Vermeer
and The Delft School was a blockbuster exhibit
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City that ran for just ten weeks in Spring, 2001.
It drew record crowds, with an average daily attendance
of nearly 8,000 people, including many repeat
visitors. In toto, the exhibit attracted over
half a million people. Some were so devoted to
specific paintings that they lined up outside
the Museum each morning. As soon as the doors
opened, they bolted through the galleries to visit
their favorites before the crowds could gather
to elbow them aside.
It's
been well over a year now, but Vermeer's luminous,
meticulous paintings still haunt me. And so I
offer this personal meditation as a kind of farewell.
I will remain grateful for the privilege of entering
into his vision of the blessing of simple sunlight
-- and for waking me to the mysterious that dwells
in what only appears to be ordinary or commonplace.
*
After
three lingering visits, Vermeer's paintings somehow
began to belong to me. Each time I stood before
them, I could almost feel their light fall across
my shoulders. I was surprised how small his canvases
were, and how intimate -- yet how powerfully they
lured me into sustained moments of solitude and
stillness. They made me feel lusciously alone
despite the hubbub around me; despite the susurration
of far too many Philippe de Montebellos whispering
archly into the ears of far too many people via
the very mixed blessing of AudioGuides.
For
words seemed entirely superfluous in the presence
of the women who occupy Vermeer's paintings so
fully. And it was the women who live so vibrantly
in those canvases who drew and held me: Vermeer's
fascination with all kinds of women ensnared in
all kinds of moments matched and deepened my own.
Here was a woman in the deepest, most ponderous
hours of pregnancy; there, a woman aching with
exhaustion, and another, with loneliness. Vermeer
offered me very young girls in the heat and confusion
of courtship alongside older women pouring milk,
clinching a deal with a john, adorning and assessing
themselves before mirrors so real I almost expected
to see my own face reflected.
I
fell under the spell of all those women, all those
years ago -- women pausing to notice, read, examine,
weigh; to carefully consider and reconsider in
moments of surprising gravity before they entered
back into their lives. How satisfying that a man
in that time and that place took time to notice
them, consider them, study them -- to show them
to himself, to themselves -- and to me.
*
Perhaps
my ability to enter into Vermeer's paintings was
enhanced before my third visit by two surprisingly
well-written, meticulously researched, and deeply
satisfying novels his work spawned over recent
years: Girl In Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland
(Penguin), and Girl With A Pearl Earring, by Tracy
Chevalier (Dutton). Each of the books, in its
own way, is a stunning act of imagination which
employs the small handful of facts known about
Vermeer's short life in Holland as a launching
pad for completely different flights of fantasy.
Why,
I wondered, was there such a great gush of intriguing
fiction in such a short period about an actual
artist? Perhaps it's because the paintings are
so evocative and, even more, because almost nothing
is known about Vermeer, thereby making it safe
for writers to imagine his life without a thicket
of facts to pen them in. That, and the fact that
the paintings themselves so cordially invite us
to walk into them: to imagine we can overhear
the conversations, feel the heat or chill passing
between the characters, move even closer to observe
the details of the maps and paintings hanging
right over there on the walls, or investigate
that mysterious man casting his shadow just out
of sight in the next room. It's easy to believe
we can reach out to touch the texture of the gold
braid on the orange velvet gown of the young women
getting tipsy from too many sips in The Glass
of Wine; or push open the leaded windows to peer
down into the noisy street below.
*
I
am drawn to Vermeer's paintings not only for their
pellucid atmosphere and sumptuous detail, but
for their considerable capacity to explore the
human dimensions of everyday life in a time and
place so distant, yet so immediate. In Woman Holding
A Balance, I find it hard to understand how scholars
ever overlooked the voluminous velvet-and-ermine-clad
belly of the woman observing the delicate balance
scales. It seems utterly clear that she is immensely
pregnant. My guess is that she's not only contemplating
the fate of her immortal soul, as suggested by
The Last Judgment symbolism in the painting behind
her -- but of her unborn child. Nothing seems
able to compete with her urgent interior fantasies
--not her pearl necklaces in softly radiant hues
of palest blue, bronze, and cream; not her golden
chains disregarded on the table top; not even
the grim, cautionary painting. Her inward gaze
suggests to me that she worries the same haunting
worries of all women so near delivery: How long
and painful will my labor be? Will my child live,
or die? And what will happen to me? Perhaps she
already feels her first labor pangs: is that why
she steadies herself against the table?
Despite
the darkness that nearly engulfs the room, the
woman's meditative face and full figure are flooded
with pale radiance -- moonlight? The cool purity
of that light seems transformative, even protective.
But I will only know her in that pensive moment
when trust and hope seem to hold their delicate
balance against fear and uncertainty. So in addition
to being ravished by the beauty of one of Vermeer's
masterpieces, I will forever hope that her fondest
wishes be fulfilled.
*
Vermeer's
meticulous rendering of the real -- both imperfect
and perfect -- offers a nearly holy sense of the
everyday: of sunlight and shadows shimmering on
cracked, nail-studded plaster; of smeared reflections
in well-used pewter and silver; of the small,
early morning miracles of light poking through
a keyhole, or gilding the doorjamb in a shadowy
room.
This
gift of my vision made new doesn't grow old once
it's unwrapped. One of the joys of visiting any
museum is not just what fills my eyes when I'm
there, but the ways my vision changes after I
leave. And so I cherish how Vermeer helps me see
the world his way, even just for moments: how
he wakens me to see the play of gray clouds against
a grayer sky; the harmony of close shadings of
mauve and lilac in a woman's skirt, sweater, scarf
-- even the shadows beneath and behind her eyes;
the splay of a child's bright shadow against the
museum's cement staircase, and the way it borrows
color from its source.
Vermeer
not only bestows the gift of seeing more precisely
and with a sense of the numinous: he also gives
the gift of silence, for his paintings awaken
a sense of the contemplative that not only helps
me see, but to listen in ways I often forget are
possible.
*
And so -- how did I say Vaarwel to Vermeer? Very
quietly. Without fanfare, or drum tattoos. By
remembering light falling softly through pale
colored glass on lustrous pearls or rich yellow
satin. By recalling children kneeling to play
on a tiled sidewalk while ivy clambered up a ruddy
brick wall and an old woman knit lace in a nearby
doorway. By celebrating the marvel of opaque pigment
transformed into the light and sheer crystal of
a diamond-etched wineglass.
Vermeer's
vision transformed mine. So I pause more often
at my windows overlooking the Hudson. And I notice:
thick, watery seams of tugboats plowing upstream
pushing heavy barges. Wind weaving plaids against
swift currents beneath the river. Ivy showing
silver just before rain. And I remember those
other women, standing quietly near their windows
all those many years ago, pausing just a moment
before they continued on their way.
Vaarwel.
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