17th century AD

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Vermeer's paintings are familiar from countles reproductions, and greatest in quantity of them are not too difficult to come by to in major museums in America and Europe wherefore go to the trouble, and take the risk, of making an exhibition without of as many of them as can be borrowed? The question went from one side my mind when the Vermeer present to view [ended in February in Washington, reconven until June 2 in The Hague] was first announced. on the contrary in the event, I was simply beakered over. The familiar paintings direct the eyeed newly wonderful and also newly strange. in what manner hopeless it is to think that individual can really see them in photographic reproductions or in slides! novel conservation played a part in the freshnes of their appearance. on the contrary bringing the paintings together highlighted the pair the consistency and the oddities of Vermeer's project

I can't recall another exhibition which became a pilgrimage site in quite the faculty of perception that this one did. The periods of unexpect closure to be paid to the government's budget crisis and then a snow storm sole increased people's desire to take up the journey. These paintings, the feeling was, didn't be entitled to to get caught up in the machinations of politics or the accidents of nature. on the contrary pilgrimage, with its implication of rites of devotion, does not acquire it quite right. The stance taken up by dint of viewers in front of the paintings at the National Gallery was not individual of quiet veneration but of active interest. It was noticeable that Vermeer's paintings engaged family in looking at works of art in ways that they are seldom trusted to do these days, at least not in the intrusive, hectoring atmosphere of American museums. After Rembrandt with his herculean output, his crowded workshop and his display of a personal turn of expression it is a relief to approach to Vermeer with his solitary 30-plus autographic paintings (the exceptions in my view being the questionable Young Girl with a Flute and the Girl with the R Hat in the National Gallery), his impersonality, his focused creativity.

Vermeer was not unknown in his time and his works were at no time forgotten. It is a bit of myth that he was rediscovered through the French critic Thore-Burger in 1866 Like many myths, allowing this one contains a kernel of verity A discriminating taste for Vermeer existed in Delft during his working life. After his death, he continued to be a great value to several generations of collectors with cash and taste in Amsterdam. This is marked in the praise evok and high prices commanded whenever individual of his few works came onto the market. on the contrary it so happened that, for reasons that remain unclear, he was left without of Arnold Houbraken's Groote Schouburgh the foundational 18th-century Dutch handbook upon artists. So it was that for almost 150 years after his death Vermeer remained a matter of a local knowledge. (Hence, the curious fact that the scarcely any Vermeers to leave Holland at the time were attributed to those Dutch artists who were familiar to, and hence a value to, outsiders. In 1742 Vermeer's Girl Reading a alphabetic character at an Open Window came to Dresden as a Rembrandt!)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Though Vermeer's reputation remained a local individual for well over a hundred it is clear that his works were not pass overed and never lacked for value What is puzzling is in what manner these paintings, mostly concerned with domestic life in the 1660 in a city of 25000 in the province of Holland, became a central value to European and, upon the renewed evidence of this exhibition, American agriculture How is it that Vermeer's interests and skills attract for a like reason many and seem so valid in a world in like manner different from his own?

Vermeer looks hardly the artist to appeal to this postmodern age. Many critical voices--and many of today's art works--put canonized accomplishment beneath pressure, while Vermeer's paintings are clearly outstanding, smooth eerily so. Present-day critics and artists alike value art for its engagement with the world, and artists many times press the point by appending explanatory words to their works. on the other hand Vermeer's paintings are essentially wordless. And although they have been much written about, it is extraordinarily difficult to set their look into words. What is it that is in the way that remarkable about the View of Delft when individual sees it there across the room? individual understands why Bergotte, the author described by the agency of Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, famously died in the belief that his writing had failed to equal the value of a little patch of Vermeer's gold-colored wall (actually, a sunlit roof) (French writing upon Vermeer, with its emphasis upon the painted mark, has its beginning here, as does French faith in the View of Delft as paradigmatic of painting.) This, individual feels spontaneously, is what painting is all about. on the other hand has one ever seen--has there at any time been?--another painting like this one?

Vermeer is a latecomer and heir to a unraveled pictorial tradition. The scheme he starts not on from is always a conventional one--in this case, the printed city views oftentimes assembled around a map or in an atlas. View of Delft takes not on from such images, at one time emphasizing the chosen format and intensifying the world perceived and exhibited within it. There is the novel invention of fogs nudging the painting's upper cutting side the contrast of gray above white repeated in the shut firmlyed shadowlike reflections of the buildings staining the pale water gray. Where is the orb of day that lights the roof and the town beyond?