{"id":1936479,"date":"2026-05-15T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1936479"},"modified":"2026-05-15T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T06:00:00","slug":"one-erased-vermeer-two-books-and-no-consensus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1936479","title":{"rendered":"One Erased Vermeer, Two Books, and No Consensus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tA room sits empty, save for a lone chair and a shaft of golden light. Yet in the details\u2014a patterned marble floor, blue Delft tiles, a stained-glass window pane\u2014the setting for George Deem\u2019s painting Extended Vermeer<\/em> (2000) is unmistakably a 17th-century Dutch home. What other period\u2019s interiors have become so immediately legible, and psychologically captivating, to contemporary viewers? Thanks to the work of Johannes Vermeer, the quiet simplicity of a world four centuries removed from our own has come to stand for a distinctly modern subjectivity\u2014one that is private, contemplative, and individual.<\/p>\n

\n\tDeem, an American artist who died in 2008, at the age of 75, is central to Ruth Bernard Yeazell\u2019s new book about Vermeer\u2019s legacy: Vermeer\u2019s Afterlives,<\/em> out next month from Princeton University Press. Deem copied Vermeer\u2019s paintings but removed their figures, leaving more space for the kind of projection that Yeazell argues is essential to Vermeer\u2019s enduring popularity and continued emulation, by artists from Vilhelm Hammersh\u00f8i to Gerhard Richter.<\/p>\n

\n\tVermeer is best known for tonally painted genre scenes, precise enough that he was believed to have used a camera obscura, and yet atmospheric enough\u2014that glorious light!\u2014to seem almost otherworldly. His scenes of everyday life are evocative yet without strong narrative components. Their interpretive openness makes space for viewers to develop their own associations, either dwelling in absorptive ambiguity or writing their own endings, as in the many works of fiction and poetry based on the artist\u2019s oeuvre that Yeazell catalogues. The mystery of Vermeer\u2019s figures, often female, gave rise to works from Tracy Chevalier\u2019s blockbuster novel Girl with a Pearl Earring<\/em> (1999) to lyric poetry. Eamon Grennan\u2019s line, \u201cSince he painted her, she will always be putting this pearl necklace on,\u201d takes the artist\u2019s work deliberately out of its own time and offers it up to eternity.<\/p>\n

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Johannes Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring,<\/em> ca. 1665. <\/span>Mauritshuis<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIn absenting the paintings\u2019 principal figures, Deem\u2019s gesture mimes the treatment of Vermeer himself, who was largely removed from history for two centuries before a French art critic rediscovered his work in the 1860s. Th\u00e9ophile Thor\u00e9 traveled to Holland in 1842 and was struck by \u201ca superb and very singular landscape\u201d in the museum at The Hague, painted by an artist who \u201cvery much deserves to be known\u201d\u2014Vermeer\u2019s View of Delft<\/em> (ca. 1660-63). His 1866 article catalogued the artist\u2019s work and identified in Vermeer much of what he found lacking in French art of the time: authenticity, nature, light. From the earliest historiography, then, Vermeer was employed to respond to the needs of the present. He re-entered the historic record at precisely the time that French painting became more concerned with atmosphere than story, a development that has come to define modern art.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo make the Dutch artist\u2019s work modern required forgetting its original context, an oversight that Andrew Graham-Dixon seeks to redress in his recent biography of the artist. Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found<\/em> restores specificity to the artist\u2019s oeuvre, finding in the smallest detail symbolic allusions to the particular concerns of the seventeenth-century Netherlands.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo invested is Graham-Dixon in setting the historic scene that the artist\u2019s birth only occurs on page 77 of his 416-page tome. Before that, he takes the reader through the complicated wars of religion that ravaged the region and outlines the formation of alternative religious movements, most notably the Collegiants (an outcrop of the Remonstrant church). Opposed to strict Calvinist principles, the Collegiants promoted pacifism, tolerance, and personal spiritual practice.<\/p>\n

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Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window<\/em>, 1657-59.
\n<\/span>Photo Wolfgang Kreische\/\u00a9Gem\u00e4ldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tArchival evidence reveals that Vermeer\u2019s patrons, Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, were not only members of the Collegiant movement but hosted Collegiant meetings at their home, known as the Golden Eagle\u2014meetings for which Vermeer\u2019s canvases may have provided the backdrop. (Maria was both the leader of the meetings and Vermeer\u2019s primary patron, a feminist twist on the standard history of patronage.) For Graham-Dixon, it is Vermeer\u2019s affiliation with the Collegiants above all that defines his work. He sees Vermeer\u2019s painting as an act of faith, a sacrament akin to baptism or communion and a way of manifesting a better world in times of strife.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeazell and Graham-Dixon\u2019s accounts of the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window<\/em> (ca. 1657\u201359) demonstrate their divergent approaches to Vermeer. The work had long been thought to feature a blank wall in the background. But the painted blankness concealed a picture-within-the-picture of a naked Cupid. While it was initially assumed that Vermeer himself had covered over the Cupid, thus embracing a more mature style based in contemplative space and an expanse of pure painting, recent restoration work reveals that the overpainting happened after the artist\u2019s death. For Graham-Dixon, the presence of the symbolic Cupid proves this is a marriage painting depicting sacred love; for Yeazell, it is a challenge to Vermeer\u2019s presumed modernity.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich version of Vermeer appeals\u2014whether Yeazell\u2019s modern inspiration or Graham-Dixon\u2019s religious devotee\u2014depends on what we want from art: its past truths or its present resonances. Both authors deepen our understanding of this singular figure, whose scant oeuvre of some three dozen pictures has bequeathed a continually radiating light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/DSC_6410-1024×682-1.webp?w=1024″] A room sits empty, save for a lone chair and a shaft of golden light. Yet in the details\u2014a patterned marble floor, blue Delft tiles, a stained-glass window pane\u2014the setting for George Deem\u2019s painting Extended Vermeer (2000) is unmistakably a 17th-century Dutch home. What other period\u2019s interiors have become so immediately legible, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1936479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1936479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1936479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1936479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1936479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}