Vermeer: The Complete Paintings
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Vermeer: The Complete Paintings Details
About the Author Walter Liedtke is curator of European paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Read more
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For more than a decade, Walter Liedtke has publicly channeled his erudition and seemingly boundless energy in the cause of Vermeer scholarship. As curator of European painting for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, he produced the book, A View of Delft: Vermeer and His Contemporaries in 2000, marshaled the astonishing 2001 New York/London exhibition, Vermeer and the Delft School, and was the principal author of that exhibition's remarkable eponymous catalog, the best comprehensive scholarly account of Vermeer and his milieu yet achieved, punctuated as it is with scintillating, extremely faithful reproductions of much in Vermeer's oeuvre. In Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, the third volume of the ambitious Classical Art Series, Liedtke seeks to build on his previous work while distilling recent scholarship about this artist.Perhaps Liedtke's most important contribution in Vermeer: The Complete Paintings is embodied in the title. The gravitas of his analyses leaves little doubt that the thirty-six paintings presented here constitute Vermeer's authentic canon, at least the works that have surfaced over the years, although Liedtke believes, with good reason, that the artist produced at least six other canvases that are now lost. Because he had years ago dispatched, with others, the dubious Wheelock/Kitson attribution of St. Praxedis from any association with Vermeer, Liedtke makes no mention of that benighted work. Extending his previous evaluation of the Girl with a Red Hat and Girl with a Flute, small paintings on wood panels now residing at Washington's National Gallery of Art, he convincingly dismisses Albert Blankert's long-standing doubts about Vermeer's authorship of these paintings, although he's aware that the latter work suffers from a lack of the artist's finished refinements, most likely the result of another's (clumsy) brush. And he is the first serious scholar to bring on board the newly reattributed Young Girl Seated at a Virginal, now the only Vermeer painting in private hands. Liedtke's standardization of Vermeer's oeuvre will inform all future scholarship about the Delft Master, no small accomplishment.In too many other ways, however, Vermeer: The Complete Works disappoints.In books of this kind, Vermeer connoisseurs should expect vibrantly true reproductions of the master's paintings, allowing them to enjoy stellar facsimiles of Vermeer's art without trekking hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to see the originals in museums, although extraordinary reproductions often stimulate the desire to do so. However, with but few exceptions, the quality of the reproductions here is substantially below the quality of Liedtke's 200l exhibition catalog. Only the superbly restored The Procuress passes muster, revealing the magical silvery light that also permeates many other Vermeer paintings.Overall, the reproductions seem devoid of the vivacity characteristic of the first rate. Many are too dark in key areas, hiding telling details. Some are dreadful, notably both Ladies Standing and Seated at the Virginal, extending out to Woman with a Balance and The Milkmaid, and including the Girl with a Pearl Earring (so pinkish) and the Woman in Blue Reading (with those yellow walls). Pictures of The Little Street, the majestic View of Delft, the operatic Art of Painting, and the Girl with a Red Hat are of average quality but a side-by-side comparison with the same works in the Delft School catalog discloses their deficiencies. To be sure, Vermeer's subtle glazes and nuanced tone don't lend themselves to high fidelity copy. Nonetheless, The Complete Works is not an inexpensive volume; it costs more than the 2001 catalog, where good reproductions abound. Generally better copies also exist in Irene Netta's Vermeer's World, as well as in Mariet Westermann's Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675).Although Liedtke makes many accurate observations about what is known of Vermeer's history and his surviving paintings, and occasionally writes with wit and pleasure about his subject, he also fails to deliver on his promise of showcasing relevant new material about the artist's work, often ignoring or unfairly discounting a good deal of compelling research. Throughout, he's often in conversation with himself, frequently referring back to his previous work to confirm his present opinions, while sometimes fashioning circular tautological explanations for why Vermeer's themes and optical effects seem related to those of his peers.He also writes long passages in Jack Van Impe fashion. Van Impe is the bizarre televangelist who rationalizes eschatological prophecy by linking a series of Old and New Testament verses together to "prove" how scripture reveals the coming end times. There are scores of these kind of name-dropping passages embedded into the fabric of Liedtke's narrative: "For all these possible and indisputable sources, however, it is not enough to say that A Maid Asleep is a Delft version of pictures by Maes (with a touch of Ter Borch), any more than The Procuress (cat.3) may be seen to closely resemble a Caravaggesque picture by a painter from Utrecht or even from Delft (namely, Van Couwenbergh; fig. 3b)."Vermeer lived in a world filled with artistic creativity, and his work, like Shakespeare's, was informed by varied influences, including the tropes and styles of many artists, the imagery and icons familiar to his society, as well as the visual, even musical, entertainment rhetoric favored by the wealthy. Vermeer also inhabited a world of philosophers and proto-scientists keenly interested in the nature of perception and the acquisition of veridical knowledge, often deploying optical aids as part of their inquiry. His art bridged and assimilated both worlds.Of all the artists in the Dutch Golden Age, perhaps Vermeer best achieved the ideal known as houding, a theoretical precept by which painters of his era sought to demonstrate their mastery by blending abstract, almost musically harmonious perspective design with convincing illusions of images in space to fool the eye and engage the viewer. Moreover, the range of Vermeer's genius--esemplastically encompassing scientific and philosophical investigation, pictorial and painterly virtuosity, musical, philosophical, and literary allusions--was enormous. The eidetic quality of his images in some cases was placed in service to allegory and reification, answering such questions, for example, as what would music look like in concrete, visual form.Poetically, he nested layer upon layer of diverse meaning into the best of his works. Although the Woman with a Balance is surely about equipoise, as Leidtke posits, perhaps even with religious connotations, it could also serve as the cover for Descartes' Meditations as the pictorial symbol of the cogito at work. And it could be a punning critique of religiosity as well, as the poet Edward Snow has suggested.Nothing serves an appreciation of Vermeer's intentions better than an understanding of his penchant for paradox, the idea that two opposing ideas can both be true. Along with what Gowing has called Vermeer's special "optical way," it is the artist's enchantment with paradox that appeals to modern experience and sensibility. He was an entertainer of the highest rank.Vermeer seemed obsessed with ambiguity, likely recognizing its importance for creating tension. He took pains to minimize explicit narrative. One of the reasons to treasure Vermeer's art is the way the artist sets a tumult of painterly images and thematic activity against each other but then resolves the complex tensions as one perceives the work in whole, where one is struck by a sense of serene balance, even stillness, with everything in harmony, much in the way fugal contrapuntals in a Bach orchestration are ultimately resolved by the end of the score.Liedtke imparts little of this complexity. He typically deconstructs Vermeer's paintings with prosaic, comparatively narrow explanations, as if relating how Huckleberry Finn is a story about a boy on a raft. Perhaps he should read Don Delillo's novel, Underworld, particularly the first chapter--and note the Vermeeresque way DeLillo engages a baseball game, a quotidian contemporary trope. The novelist unleashes intricate energies, ultimately boiling down the sport of baseball and the era this game was played into their essence. This is what genius does. What Vermeer did.Liedtke admits that a formal School of Delft painters is a fiction. But no one--from Thore-Burger down through Hale, Gowing, Descargues. Blankert, Wheelock, Westermann, among many other scholars--ever doubted that Vermeer both influenced and was influenced by such contemporaries as Ter Borch, Fabritius, De Hooch, Van Mieris, Maes, Metsu, Steen (some of whom lived for a time in Vermeer's Delft), and a plenitude of others, going back to Campin. By insisting that Vermeer's art owes so much to the artist's ability to synthesize the work of others, Liedtke is beating the deadest of horses, which expired no doubt from the overwork of plowing no new ground.Discerning eyes recognize familiar settings and themes but all acclaim that Vermeer's style is unique, transcendent. The artist's paintings appear different from the work of contemporaries, set apart with the glow of optical, highly cinematic sheen, much as if they were lifted out from a movie reel. This is largely the reason so many art experts believe Vermeer was greatly indebted to the images produced by the camera obscura: the facture of his paintings shimmers with soft edges, intense color saturation, and an inner light characteristic of the pictures projected within that device. Indeed, Vermeer's paintings exhibit all of the features captured in a camera obscura.Liedtke can huff and puff all he wants in an effort to dispel the idea that Vermeer's artistic sensibility is tied to the camera. But he fails to blow the house down. His dismissal of Philip Steadman's research is not only cavalier; it is also frequently petulant and, in some instances, demonstrably wrong. A professor of architecture at London's University College, Steadman (see his book, Vermeer's Camera) scientifically recreated Vermeer's studio, using a "reverse perspective" technique to make geometrical reconstructions of the rooms depicted in six Vermeer paintings, showing they were all just one room. After conducting a series of mathematical perspective analyses, followed by small-scale modeling demonstrating that the "projected images" of those six paintings onto the back wall were the same size as Vermeer's canvases, he finally placed a closed chamber constructed of curtains at the back of a full-scale recreation of the studio at an angle of view appropriate for Vermeer's The Music Lesson, one of the six paintings. With a four-inch lens, the device projected a rectangle on the back wall precisely the size of that painting. Steadman did not, as Liedtke states, cherry pick this result. Rather, it emerged unbidden. By arranging the scene at the front of the studio with models of people and furnishings in the precise positions of those depicted in The Music Lesson, and simulating the north light that Vermeer's studio likely had, Steadman achieves remarkable verisimilitude, with photographs of the simulation taken at the proper angle of view providing not only the correct size of the paintings and its details but also similar shadow features throughout.There simply is no escape from Steadman's conclusion that Vermeer used a camera obscura to compose these paintings, perhaps even tracing the projected image. One could explain a single incidence as the result of chance. But not six. The architect agrees that such a camera projection would have been upside down and reversed. But he then explains how Vermeer could have overcome this obstacle. Furthermore, Steadman serendipitously found evidence that Vermeer's probable actual studio, a room on the second floor of his residence, had dimensions with almost exactly the same shape and volume as the one he had recreated. For more about these findings, see Steadman's Vermeer's Camera: Afterthoughts and a Reply to the Critics at [...]and then Steadman's commentary, along with those of Ab Warffemius, [...].All of Vermeer's interior scenes are entirely frontal views, with the same one point perspective as photographs. No trace of any drawings has been found in connection with Vermeer, and no drawings have been detected in any of the painter's foundational working methods. There are pinholes in many of the works, strongly suggesting Vermeer used a pin and a chalked string to clarify his orthogonal lines. But this is not evidence Vermeer deployed such a simple perspective technique for more than guiding lines to their vanishing point; Steadman shows there were other complex perspective geometries at work. He also explains how easily the lens's focus could be altered to adjust foreground, middle and background effects.Vermeer may have anticipated the working methods of today's film directors, staging his scenes in the light of his camera, changing his mind, rearranging models and lighting until he was satisfied, after which he began to paint what he saw in front of him, occasionally altering his images for artistic affect. He certainly had the technical skills to paint what he saw without staying within the confines of his makeshift camera, although he may have returned to it from time to time to refresh his mental image about the effect he was striving to achieve. Nowhere should any of this imply that Vermeer's art was not the result of ideation, for what he painted was nature filtered through his artistic sensibility, and he likely used the camera as he used his brush and paint, considering it one more tool to enhance his artistic--and intellectual--ambitions.It is difficult to understand why Liedtke continues to resist this idea, particularly since he showed that Fabritius' A View of Delft was part of a perspective box, proving that the investigation of optical phenomena was of great interest among artists who might have influenced Vermeer. It takes nothing away from Liedtke's general thesis and it elevates Vermeer as an artistic tactician. Savvy historians such as Westermann have embraced Steadman's research, using it to inform their writings, as she did in her splendid recent monograph on Vermeer's Rijksmuseum paintings, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). In this work, Westermann also features Steadman's compelling case for the location of The Little Street, behind the Mechelin in Delft, research that Liedtke simply ignores, ex cathedra. [...]There are many good commentaries in this book. Liedtke makes the case for Pieter van Ruijven's (Vermeer's patron) ownership of The Concert and the thematic affinities of this painting with The Music Lesson. By placing them next to one another on the page, Liedtke shows how Van Ruijven might have hung them in his cabinet, enjoying their visual conversation. The observation here that the man in The Music Lesson is singing is a novel one, and very probably correct, although the telling detail of this activity is problematically not in evidence. But there are also commentaries that aren't strictly accurate. And there's much that could have been said that was not.Maria Thins, Vermeer's future mother-in-law, did not reside at her cousin's house along the Oude Langendijk when she moved to Delft, as Liedtke has stated. In fact, she may have moved in well after Vermeer and her daughter were married. Moreover, there is no good evidence that Vermeer himself converted to the Catholic faith in order to marry Catharina Bolnes. Montias could find none and neither could Anthony Bailey who, in his excellent Vermeer: A View of Delft, mentioned that mixed marriages did occur at the time if circumstances permitted. There is no hint of personal religiosity in any of Vermeer's paintings, including his Allegory of the Catholic Faith, one of the artist's least convincing works. Early on, Liedtke admits the case for conversion is equivocal, after which he often states it as fact. There are many good reasons to suspect that Vermeer did not change from the Protestant religion of his parents, although there is strong evidence that he allowed his children to be raised in the Catholic faith and did not interfere with his wife's practice of it, both standard conditions the Church imposes to this day in order to sanction mixed marriage.There is also the claim Vermeer, like most artists of his day, did not depict pregnant women, this based upon a review of the literature and the opinion of a fashion expert who argues the jackets worn by many of the women in Vermeer's paintings were meant to emphasize a bell-shaped appearance. Consequently, for Liedtke, the women in Woman Holding a Balance and Woman in Blue Reading were not pregnant. But here one should trust visual good sense, as Van Gogh did. The women in these two paintings are the quintessence of pregnancy, especially the former with her bright red-orange abdominal curve, which draws the eye to it. None of the other women shown in Vermeer's works, women wearing similar jackets, appear to be pregnant. But, this is not to say that Vermeer did not intend ambiguity on this, as on every other, question.Did Vermeer make a lot of alterations from the actual cityscape he saw when painting his View of Delft, as Liedtke says that he did, building on Wheelock's earlier observations? The evidence for this comes from comparing Vermeer's painting, done in 1660, with an Abraham Rademaker drawing made fifty years later. Although the two renderings were made from slightly differing angles, the similarities are actually striking. Most differences appear due to contrasts in style and vantage point. The Capels Bridge in both pictures looks long and straight; the two city gates, when adjusted for the aerial perspective, seem nearly congruent. Even the rooflines appear similar. What gives Vermeer's painting its distinctive cachet is the atmospheric light and color applied so artfully across the schematic grid. Although the image may have been constructed from a template formed from the lens of a camera obscura, its vivacity is due to the skill and mind of its creator--as Liedtke continues to remind.Reader appreciation of the Girl with a Red Hat would have been enriched by more discussion of Vermeer's painterly technique, pointing out such delights as the turquoise highlight in the girl's eye and the complementary pink highlight between her lips. And what of the pinwheel and nearly camouflaged images of women entwined in the tapestry to the left of the girl's ear? And then there's the "shadow hand" subtly embedded in the headscarf worn by the Woman with a Balance, so invisible and yet so riveting once revealed. And then there's Liedtke's own observation about Mistress and Maid, footnoted in his View of Delft, in which he thinks that Vermeer mismatched the scale of the two women, obvious when studied carefully, because the artist believed the painting might be hung high on the wall, well above eye level. And indeed, if one crouches down near the floor of the Frick, and looks up at the painting, the scale of the two women seems to align perfectly. Even holding the picture of the painting in the book above eye level provides this perspective. But, alas, Liedtke makes no mention of these bon mots in his latest book.Walter Liedtke deserves much praise for Vermeer: The Complete Works. It will doubtless become a graduate text on Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age, where it may well serve as a foil for colloquy. Its rhetorical style is more appropriate for academia than for the lay reader. Still, given the launching pad it had with Vermeer and the Delft School, it should have been much better. Vermeer's complete story remains to be told. To do so properly, the biographer should have the relentless curiosity of Michael Montias; the scientific acumen of Philip Steadman; the literary/philosophical sophistication of Jonathan Miller (do see his comments in the Vermeer video, Life, Love and Silence) and Anthony Bailey; the synthetic perception of Mariet Westermann; and, not least, the artful eye and fearless pen of Walter Liedtke, who challenged the silly stampede of art historians supporting the St. Praxedis attribution, with its whiff of Van Meergeren, and then publicly chided Albert Blankert for his pigheaded resistance to the Girl with a Red Hat, in the process giving his more circumspect (timorous) colleagues some much needed backbone in connoisseurship. Despite his failings in the Complete Works, Liedtke continues to provide much needed leadership in a profession brimming over with followers.
