores successful works (Girl Writing an Email, 2008). Click on the image for an enlargement.

If my math skills are not as bad as I suspect, within two years 13 canvases by the Vermeer will have collectively travelled no less than 98,179 miles (see the post below with a list of travelling paintings and their destinations). To give you a more tangible idea of the distance involved, the circumference of the earth is 24,902 miles. Don’t forget, 98,179 miles is nearly half way to the moon.

On the other hand, the longest documented trip made by the artist was Delft-Amsterdam. That’s 66 miles round trip, as the crow flies.

The first time I saw the Woman with a Pearl Necklace was at the block-buster exhibit of 21 Vermeer paintings in Washington. The room where it hung was so congested that I barely resisted an hour. Under the circumstances the work left no impression and the mental image I had previously drawn from scores of reproductions remained unscathed.

My next encounter was 7 years later at the Madrid Vermeer and the Dutch Interior exhibition. Again, it was a jam-packed event with a minimum of 5 viewers per painting. This time, however, I was resolved to make the best of the situation and held my viewing ground as much as good manners permitted.

The picture made an unforgettable impression but one particular passage left me puzzled: on the left-hand side the girl’s gray gown was a dark rectangular area that made little sense (it cannot be seen in any reproduction). At first glance it suggested a dark recess in the woman’s gown but, in effect, it was far too wide and too dark for that. Was it Vermeer caught in an off-moment, the consequence of decay, faulty restoration or something else?

Recently, I was once again able to observe the picture which is on temporarily loan here in Rome. Even though the lighting is dreadfully low, a pair of strong reading glasses allowed me to draw close the canvas without tripping the alarm and see more than I had before.

The paint layer of the passage in question does not appear flawed; on the contrary, it seemed to have been deliberately and carefully executed. After a few moments of close inspection I noticed the presence of a very fine blurred line of light gray paint that runs parallel to the area’s right-hand edge dividing the dark into two parallel strips. Click on the schematic drawing above for an enlargement and see what I mean.

It struck me that instead of representing a part of the girl’s gown altered by some variance of illumination or fold, this passage might describe two decorative strips of black or near-black fabric sewn down the front of the gown. One such gown is worn by the seated lady in Gerrit Terborch’s Lady Peeling an Apple in Vienna (see detail left). Vermeer himself may have rendered a similar, but darker garment in his early Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

While knowing exactly what kind of gown the young lady adorns hardly alters the “meaning” of the painting, to me it helps to underline the care with which Vermeer treated the accouterments of the women he loved to paint.

“When Johannes Vermeer painted Girl With a Pearl Earring more than 300 years ago, he couldn’t have foreseen how his iconic portrait would one day be reproduced – or just how tiny that portrait could be.

How tiny? A University of Montreal researcher has rendered the famous image within a single drop of liquid vitamin on a microscope’s glass slide, reducing the portrait’s dimensions to a mere 200 microns – about the width of two human hairs.”

If that is not enough, read the whole article.

In a recent post I wrote that there are virtually no art history blogs of the net. Instead, two interesting ones have been brought to my attention: The Art History Newsletter by Jonathan Lackman and The Art Tribune by Didier Rykner. Keep them coming.

The Louvre will be sending about 70 artworks to Japan in 2009 for a special exhibition of 17th c. paintings, The Louvre Museum Exhibition: 17th Century European Masterpieces. The exhibition will be held at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo and the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and will include Vermeer’s dazzling little Lacemaker.

Not all are elated as the NTV who sponsors the event. Read Didier Rykner’s The Louvre without Vermeer at the Art Tribune.

The Lacemaker’s voyage adds a notch to the current “travelling-Vermeer count, 2008-2010″ which now stands firm at 13 (two pictures make two trips each). This boils down to the fact that one third of Vermeer’s known artistic output will be travelling tens of thousands of miles within the span of a mere two years.

1. The Astronomer – Atlanta 2008
2. The Little Street – Tokyo 2008
3. Diana and her Companions – Tokyo 2008
4. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary – Tokyo 2008
5. Young Woman Seated at the Virginals – Tokyo 2008
6. Woman with her Maid – Tokyo 2008
7. Girl with the Wineglass – Tokyo 2008
8. Lady Writing – Pasadena 2008
9. Woman with a Pearl Necklace – Rome 2008
10. The Lacemaker – Tokyo and Kyoto 2009
11. The Astronomer – Minneapolis 2010
12. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary – The Hague 2010
13. The Procuress – The Hague – 2010

Although the signature on Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace cannot be made out in any reproduction, one has no problem finding it when directly viewing the work. It is discreetly positioned on the side of the massive extendable oak table (parallel to the picture plane) slightly to the right on the slate-blue tablecloth (click on the image to the left to enlarge the schematic drawing I recently made of the area in question). It is executed with a delicate but firm touch using a slightly darker pigment than the base tone of the background. The typical monogram (IVM in ligature) is a bit clearer than the following ”eer”.

On those mature canvases which bear signatures, Vermeer declined to adopt the conventional formulae of signing in the lower left- or right-hand corner where it presumably might not disturb the aesthetic balance of the composition. Instead he positioned it in assorted places subtly varying its size, tonality and style. At times it is more prominent and at times more discreet always but it is always done with an infallible sense of pictorial design.

One senses that for Vermeer, the signature may have had an additional function other than simply claiming authorship.

Another curious little “secret” in this work that cannot be seen in reproductions is the presence of two circle-like forms to the right of the signature. Although they are clearly deliberate, they are so faint that they can easily be missed, I failed to spot them both times I had previously viewed the canvas. On close inspection, the upper one is composed of two tiny concentric circles which suggest a doughnut like form. The lower one appears to describe a delicately semi-spherical relief.

I have not a clue what these forms represent but they must have meant something otherwise Vermeer would not have painted them with such finesse.

The Mauritshuis (home of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, View of Delft and Diana and her Companions) has launched their own blog which is perhaps a first for such a prestigious collection. For the moment it can only be accessed from the Dutch website but is nonetheless it is written in English.

Presently, it not quite clear how the Mauritshuis counts on handling public interaction. There appears to be no way to leave comment from the blog’s platform and, in effect, the blog’s author(s) remains anonymous.

Since the Mauritshuis prizes public dialogue and has such excellent organizational capabilities, I imagine that their objectives will be more precisely defined in the near future.

Museums have been painfully slow to develop blogs and community sites which would seem a logical (and incredibly inexpensive) extension of their goal of public awareness.