Blog Meridian: Vermeer

Showing posts with label Vermeer. Show all posts

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Dalí re-imagines Vermeer

The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table, 1934.

One of my students is writing a paper on a couple of Dalí paintings; I didn't recognize them from her descriptions of them and so went a-Google-ing for them yesterday. It was while hunting for them that I ran across these images, which make explicit reference to certain of Vermeer's works.

They're here because, well, it's my blog and (not that I'm all that familiar with Dalí in the first place) these are new-to-me images that are at least intriguing to me because of my appreciation for Vermeer--and in the case of The Ghost of Vermeer I genuinely like. Beyond that, I don't have much to say about them aside from the rather simplistic speculation that Dalí sensed in the work of this otherwise very different painter a sort of dreaminess that would, you'd think, appeal to a Surrealist painter.

All the images here were found at Virtual Dalí. As always, click on the images to enlarge them.

The titles are, in order, Apparition of the Town of Delft (1936), The Lacemaker (1955), and Paranoiac--Critical Study of Vermeer's Lacemaker (1955). As a bonus for you fans of Velázquez, I've also included Dalí's very late painting, The Pearl (1981).

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Art Meme III: Art to see before you die

Via Crooked Timber comes news that the Guardian has started a blog on the arts. In its inaugural post on art, Jonathan Jones has a post called "The works of art that matter most," its intention being the generation of a list of the 50 works of art one must see in person before dying. Jones kicks things off with his personal list of 20 works (the list and an accompanying slideshow are below the fold), and he solicits recommendations from his readers. He notes as a sort of pre-emptive strike that his list is exceedingly Euro-centric and Renaissance/Baroque-heavy; still, though, he says that these are the works that he alsways finds himself returning to--which, I suppose, would be the one criterion for works for this list. Not fame, not "beauty;" what works, finally, can you not get enough of, no matter how many times you see them?

Jones includes a Vermeer on his list, but my personal addition would be the one you see here, The Milkmaid. Long, long ago, I blogged about this painting, if you're curious, here and here in an attempt to get at why it may be my favorite Vermeer and one of my very favorite paintings, period.

Honestly, though, I'd have to think a bit before I add some others. I mean, we all have our personal favorites, but do we feel so strongly about them that we would have the temerity to insist to total strangers that they will be lesser human beings if they do not make time to see them in person? I'm pretty sure I can say that about The Milkmaid.

How about you? Jones is soliciting suggestions at his post, but you're welcome to comment here or, even better, take a hint from this post's title.

slideshow (Be warned that the order here doesn't correspond to that of the list below.)

Jan van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, c.1435, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Caravaggio, The Burial of St. Lucy (1608), Museo di Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse, Sicily

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1654), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

San Rock Art, South African National Museum, Cape Town

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (1904 - 6), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Michelangelo, Moses (installed 1545), Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Magi, (c. 1481), Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Mark Rothko, The Rothko Chapel (paintings 1965-66; chapel opened 1971), Houston, Texas

Vermeer, View of Delft (c.1660-61), Mauritshuis, The Hague

Matthias Grünewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1509-15), Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France

Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ, (1521-2), Kunstmuseum, Basel

Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun (1333-1323BC), Egyptian Museum, Cairo

Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (c.1427), Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937), Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid

Titian, Danaë (c. 1544-6), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

Raphael, The School of Athens (1510-11), Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace, Rome

Parthenon Sculptures ("Elgin Marbles"), c. 444 BC, British Museum, London

Henri Matisse, The Dance (1910), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

EDIT: As is usually the case with me, it belatedly occurs to me that some of you might want to see the other art meme posts in this blog--and even play along at home, if you wish. Here is the first one; and here is the second one.

Technorati tags:
Art, Canon, Memes, Art memes

Sunday, April 11, 2004

Further thought on The Milkmaid

Earlier tonight, Susan and I spoke on the phone at some length about the two Vermeers I mentioned in the previous entry, specifically about their composition. I just wanted to add a couple of comments about The Milkmaid here.
I have always felt welcomed and included in the space of this painting, and I had said this was so because of the activity depicted. Well, in part, Susan has helped me to see. First of all, she made me notice that the table is angled in such a way that it points into the space of the painting and thus doesn't form a barrier between viewer and maid. But second and more significant for me, she asked me where my eyes end up resting when I look at this painting. It's the opening of the pitcher of milk: the thin white pouring of the milk contrasting with the round black orifice of the pitcher. That black space creates a psychic entrance into the painting for me, one that is as inexhaustible as the stream of milk the Maid pours.

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Assessment-Land; Vermeer's Milkmaid

It's Holy Saturday, and now, I think, I have a bit more distance from our faculty's Thursday discussion of assessment. Then after that, I'd like to talk at some length about Vermeer's beautiful painting.
Where to start? Perhaps with the truism that American education, because of demands from parents and businesses and government, is driven by the requirement that it assess its students and itself. Fine (I guess). I'm ambivalent because I certainly believe that schools need to demonstrate in some way that they are fulfilling their mission; but what is irksome is that the assessment models the accreditation agencies have adopted recently are essentially cribbed from Total Quality Management models and then allegedly tinkered with to fit the work that happens in a college or university. The trouble is simply that actual learning is fiendishly difficult to quantify--and since all schools declare, in some form or fashion in their mission statements, that they seek to shape their students into productive citizens, how the heck does one measure THAT?It is tempting--and many faculty do this--to blame assesment models on the administration, but they have no choice: the accrediting agency tells the schools, "This is the model and the language we'll be using for assessment, and, assuming you want to retain your accreditation (duh!), this is what YOU'LL be using, too."So, then: On Thursday, the president (whom I have great respect for, talked about our new assessment model, something called AQIP (which stands for something but whose meaning escapes me--and in any event, as I'll note late, it doesn't much matter what it stands for). Among other things, she mentioned that it was a model that had been borrowed from business but had been reworked so as to fit better with the work colleges do. So far, so good. But then we moved into our "break out sessions" (a term whose connotations spin in myriad not-necessarily-desirable directions), and Jim, one of my fellow English faculty, led us through how this model is supposed to work. He began by saying that everyone who has any sort of investment in the success of the school is termed a "stakeholder." Internal stakeholders are those people who receive a paycheck from the school; external stakeholders are everyone else: the community, businesses, government . . . and students??? "Oh, really?" I asked Jim. "Students are external stakeholders?" "Yes" "Well: I certainly have learned something new today." The minute Jim told us this, it was clear that, at least as far as student were concerned, the only modification of the business model was that, while we wouldn't be referring to students as "customers" (thank God), they weren't re-imagined as being anything other than customers.Here's the trouble with that analogy: its presumption is that an education is what's for sale, just like widgets. The model breaks down, though, when one considers what an education actually is. Buying a widget doesn't make one smarter; it doesn't fundamentally transform the purchaser. An education is supposed to do that by design, though. In other words, students may start out as external stakeholders, but while they not become internal stakeholders as defined in this model, they certainly don't remain external ones as defined by that model.That becomes even more obvious when we get to the assessment process itself: we in the faculty are supposed to assess the learning of our students--our "outcome," to use the model's language. Yet in the process model we were given, which shows us what elements contribute to the Outcome, "students" are one of those elements. Never mind that, as an open-admissions campus, we have no control over the quality of students we admit; how can external stakeholders also logically be considered intrinsic to the "product" the school produces--and, for that matter, as passive an element of the process as wood is when making widgets?The system is inconsistent on its own terms; how then will it produce accurate assessments? What makes some of us even more cynical is the strong suspicion that, even as this model has been handed to us as the One True Assessment Model, in another 5 or so years we'll find ourselves in another in-service meeting being introduced to another One True Assessment Model."He loved Big Brother."
On to Vermeer now.For about about 3 days now, my friend Susan and I have been "talking" (actually, e-mailing back and forth) about two paintings by Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher and The Milkmaid. I am entranced by The Milkmaid: the cool yet inviting light; the woman's intense gaze as she pours; the textures of the bread and ceramics and baskets. But even more: how this painting radiates welcome and even nurturing. The bread, the milk she pours, are for me. It is the humblest of communions, and therein lies its beauty, despite the dinginess of the room we find ourselves in. The center of the painting is the space within the rough circle described by the woman's arms and shoulders--to be precise, her left breast is the painting's center. So, then: it is more than the sense that she serves me; it is as though the very bread and the milk she pours comes from her in some essential way--note how her apron is hiked up around her left hip, as if to suggest that the jug of milk had been under her apron. To that end, it's a bit unnerving even as it entrances. Vermeer is a poet, Susan says; I compared him to someone like Stevens, someone whose poems aren't rooted in time because they are about metaphysics and not about the material. But the presentness of this painting is undeniable. It is timeless. It may lack the utterly ethereal quality of the paintings depicting women reading letters or Woman Holding a Balance or Girl with a Pearl Earring, but that coarse bread and thick milk provide sustenance a-plenty.

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Cool Hand Luke; The Magnificent Seven; Vermeer

Three, count 'em, three old masters.
I asked my movie-junkie friend Larry if he had the two films for very different reasons. In the case of Cool Hand Luke, I had heard of it when I was a child but never really had any interest in seeing it until, on an episode of Cheers, it was voted by the bar's patrons as the Sweatiest Movie Ever Made. As for The Magnificent Seven, I had heard of it but never seen it and learned only when I bought my copy of Seven Samurai that it was a remake of Kurosawa's film. But The Magnificent Seven is also a favorite of the gang at Cheers, now that I think of it. We indeed encounter films, music, books, in the oddest or most roundabout ways. But learning is rarely a straight-line proposition . . . which, of course, is what makes it fascinating.
Sweat indeed pours off bodies in Cool Hand Luke--it IS a film about prisoners set to work in a road-work gang, after all. George Kennedy's character takes such pleasure in saying, "Takin' it [his shirt] off, boss!" and then smiling broadly as he does so that it would be easy to find this film, in its early stages, silly at best or a woefully miscast piece of homoerotica. And indeed, I DID find it a bit goofy at first. Luke (Paul Newman) is in this gang because he was caught cutting the heads off parking meters--not to rob them, but just to cut them off. Yet the men he's imprisoned with have been convicted of far more serious crimes. What gives? But as the film wears on, it becomes clear that Luke, though guilty of a lesser crime, is indeed in the right place. He simply refuses to submit to authority. He's not mean; he's pretty likeable, in fact (it IS Paul Newman, after all). It's more like he's a passive-aggressive sociopath. His real crime, then, remains unspoken, undefined--not quite like Joseph K in Kafka's The Trial, but it's certainly not the sort of crime that one can find in a legal code except by implication.The famous line from the film--"What we have here is a failure to communicate!"--is uttered first by the warden and then, later, by Luke, and the significance of that fact is the film's big theme in a nutshell: Authority as Immovable Object, Luke as (almost) Irresistible Force. In short--by its end, it's pretty easy to forget that you once thought this film was going to be silly.
The Magnificent Seven, according to John Carpenter, interviewed in the featurette that accompanies it on the DVD release, is the last of the great westerns. By that he means "traditional" westerns. I suspect that that's true. Four years later, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars would be released: a film in which the ostensible hero is definitely not a white-hatted sort. One could, in fact, see Eastwood's Man with No Name as the opposite of the six men Yul Brynner's Chris rounds up to defend the villagers against the predations of Calvera. The Seven are gunslingers but with hearts of gold. Only one of them obsesses over the money he's sure the villagers are hoarding (else, why would they be terrorized as they are?); the rest, though, are altruists. Knights-errant. It's very much a Western in the grand style. In A Fistful of Dollars, the setting is much the same: a town terrorized, this time by TWO rival gangs; Eastwood, in need of money, hires himself out to BOTH gangs, makes it so they kill each other off, pockets his money, and rides off. Whatever good results is collateral, incidental. Westerns are easy to mock or satirize, as I suppose all genres are, but in films such as High Noon, The Ox-Bow Incident, and the Leone films we find depth and passion and, ultimately, true and disturbing things about us as a culture.
On to painting now . . .Thinking about Vermeer is hard work, I'm finding. Susan and I have begun to look at his work seriously now, and for me at least, Vermeer is a more challenging painter than his contemporaries. That's not to say that de Hooch and Maes and Fabritius aren't also fine painters--they are--it's that, if I were to offer an analogy from literature, it's like comparing Robert Frost's poems to those of Wallace Stevens. Frost is analogous to de Hooch et al.: often narrative in quality, straight-ahead language. Vermeer is like Stevens, then: ethereal, more metaphysical, freer of time than Frost. At any rate, with Vermeer everything seems important: the quality of light on the wall; whether that window to the left is open or closed (as you know, in an earlier entry I tried to find significance in the fact that in Vermeer's work we never get to see out/through a window or doorway into the street and beyond); what we find at the center of the painting; etc. Susan calls him a poet, whereas the other painters have a more narrative quality to them. I'll have more specific things to say about some paintings later on.Something that has also emerged as she and I talk is that, although I can imagine the figure(s) in a painting being aware of me or even in some way expecting me (or not), I never imagine myself as that figure looking out. I remain a spectator. Susan, on the other hand, "take[s] on the skin of" (her phrase) the figures, male or female. Whether that difference is due to her being an artist and my being a mere observer or to some other reason, neither of us can yet figure out.More tomorrow on all this, as well as some comments about the parallel universe that college assessment instruments ask us to live in.

Those wishing to read the comments for the original LiveJournal post can go here.

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Finally!

First Sunday, then Sunday night . . . and now here it is early Tuesday morning and I have a moment to post an entry. More comments on Flemish painting and the NCAA tournament follow.

Last first. I don't wager; I won't fill out a bracket sheet. But I WILL watch as much as my schedule will allow. I understand the Super Bowl's now-iconic status as THE sporting event of the year in this country, creating on that one day and in one place a kind of worship of football and commercials, but March Madness is exact opposite: stadiums across the country, schools from every region, a mix of large and small, public and private, perennials (traditional basketball powers) and annuals ("Cinderellas" and first-timers) ALL pitted against each other for half a month. It's not as definitive a method as pro basketball's and pro (and college) baseball's tournaments for determining a true national champion, and therein lies the madness. The pressure to make EVERY shot, especially in close games, is that much higher. March Madness is also that time when the powers MUST play the mid-majors. They bow to the will of the Eternal Watchmakers known as the Bracket Committee. St. Joseph's, the rap against them being that they "didn't play anybody" in the course of their undefeated regular season, now must play somebody. Thus, there's a kind of democracy at work in the tournament that other playoffs, wars of attrition that they are, don't have. In those, the powerful tend to win out over time--witness ALL those trips to the World Series the Yankees have made.
Hmm--"democracy" in the NCAAs? Maybe more like Survivor, in which the strong--or at least the upper rungs of the seedings--win their games and wait for the inevitable upsets of other of their fellow higher-seedings--those who are not upset then prey on the upsetters, and, by Elite Eight time, few, if any, teams are left who have been seeded lower than, say, 8th (Villanova as an 8 seed back in 197-something [I'm working from memory here] is the lowest seed to reach a championship game). So, then: the illusion of democracy? The masses, Roman Coliseum-like, are kept happy with spectacle and the idea that competition is going on in that they are fed a few upsets in the first weekend, while, AWAY from the upsets, the real tournament, the usual assertions of their strength by college basketball's usual suspects, is getting itself worked out. Boy--THAT's rather Spenserian. But you know something? In this column, Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel argues that the 5/8 scholarship rule (no more than 5 scholarships in a year or 8 in two consecutive years) has begun to manifest itself as parity: the wealth of basketball talent is now more diffuse. There are still the Power Conferences, and they still receive inordinate advantages in terms of ranking, but (as evidenced by the Atlantic 10's and the Western Athletic Conference's three bids each AND the Missouri Valley's 2 bids (compare to the Big 10's and the Pac-10's 3 bids each)), that former center of gravity is shifting. For the better, I say.
And who will win everything? Mandel says the logical choice is Stanford, and I agree that Stanford is the best of the teams I've seen (but note the qualifiers, those last two words). But he also says that anything can happen this year, and I also agree with that--this year more than ever.

On to painting . . .
Susan and I are still engaged in a dialogue about those beautiful Flemish interiors. In a previous entry, I said that she went to the National Gallery to look at their superb collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings from the 16th century; she wrote back to say that what struck her with real force was their physical size: these are small paintings. They are sized for intimate spaces. And that's appropriate: she told me something I hadn't known before: that as part of the fallout from the Reformation, the Dutch at about mid-century greatly restricted the amount of religious art that could appear in churches. Artists turned to private buyers in order to make a living, and so their subject matter reflected the lives of the members of that market (see, as only one example, this painting by de Hooch). So: there's a kind of Marxist reading of the Flemish interiors. But what makes these paintings so extraordinary to Susan and me is how, despite their size, they seem so expansive in their feel (what I called (and she liked) their "psychic spaces"). They accomplish this feel in several ways: the intimate feel of these admittedly ordinary scenes--indeed, as though something spiritual, if not overtly religious, is occurring (Vermeer at his very best--for example, Woman Reading a Letter--is especially good at this); the wonderful detail with which clothing, furniture, walls are rendered--the eye gets lost in its wanderings amongst all that richness, thus heightening the illusion of a physical expansiveness; and finally, the open doors/windows themselves: they not only permit us the illusion of "going out" of the painting, they also appear to invite others in that "outside" space within the world of the painting to peer in, if not enter in. I wrote her yesterday to say that these small paintings actually feel like landscapes, and she seems to agree with that idea.
Hmm--a brainstorm: I had noted to Susan that Vermeer is different, that, even in a room full of similar paintings by his contemporaries in the Vermeer exhibit at the Met in May of 2001, his stand out, not because of his skill but because of the atmosphere: his paintings, with only two exceptions, do not depict doors/windows open to an outside that we can see--and in those instances, being outside is the point of the paintings: A View of Delft and The Little Street. Vermeer is a converted Catholic in a country swept up in Reformation fervor. Maybe, for him, it's better, safer, to keep the doors and windows closed, so to speak. He loves light, though--his figures always turn toward its source, like plants.
Maybe.
I defer to Susan here--the stuff about Vermeer is me pushing at a hunch at an early hour and not something I know (or even believe) definitively. But Vermeer IS different, a Shakespeare in a world of Jonsons and Marlowes. His sensibility is different. Why?
Stay tuned . . .