Vermeer’s Syndrome

Tomorrow, February 10, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will open an exhibition destined to become an absolute sensation in the museum world for years to come. 28 works by Jan Vermeer (Johannes Vermeer, 1632-1675), collected in one place, is a record of records. No wonder the Dutch advertisers borrowed as one of the slogans of this exhibition the slogan of the Brueghel exhibition in Vienna 2018-2019: “Never again in life.” Indeed, even in the lives of our children and, perhaps, even grandchildren, it is unlikely that there will be another opportunity to see so many “Vermeers” together. About why we would all like to get to this exhibition, reflects columnist “Kommersant” Kira Dolinina.

Vermeer is one of the main myths in the history of art. Not in the sense that everything they say and write about him is a lie and fiction, but in the fact that the mythology that has developed around the artist and his paintings is so strong that it makes people return to them all the time. The main component of this myth is “mysteriousness”. The beautiful definition given to Vermeer by the French critic Theophile Thoré-Burger, who “rediscovered” him in the second half of the 19th century, “The Sphinx of Delft” sets just such a tone. And it’s true, we know very little about him, there is room for fantasy to unfold: he didn’t live long (43 years), left behind a bunch of children (there were 15 in total, 11 survived), almost no documents, the teacher is unknown, there seem to be no students, and suspiciously small for a normal productive artist of the Golden Age of Dutch painting paintings. Difficulties immediately begin here: to date, 37 canvases are attributed to him, however, even on the website of the Rijksmuseum exhibition, data on 35 or 38 paintings coexist side by side. Some particularly harsh experts call the number 34. The difference is small (Tore-Burger considered more than 60 canvases to be “Vermeers”), and it is so difficult for any museum or collector to refuse that he has a work by Vermeer in his collection that the “suspected” paintings are still long kept in catalogs and at exhibitions. So at the current gala there are at least three works in doubt – two “troniers” (images of types) from the National Gallery in Washington and one “Girl behind the Virginal” from the private Leiden Collection, New York.

Yes, the improbability of the exhibition opening tomorrow is primarily in its size. 28 works by Vermeer in one exhibition – extravaganza. However, this is not the only reason why people from all over the world are already buying up tickets for free slots from the first to the last day of the exhibition, until June 4th. This exhibition promises them strong impressions, emotions, a touch of the “mystery”, that is, something that is highly valued in modern museum consumption, but can not be “guaranteed” so often. The last time the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum provided its viewers with an exhibition of Brueghel (408 thousand spectators), but there were fewer open questions and more fascinating slow reading of famous paintings.

The main problem of looking at the works of Vermeer is how to catch what is impossible to catch: his specialness, dissimilarity where he is strikingly similar to his contemporaries and colleagues, his genius, the very “piece of the yellow wall” of which, according to the writer Bergott, the hero of Proust, Worth more than all of his books combined. Actually, “genius” is the main request with which the viewer comes to watch Vermeer. And if there are so many Vermeers, then the “genius” per unit area must clearly be more than what we can imagine.

At this point of expectation, viewers are confronted with the reality of art history. Experts have not discussed Vermeer’s “light breathing” or “divine light” for a long time, for them it is much more important to understand the social context of his life, professional connections and laws to which the artist obeyed or not, the features of the technique and technology of his painting. In the catalog of today’s exhibition and in the monograph of its chief curator Gregor Weber, attention is primarily focused on the issue of Vermeer’s relationship with different faiths – from the long-standing and yet unproven assumption that he converted to Catholicism for marriage to the influence of Jesuit neighbors on himself and the symbolism of his paintings. Almost all the news that accompanied the preparations for the exhibition at the Rijksmuseum concerned technical aspects: for example, in The Milkmaid (1658–1659), the latest technical means made it possible to see objects recorded by the artist himself in the underpainting. This allowed art historians to refute the established notion of Vermeer as an artist who painted slowly and amazingly accurately from the moment he began work on the painting. In the same series of studies is the discovery of specialists from the Dresden Gallery, who saw under the gray wall behind the “Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window” (1657–1658) a picture recorded by an unknown person with Cupid almost a third of the entire canvas size. The finds are, of course, interesting, but the story of the Cupid left more questions than answers: the deaf, chipped gray wall was much more “genuinely Vermeerian” than what the restorers who removed it discovered.

Because “Vermeer” has long been a concept, a phantom from our ideas about it, based on a legend that is completely unsupported by facts about the forgotten and rediscovered Delft genius, which is all poetry and magic.

There is no point in arguing with this. Of course he is a genius. Of course, it is for the evidence of this that people will go to this exhibition. And yes, love for Vermeer has already given rise to the “Vermeer Syndrome”, which, akin to the “Stendhal Syndrome”, falls into the abyss of this mythology lovers who are ready to rush around the world in order to see “the whole Vermeer”. From tomorrow they have a holiday – and they can only be envied.