Director: Suzanne Raes (Netherlands). Year of Release: 2023
Two older men are laying postcards on a cardboad rectangke like a high art version of Pelmanism. Gregor Weber and Pieter Roelof are curating the largest ever Vermeer exhibition, which took place this Summer in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. At the moment, they are going through Vermeer’s works, dividing them into the ones which have been promised for the exhibition, and those which require further negotiations with the gallery (or in one case private individual) who owns then,
Like much of this film, the experience of watching two clearly knowledgeable men go thrrough their daily work is in equal parts fascinating and frustrating. They know the works, and each other, so well that they barely need to communicate. We watch in from the outside, as they swap pictures around. In a similar scene, later in the film, they decide which picture should hang in which room. We see what they are doing but don’t learn why they are taking their decisions.
The people featured in Vermeer – Reise ins Licht are not just experts – they are also obsessives. They reminisce on the first time they held a Vermeer in their hands. One says that the first time he saw a Vermeer picture “I actually fainted”. This is all very laudable, but it strays slightly into the territory of Art as Product. You get the feeling that what is being celebrated is not so much the beauty of the paintings as the fact that they were painted by Vermeer.
This is most clear in a dispute which rumbles through the film. Weber and Roelof have an obvious interest in attributing Girl With A Flute to Vermeer. If it were not a Vermeer original, it would have less pulling powerwithin the exhibition. But a group of US American academics have produced what they consider to be compelling evidence that, although the painting is in the style of Vermeer, and looks very like one of his other paintings, it was painted by somebody else.
One argument that this must be a Vermeer is the skin colour of the titular girl. It has a green tinge, the result of a technique that only Vermeer was using at the time. This is less than compelling evidence, as surely other artists were perfectly capable of studying and copying Vermeer’s style. The Americans float the idea that the painter was one of Vermeer’s students, who would have learned the technique of colouring skin using green earth from him.
Another argument is that maybe this was by Vermeer when he was having a bad day. I’m sure that the experts had access to knowledge which doesn’t appear in the film, but on camera they dismiss this suggestion out of hand. There is a good argument to be put that the Dutch curators are – consciously or not – arguing out of self-interest, but I’m not convinced by the assumption that any work by Vermeer must have a certain quality (and Girl with a Flute is certainly not a bad painting)
Most frustrating for me, though, is that no-one asks the question: Does any of this actually matter? We are being implicitly asked to judge the quality of a work of art not on whether it moves or impresses us with its form – in short, whether it is Any Good – but on who it was made by. If Girl With A Flute is not a Vermeer original, does this make it a worse (or better) painting? Unfortunately, no-one seems to feel that this question is important.
Similarly, there is much expert discussion about the person of Vermeer, which I don’t really find relevant. There are no known pictures of or writings by Vermeer. Looking at the one painting in which he features (in which he is viewed from behind), someone says: “It would be interesting to know what he actually looked like-” Well yes, but only up to a point. How would a vision of Vermeer’s face affect how good or bad his paintings are? Is art improved by including selfies?
We hear of different trends of analysing Vermeer’s work. The one that’s most interesting to me – that, unlike those of most of his contemporaries, his subjects were mainly working class characters – is dismissed as being something from the past. More in vogue now is the idea of Vermeer as a feminist. Certainly he did paint a lot of women, which is important. But the other evidence – there were a lot of women in his household so he must have been for women’s rights – is unconvincing.
Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of interesting information inside this short film. The scenes of pictures being x-rayed to check their authenticity, the presentation of a camera obscura to show how Vermeer must have produced his portraits, the discovery that the bird cage in Girl Interrupted in Her Music was added long after Vermeer finished the picture, are all fascinating, but they rarely touch on the aspects of Vermeer which particularly interest me.
Vermeer had a perceptive control of colour and shadow. He was also working at a particular historical moment – the birth of mercantile capitalism in the Netherlands. How did this situation affect the Art which he was able to produce? The use of light and shadow is mentioned in passing, although we are not shown enough concrete examples. The historical aspect is barely addressed. Instead we mainly experience an internal discussion amongst people within the closed Art world.
The film opens by asking “What makes a Vermeer a Vermeer?” It never really manages to answer this question. Although given the range of subjective and academic interpretations, maybe there is no single answer. We do learn about how commerce and self-interest affects the availability of what we see in exhbitions. We are also offered a glimpse of Vermeer’s Art. At one point, Weber says, disappointedly, “All we have is the paintings”. But do we really need anything else?
CinePhil 