Word: vermeers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shine. The late 17th century in Holland was an age of the eye: optics was a ruling scientific interest, and the telescope and microscope were opening tracts of nature that up till then had been below or beyond normal sight. As an aid to painting his View of Delft, Vermeer probably used the camera obscura--a box with a lens that captures the image of a scene on ground glass. It may be that the circles of confusion--the luminous spots caused by imperfections of the lens--gave him the idea for his poignant highlights, the liquid white dots that...
Light comes out as sacred, even in a homely scene--or especially there. Vermeer's religious paintings and allegories aren't very moving or convincing; God is in the shimmering, glinting details of the house. In Young Woman with a Pitcher, circa 1658-60, the subject holds a gilt water pitcher while opening a casement window whose leaded pane looks just like a 1912 Mondrian apple tree turned on its side. Blue is everywhere: deep ultramarine in her skirt and sleeves, lighter blue in the cloth on the table, whose tone rhymes with the rolling...
Sight has taken over from narrative. Nothing really happens. Time has stopped. Yet for all his classicism, his tense repose and care with proportion and interval, Vermeer can be a theatrical painter. It's just that the theatricality is cooled down by being shifted from people to props, leaving the peace of the figures undisturbed. It's like the moment when a curtain rises to show an actor in reverie ignoring the audience...
...negotiating these things, your eye becomes tuned to the distance of the figures and to the air around them: the woman at the keyboard whose back is turned but whose absorbed face can be glimpsed in the canted wall mirror, and her teacher (or perhaps, given Vermeer's interest in music as a metaphor of harmonious love, her suitor) in black. You can gauge the depth of the room from the perspective clarity of its floor tiles. It is real, but at the end it becomes a paradise of abstraction, in the sober play of dark-framed rectangles of picture...
...Vermeer's visual music is utterly mysterious. He wasn't only abstract on the large scale of composition, negative shape and depth. When you look at the details, you see a system of coherent microforms in every representation of small pattern and texture, whether he's doing the faux-marble finish of a virginal case or resolving the optical glitter of a gold frame into tiny lozenges of paint. You're meant to enjoy both the illusion and the means by which it's brought about. Supremely conscious of his language, he puts all the machinery in the open--like...