From a lecture delivered last year by Kristian Vistrup Madsen at the University of Applied Arts, in Vienna.
There’s nobody like Vermeer. Or is there? His modest known output of some thirty-five paintings—a number that keeps fluctuating—inspires something more than appreciation, or even fascination, in those who latch on. We could speak of awe, an almost religious reverence.
In 1929, crowds flocked to London’s Royal Academy of Arts for a massive exhibition of four hundred and fifty years of Dutch art. Gracing the cover of the illustrated exhibition publication was Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa of the Low Countries. Not a Hieronymus Bosch or a Rembrandt, but this small and modest painting by Vermeer, not even a portrait, but a tronie, a stock character, rather low-ranking in the hierarchy of painting. What is it about her? I ask this honestly: Where does value lie in this picture. Or rather, how was value produced, not only by the painter, but by the machinery of art history?
You might be surprised to know that the Royal Academy exhibition was among the first big outings of the Pearl Earring, which was, at that point, around 260 years old. In 1907, the prominent American art collector J. Pierpont Morgan had never heard of Vermeer when he threw $100,000 at A Lady Writing a Letter, either because he recognized its outstanding quality or because Isabella Stewart Gardner already had one. What is strange here is not Morgan’s ignorance, but that so much money should be paid for a work by an artist who had never had a dedicated exhibition, and who was barely known outside Holland until two hundred years after his death. And so much the stranger, then, that a Vermeer should end up, two decades on, as the very face of nearly half a millennia of Dutch art.
In 1742, Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony bought a Vermeer because he was told it was a Rembrandt, and he believed it. Fair: the dealer might have thought so, too. The picture was thrown in as an extra in a lot of some thirty works purchased at the death of the art-loving Prince of Carignano.
Forty years later, an art dealer to the French crown, Joseph Paillet, an early champion of Vermeer’s work, got his hands on The Astronomer. But Paillet’s assurances of rarity and quality were insufficient. Louis XVI needed a name, and Vermeer didn’t have one. And so The Astronomer would not make it to the Louvre until two hundred years later, in 1983.
During the nineteenth century, the spotlight that until then had been directed at Raphael slowly panned to Caravaggio, and after the advent of modernism, artists like El Greco and Goya—with their darkness, their perversion of color—joined the pantheon of masters because it was possible to see in them the blueprint for the new age. It was in this spirit of reinvention that Vermeer, too, was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, along with some of his contemporaries, notably Frans Hals, by the French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger.
Thoré-Bürger was an early socialist who was forced into exile after the revolution of 1848. Vermeer’s work was “art for the people,” Thoré-Bürger declared, with reference to its depiction of ordinary people doing everyday things. For Hals, it might have been the rough brushwork that sold him to contemporary viewers. For Vermeer, I’ll speculate, it was less the humble settings than his stubborn secularism, even in works with ostensibly religious themes, and his depiction of that special domestic sensibility of the bourgeois: privacy.
Thoré-Bürger initially claimed to have identified more than seventy Vermeers. But, according to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, six of the fifteen paintings included in Vermeer’s first solo exhibition at Museum Boijmans in 1935 turned out not to be by Vermeer at all. In 1937, the major American collector Andrew Mellon bequeathed two Vermeers to the National Gallery, which, despite the promises of Wilhelm von Bode of Berlin’s Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum and Wilhelm Martin of the Mauritshuis—titans of the European museum world—also turned out to be imitations. Also that year, an extraordinary new Vermeer appeared on the market: The Supper at Emmaus, a large religious painting. Museum Boijmans bought it for 500,000 guilders. It later turned out to be the work of Han van Meegeren, a master art forger who had been manufacturing fakes for more than a decade.
The twentieth century is plastered with Vermeer. We see his influence in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s empty rooms. In the intense psychology of Edvard Munch, the New Objectivity of the Weimar Germans, the urban quiet of Edward Hopper. But more than anything else, the lasting appeal of Vermeer was that Thoré-Bürger had succeeded in finding out almost nothing about the artist himself. “The Sphinx of Delft,” he called him. He saw that mystery was the most durable PR strategy and gave birth to a myth.
