A great exhibition, as art historian Gregor Weber contends, should change your view of the world. As outgoing head of the Department of Fine Arts at Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, earlier this year he had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to curate the largest ever exhibition of the works of Johannes Vermeer.
If the name seems familiar cinematically, it’s possibly because Scarlett Johansson starred in the 2004 adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s highly specious novel, Girl With a Pearl Earring, a fictionalized account of the painting of one of Vermeer’s most famous pictures. Chevalier was given the space to fill in the gaps of Vermeer’s life because so little is known about him, little beyond the barest of details. Born in 1632, he lived and worked in the city of Delft as an art dealer, fathered 15 children, painted a few dozen pictures – small pieces, mostly painted in the same room in his house – and died at age 43. He is now recognized as a revolutionary figure in Baroque art: However, in his lifetime he was a minor artist, barely known outside of his hometown and completely overshadowed in the Dutch Golden Age by his peers, Rubens and Rembrandt.
And the biggest enigma: How many paintings did Vermeer actually paint? That’s the challenge facing Weber and exhibition curator Peter Roelofs as they attempt to put together the definitive exhibition of his works. It’s also the intriguing narrative of Close to Vermeer, Suzanne Raes’ wander through the gallery as the team attempts to define what a Vermeer is.
The quest is surprisingly tense (especially for anyone who has undertaken any archival work) every time a picture is removed from its frame for restoration or scanning. The scanning is important: This is an unprecedented opportunity to pull together every confirmed Vermeer – or at least those about which there is sufficient academic consensus – and look at them, brushstroke by brushstroke, pigment by pigment, layer by layer, stripping away restorations and later additions to analyze and speculate about the master’s methodology.
That the revelations surprise even the obsessive Weber helps make Close to Vermeer so fascinating, especially as he works to prove his theory about Vermeer as an innovator of optics, explaining his incredible comprehension of how shadows work at a level that far outstripped his contemporaries. At the same time, it triggers a complicated and sometimes awkward discussion of attribution: What if a supposed Vermeer is not a Vermeer, or was finished by another artist, or the subject of a bad restoration, or a copy, or an imitation, or maybe the flaws are Vermeer on a bad day? Such discussions bring the single-minded Weber clear pain, and so it’s fortunate that Raes can alleviate the stress, at least a little, with the mechanics of assembling an exhibition, as Weber and Roelofs overcome seemingly impossible hurdles of curation and the team at home fusses over details of merchandising and barriers. And while Raes may not be able to replicate the experience of the show for the cinematic audience, she undoubtedly leaves them with a new perspective on the curator’s calling, and the work of Vermeer himself.
This article appears in July 14 • 2023.
