Word: vermeer
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...Cheney] has sent me several books. In fact, the reason I read "Henry and Clara" is because she sent me Thomas Mallon's latest book, "Two Moons: A Novel." We also shared "The Girl With the Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier. That's a historical fiction about the artist Vermeer. That was one of the most recent, and I did like it a lot. Then I just saw the Vermeer show at the Metropolitan. It was fabulous. I also saw the one that was here [in Washington] about five or six years...
...Vermeer was by far the less eloquent artist. His figures don't gesture for attention; narrative relations between them are never dramatic. They can be curiously self-absorbed and if not passive, then at least quiet to the point of inwardness. They had that character right from the start of his career. Thus the earliest of the 15 Vermeers in this show--because of the massive borrowing power of the Met, it contains nearly half his known output--is his one and only mythological scene, of the moon goddess Diana. The favorite Diana myth among painters showed her bathing with...
...time he was in his 30s, Vermeer had developed a unique way of rendering light and texture. Instead of building up forms with continuous movements of the brush, he used tiny luminous highlights, pasty dots and spots bringing more dissolved areas of light into focus. These gave a startling effect of studied, textural distinctness. It's as though you see every crumb in a cut loaf, every thread in a tapestry...
...didn't let this turn into mere artifice. In Vermeer, everything is subordinated to wholeness and silence. No figures are more self-absorbed than his. That is very much part of their magic: they are so concentrated on what they are doing, and that is never public. A girl plays a virginal, its music unheard. A maid hands a young wife a letter--a love letter from someone other than her husband, we surmise, though it isn't stated. A young woman holds up a pearl to the light from a window...
...meaning hangs on the wall behind her: a Last Judgment scene, with the dead resurrecting under the presence of God in the sky. Their souls, the Bible says, will be weighed in the balance, that archetypal symbol of judgment whose tiny relative is held by the woman Vermeer has painted. As it is on earth, Vermeer insists, so it will be in heaven. But he's no spokesman for holy poverty. He is too much in love with the world--its pearly light, its rich surfaces, its densities and textures, and the beauty of the women in it--to pretend...