Word: vermeers
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Winslow Homer was, along with Thomas Eakins, the greatest American painter of the late 19th century. Vermeer of Delft was the greatest Dutch one of the late 17th century. Both are the subjects of extraordinary retrospective shows at the National Gallery in Washington. But because the Republicans' zeal to pressure Bill Clinton into signing their balanced-budget bill has closed the National Gallery (along with the whole Smithsonian complex, and much else), nobody can see Homer in Washington, though the show will travel to Boston in February and New York City in June...
...Vermeer is more difficult. From the moment it opened two months ago, it was besieged by art lovers--as many as 4,000 a day, lining up to see 21 paintings, two-thirds of the master's surviving output. Because Vermeer's work is so rare, no such gathering of it has been made since his lifetime, or will happen again in ours. But, on Dec. 16, the show had to close. Last week the National Gallery's director, Earl ("Rusty") Powell III, managed to scrape together the necessary $12,000 or so a day from private museum funds...
Whatever happens, the show has to close for good on Feb. 11 in order to go on view at the Mauritshuis in the Hague in March. Nothing in the budget blackmail epitomizes the Republicans' folly as well as Vermeer. He's the canary in our ideological coal mine. This, one realizes, is part of what Congress's cultural ignorami mean by renewing American civilization. It is done by humiliating cultural institutions and depriving Americans of what the institutions contain. Meanwhile, at the National Gallery, lines have been forming at 6 a.m. in below-freezing weather and stretching round the block...
Forget about social history. Though any post-Marxist pedant can wring out the usual insights about patriarchy and property in 17th century Dutch bourgeois life, none of them touch on the peculiar magic of Vermeer's images. Like Piero della Francesca, Vermeer was a highly inexpressive artist. He didn't even paint a self-portrait, as far as anyone knows. You come out of the exhibit knowing almost as little about Vermeer the man as when you went in. Biography, faint: Lived in Delft, a backwater. Son of a silkworker. A Papist in a Calvinist town. Quite successful nonetheless. Married...
...interiors raise the obsessive cleanliness of Dutch domestic culture to the level of abstraction--no wonder his great Dutch successor, Mondrian, loved him, for that and other reasons. Vermeer's jonkers and juffers (dandies and damsels) are so neat, dressy and full of decorum that you can hardly compare them to the rowdier figures elsewhere in 17th century Dutch art, coming on with wineglasses and making gestures of sexual insinuation. Vermeer's are seldom marked by experience, and except for maids and servants, they all belong to the same stratum--a class, needless to say, rather above his. Does this...