Flying Fox

Have you seen Vermeer Milkmaid at the MET? Then why not share your impressions, thoughts, questions and comments  here?

Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid
September 10, 2009–November 29, 2009

Not that I vilify large-scale art exhibitions, but small, though-out exhibitions with a sharp focus generally stick more with me. So when the MET announced that Vermeer’s Milkmaid would be the central piece of a special exhibition, I knew luck found me. Chance has it I will be in NY during the Milkmaid’s New York sojourn having already made plans to attend an opening of a show of my watercolors in a Manhattan gallery.

Along with the Milkmaid, five Vermeers of the MET permanent collection will be on display plus a few keys works to help clarify the exhibition’s point (three more are housed at the Frick a few blocks away). Anyone affected by Vermeer and who lives within a reasonable distance will not pass up this opportunity.

Museum goers will be in good hands: the exhibition is curated by Walter Liedtke who, as few,  has channeled so much productive energy into making sense of Vermeer’s 36 extant works and bits and scraps of historical information. Accompanying the show is a booklet (by Liedtke) which takes a rather original look at a remarkable picture.

Liedtke also discusses the artist’s unique patronage and its influence on the artistic and psychological aesthetic of the Milkmaid and other works by Vermeer on a MET  podcast.

Visitors’ comments are very welcomed.

See my interactive study of the Milkmaid here.

work: The Sacrifice of Isaac
artist: Andrea del Sarto
museum: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
get the zoom: http://www.clevelandart.org/explore/artistwork.asp?searchText=del+sarto&ctl00%24ctl00%24ctrlHeader%24btnSearch=go&tab=1&recNo=0&woRecNo=1

what it’s about: For a painter who wishes to comprehend the technique of Vermeer, the best imaginable venue would be to spend a day, even an hour, watching him paint.

The next best thing, this one at least theoretically possible, would be to be able study a half-finished work by Vermeer, say somewhere between the underpainting and the final working-up stages. No luck here either.

In fact, to think of it, we rarely come across incomplete paintings in any museums by any author or from any age, not because they are down on the gallery racks out of view, but because very few have survived. Most often, when a painter died or an incomplete work surfaced, either an apprentice or a competent colleague was called in to make it salable. Authorship, even in the case of the most renowned masters, did not have the same aura as it does today.

The third best solution would be able to study an unfinished 17th-century canvas by a competent artist. Wish granted. And not only is there such a picture, it’s viewable in an excellent Zoom on the net. To be frank, there is too much to learn just by looking, so get clicking.

If you are a painter and you need background information to make sense of Del Sarto’s canvas, my book How to Paint Your Own Vermeer on Vermeer’s methods and materials covers quite a bit of common 17th-century studio practices. If you are not a painter and would like to delve in to some of the mysteries of the masters’ workshop, you get the same information in lay terms in my Looking over Vermeer’s Shoulder.

When I launched the Essential Vermeer website 10 years ago, I was startled by how little was to be found on Johannes Vermeer and by the less-than-lukewarm attitude of the art community towards internet technology. On the other hand, being among the first to get seriously into the field was like turning into new four-lane highway with no cars on it and anywhere to go.

The latest feature of the  the Essential Vermeer Interactive Online Catalogue of Johannes Vermeer. It has been years in the making but only in recent months have I found the impetus to finish the job up having come across JQuery, an amazingly fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML event handling and animating (admittedly, only my youngest son’s patience and tech savvy permitted me to take advantage of it, beyond fundamental HTM, Photoshop and CSS, I am lost).

So, instead of me going on about what an online catalogue of paintings can do and all the endless research I have poured into the project, it’s best to simply go to the main page, click to the painting you like most and begin exploring. I hope you will learn and enjoy.

BTW, it’s just up so you may encounter bugs and misspellings that will be ironed out gradually. Please, please let me know of any problems you spot. You will agree with me that any Vermeer catalogue deserves to be perfect. Any suggestions and criticism are gold.

Bets are that you don’t know Caesar van Everdingen. Vermeer did.

Art historians believe that Vermeer used a now-lost, large-scale Cupid by Caesar Van Everdingen a good 4 times as a backdrop for his own compositions. The most explicit rendition, impossible to ignore, glares out from the late Lady Standing at a Virginal (see detail left). The other three are more discreet.

In the Maid Asleep, Cupid’s foot dangles in the upper left-hand where we can see the corner of a picture with an ebony frame. If you know he is there, you can see him standing erect in Girl Interrupted in her Music although pretty much obliterated by time and restorations. And had it not been for x-ray photography, we would have never known he hung in all his glory, dominating the background wall of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

Chances are Vermeer’s Cupid is the one mentioned in the inventory of his widow’s possessions in 1676.

Knowing how exacting Vermeer was in aesthetic matters, the modern viewer might wonder just what Vermeer had in mind. To our tastes Van Everdingen’s Cupid is simply too big, too confrontational, too rhetorical and too nude to have anything to do the values we prize in Vermeer’s art. Historians usually have no problem skimming over aesthetic valuations of the painting that no longer exists. Far more comfortable is to take Cupid as a symbol which 300 years ago meant, and still means, love to anyone.

In common with so many forgotten or underestimated artists, Van Everdingen occupied an important place in the art of his own time. The century-long refusal of critics and connoisseurs to look at his type of art shows signs of coming to an end.

It could not have escaped a young, ambitious painter like Vermeer that Van Everdingen was a superb technician, not only with detail and brushwork, but with his ability to paint portraits, mythological and allegorical pictures in a broad, yet crisp and polished style. His outstanding strength was his ability to simplify complicated forms and convey the sense of volume and surface with great pictorial economy. His treatment of light evokes the fullness of nature; even his shadows are colorful and pleasant to look at.

In his later years, when Vermeer pursued a more classicist agenda, Van Everdingen’s painting became more relevant than just being a convenient prop.

Luckily there are some excellent high resolution images of van Everdingen’s work on the net.

My preferences goes to:

Cupid with a Glass Ball
Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf
http://www.museumkunstpalast.de/mediabig/1845A_original.jpg

Winter
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/images/aria/sk/z/sk-a-4878.z

Bacchus with Nymphs and Cupid
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
http://www.oogvoornaakt.nl/

(this images is a bit laborious to access but very worth the while)

1. click on the “Bekijk alle naakten” link to the lower-right
2. scroll the multiple images to reach the far left-hand border
3. click on the farthest left-hand painting in the second row from the top
4. click on the medium size image of the paintings that appears which brings up an extraordinarily detailed image and use your mouse to explore the painting.

what is it? – Gerrit van Honthorst, like a number of 17th-century Dutch painters, knew his trade and worked well in different genres. He was equally comfortable in history painting, raucous bordello scenes and refined portraiture alike. Although sought-after in his own age, few average museum-goers are familiar with his work even though he was far more influential in his age than Vermeer. He was also far richer. In 1654, he sold his house in The Hague for the astronomical sum of 14,000 guilders (an average Dutch house might have gone for 1,000 or less) and lent Elizebeth, Princess of Hohenzollern no less than 35,000.

what to look for – Although the present canvas may not be particularly inspiring, it is nonetheless a solid piece of 17th-century painterly skill.

The most informative detail is the painter’s “selected” palette on which are disposed two rows of perfectly ordered paints blobs. The top are all the pigments conventionally used for mixing flesh tones. The bottom row presents the ready-to-use basic mixtures. If you don’t believe flesh can be so miraculously evoked with a hand-full of different tones, scroll up and inspect the faces of the lovely painter, the putto and her sitter. Analogous flesh palettes were employed by Rembrandt and Vermeer.

The choice of representing the selected flesh palette was far from random. From the very beginning of European tradition of easel painting, the depiction of human flesh was given great importance and it still constitutes one of the most telling technical challenges until this day. Willem Beur, artist and art writer of Vermeer’s time, wrote: “Just as we humans consider ourselves the foremost amongst animals; so too, are we the foremost subject of the art of paintings, and it is in painting human flesh that its highest achievements are to be seen, whenever a painter succeeds in rendering the diversity of colors and strong hues found in human flesh and particularly in the faces, adequately depicting the intricacy of the diversity of people or their different emotions.”

For the painter and the technically-minded, the top row of pigments probably are (left to right): lead white, yellow ochre, vermillion, red ochre, red madder, raw umber, black and a last unidentified pigment.

Selected palettes were the norm in 17th-century painting when complicated compositions were worked up in a piecemeal fashion, area by area. Painters laid on their palettes only those pigments which were strictly necessary for the day’s work in order to avoid waste of grinding time and raw materials.

Let’s be frank, since the internet began to reach out in the 1990s, the fine art community has made little headway on the web. Art with a capital “A” lags and it lags badly. Serious monographic sites of great artists are exceedingly rare and art collections and institutions are dutifully present but, save exceptions, not much more.

One area where progress is being made is in digital imagery. Major collections and museums are slowly but surely presenting their finest works with various Flash applications such as Zoomify allowing the viewer to scan with ease over good quality images. Some are carefully tucked away where the average viewer will never chance.

Obviously, we cannot expect to experience the impact of a work of art from the computer monitor no matter how high the image’s resolution may be. But zoom-viewing permits close-quarter, detailed observation that can provide its own pleasures and food for thought. Most importantly, considering that we will never, ever in our lives see 99% of these pictures where they are physically housed, high-quality, internet zooms constitute an illuminating resource and not merely eye candy for the curious.

The following Zooming-in columns  will report some of the most interesting zooms on the net, with hopefully, some interesting comments.

The name Van Meegeren is still a potent magnet. Eroll Morrris of the New York Times digs in and serves up a useful mulit-part article on the most notorious of all art-theft case including interviews with the authors the two most recent books on the subject, Jonathan Lopez and Edward Dolnick.

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/bamboozling-ourselves-part-1/

See my own Essential Vermeer interview with Lopez here:
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/interviews_newsletter/lopez_interview.html

and his take on the possibilities of the nightmare happening again:
http://flyingfox.jonathanjanson.com/2008/11/21/can-this-happen-again/

One of the paybacks of 9+ years of making the Essential Vermeer website is the constant influx of correspondence. Scholars and specialists inform me of their thoughts and writings, museums directors about their exhibitions and web initiatives. I receive suggestions, constructive criticism, books, articles and even proposals for collaboration from all over the globe.

Alongside public figures, there are people whose names I did not know who generously express their opinions and raise questions on about every facet of Vermeer and web publishing one could imagine. They send me images of their own paintings or a dusty canvas found in the attic hoping it’s  a Vermeer, posters, postcards, poetry and every now and then, a donation to keep the site going and growing.

The other day, a friend of the Essential Vermeer, Drew, established an absolute first.  After some email correspondence about his Vermeer travels and the newly attributed Young Woman Seated at a Virginal which just popped up at the MET, Drew went to view the work directly. He  pulled out his iPhone, snapped a digital photo and emailed it to me as he was standing in front of the painting.

Sometimes I wonder.

What would Vermeer have said about someone blasting an iPhone image of his painting instantaneously from one part of the globe to another he had never met? How would have he reacted if he new some of his 36 surviving works fly on jumbo-jets over oceans, mountain ranges and the Siberian tundra to be ogled by thousands of viewers who spend hours in line at exhibitions dedicated to his art in places called museums?  What would have he though if he could thumb through the lavish, band-new Vermeer: The Complete Paintings written by Vermeer specialist Walter Liedtke?

In my opinion Vermeer would have taken in all the technology with an wide, wide grin.  He would have loved the stuff. And he would have been delighted although sometimes puzzled at what has been written about himself and his work. Perhaps he would have needed a bit more time to comprehend how many people on the earth are knit together by his tiny canvases.

The Rijksmuseum has developed a webspecial to flank their temporary exhibition of Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance normally housed at the NGA.  It briefly investigates 3 aspects of Vermeer’s painting with comparative details of the Milkmaid (Rijksmuseum), Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (Rijksmuseum) and the Woman Holding a Balance (NGA). This special is nothing special, mind you, even though it might  interest those who tip their  toes into the water for the first time.

Lest one be disappointed at a missed chance (the code and text of the project must not have required more than a few hours to put together) visitors should remember that the Rijksmuseum offers a great deal when compared with other museums which house Vermeer paintings, especially, if you know where to dig. The quality digital scans of the museums’s holdings plus the depth of collection information can be daunting. Compare for example, the digital scans of the two Vermeers in the London National Gallery which cannot be downloaded by the viewer and bear unsightly watermarks capable of souring even the staunchest Vermeer devotee.

No doubt, the best part of this special are the downloadable images readily accessible on the press release page. In particular, the hi-resolution image Woman Holding a Balance is so accurate in color and exposition that it easily betters any printed image I have ever seen, a digital gem of sorts. The shot of the exhibition installation with the Milkmaid, Woman Holding a Balance and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is moving (see  image above photo: Jeroen Swolfs) if one recalls the time the Milkmaid and Woman Holding a Balance were hung together in Amsterdam in 1696 (see the post on the exhibition below).

Following the Rijksmuseum’s policy, the downloads are free for everyone and require no sworn oaths or bureaucratic sign-ups. Their heart is in the right place.

webspecial:
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/vermeer?lang=en

press release and images of the paintings on display:
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/pers/tentoonstellingen/vermeer?lang=en

With the usual hoopla Google has launched a virtual tour of the Prado Museum in Madrid that enables visitors to closely examine 14 of its masterpieces on their computers monitors. A Google spokesman said: “The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels).

“With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (by Rubens), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (by Roger van der Weyden) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (by Bosch).”

While broadening the access to digital images of art works is welcomed news, it remains to be seen what real need this initiative may ultimately fulfill. What is Google’s commitment to art other than drumming up one-time novel seekers and sprinkling their brand with a bit of highbrow culture? Personal experience has shown me that museum goers rarely spend more than a few seconds per painting as they “do” the gallery and with special exhibitions it is not uncommon that visitors spend more time reading the accompanying brochure than looking at the objects on display.

Gary Schwartz, one of the most knowledgeable experts of Dutch 17th c. art, briefly mulled over the fashion of major museums who lend themselves to the cause of contemporary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Read his article.

Like it or not, Hirst sealed a pact with the Rijksmuseum  (where four of Vermeer’s works are permanently housed) to exhibit his world-famous diamond encrusted skull along with the artist’s personal selection of sixteen 17th-century paintings from the Rijksmuseum collection.

Not content, the Rijksmuseum also dedicated a special website to Hirst’s work that must have been meant to work somewhat like a lighten rod. It democratically invites all opinion to efficiently channel the negative away. And, yes, in a clean hi-tech way.

I propose Vermeer’s macabre passage above (a detail of his Allegory of Faith) hoping it might constitute proof he was on par with his English colleague at least is one respect. Most of us know that Vermeer died penniless … and as Marcel Proust wrote,“ obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body.”

Hirst need not tremble for his own fate, costing £14 million to produce, his skull was sold to anonymous investors for its asking price of £50 million, the highest price ever paid for a single work by a living artist.

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.

“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 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.

Europe thought too big. As soon as the mother-of-all digital library Europeana.eu got launched 20 November, 10 million hits per hour caused the entire system to crash. If curious, check out their laconic apology.

For a timely Google alert and quirk of fate I was able to view all the Vermeer images before the site struck ground and I can guarantee the wait will be worth it for scholars and public alike.

If you want to know exactly what Europeana is, click here.

After a Sunday morning internet survey, I have discovered I am pretty much on my own; there are virtually no art history blogs. The most applicable post, appropriately dated more than year ago, takes a look at the dilemma. It is summed up here:

Dissent or agree as you will, art historians included.

Europe is thinking big and has just launched Europeana.eu, a huge digital library with more than 2 million digital items drawn from the museums and galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual collections of 26 European countries. For Vermeer people, there are already very nice surprises. Click on the links below and then click on the thumbnails for enlargements. Be patient, some of them require lots of loading time, they are very big.

The View of Delft, The Milkmaid. The Love Letter, The Little Street, The Woman in Blue and The Girl with a Pearl Earring.