Rijksmuseum to Stage the Largest Vermeer Exhibition in 2023
rijksmuseum.nl
rijksmuseum.nl
As you may know, Vermeers are so few and far between that it's entirely possible to see every one (~36) if you're able to travel the world.
So, there exists a subculture of (often) wealthy Vermeer completeists who travel the world doing exactly that.
Every month or so at Kenwood, we would be instructed to come in early to host such collectors who had made arrangements for a private viewing of this Vermeer.
An entourage would roll up around 6-7am to whisk a high-flyer into the room the Vermeer was displayed.
More often than not the individual - who was so determined to see this painting they'd paid English Heritage who knows how much - took a momentary glance and was off again.
I'm talking all that trouble for 1-2 minutes in front of the Vermeer so they could check it off their list. And then they were off.
I'd happily spend the next 8 hours in front of it observing public responses and daydreaming of how to prevent elaborate art thefts (the painting was stolen by the IRA in 1974 and IMHO could certainly be stolen again).
As someone has actually done and made a website about:
A neat but sorta terrible documentary. The central claim is that Vermeer absolutely must have used a camera lucida because his detail would otherwise be impossible. In particular I remember the 'expert' claiming that a certain smooth gradation was impossible to paint without optical tools. Maybe for a modernist like Hockney, but there are painters with academic training who achieve that kind of work without optical tools.
I'm not saying Vermeer didn't experiment with such tools, but the claims to their criticality in his process are a joke.
If you plan ahead and time your visit right you too can see it in person.
Reminds me of people who (pre-pandemic) would compete for the most country stamps in their passports. They would never see many of the countries they visited, beyond the airport's passport control facility.
I've been to a lot of the world's major museums, but I've never been to The Netherlands (or Russia). I really don't get the attraction of a "private viewing." As long as there aren't so many people that someone's always walking in front of me (like at the Uffizi), I'm fine with other tourists there. Once in a great while, someone will say something interesting about it.
> So what does it lack? The film implies anyone can make a beautiful work of art with the right application of science. There is no need for mystical ideas like genius.
> But the mysterious genius of Vermeer is exactly what's missing from Tim's Vermeer. It is arrogant to deny the enigmatic nature of Vermeer's art. If this art looks "optical", it can also look abstract. It is an act of seeing nature, not a work of copying it. Whether or not he made use of optical instruments, Vermeer looked at the world with a uniquely penetrating eye. He was able to paint what he saw with a delicate hand. If you can't see the astonishing nature of his talent when you are standing in front of his paintings you should walk away from them – not make a film about how easy they are to replicate.
> Tim's Vermeer is the equivalent of someone hanging a painting-by-numbers version of a masterpiece over the mantelpiece and claiming it's as good as the real thing. At last, an art film for philistines.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2...
As far as "just use the right optical tricks and you can be Vermeer" -- sure, this is bullshit.
As far as showing that an optical method was a real possibility for how Vermeer created his work-- sure! A layman using the tricks was able to get very close, but lacked the artistry himself to put in Vermeer's unique magic in: this establishes that the optical techniques were a plausible way for the works to be created.
I've never understood this aversion to "basic" - it feels like vanity to me when people have a desire to be unique just for the sake of standing out. It seems like society would collapse if everyone was truly unique. Maybe you or someone else can correct me if this desire to be different isn't just vanity
Parent is saying "If you are a simpleton, who doesn't understand art, then ...."
Even the most upvoted urban dictionary definition has the first definition as: "Used to describe someone devoid of defining characteristics that might make a person interesting, extraordinary, or just simply worth devoting time or attention to."
Which says nothing about someones intelligence. Granted the next definition does mention being stupid, I hardly think it's fair to interpret a comment in this context as being hostile in the least.
If it doesn't apply to you, what's the problem?
Why would interest in technology negatively correlate with interest in art?
That presumes a very specific correlation between chosen profession and cultural interests.
The document is very fun! But just trying painting will quickly educate a person of the pragmatics. Starting painting is really simple nowdays with IPad, Apple Pen and Procreate. There are tons of resources and courses available - and the problematics in digital art if using traditional art analogues map quite far into oil painting (even though physical medium does have it's specificities).
OP didnt write any such thing. I think you're reading too much into his comment.
However, this person seems very confused on what painting is. After their insensitivity accusations, they go on to claim that drawing on a iPad is equivalent to painting. That's like claiming someone plaing a golf game on iPad has insights on the skill of professional golfer.
Poor sentence building on my part, I get caught up on petty linguistics. No harm intended.
"However, this person seems very confused on what painting is. After their insensitivity accusations, they go on to claim that drawing on a iPad is equivalent to painting. That's like claiming someone plaing a golf game on iPad has insights on the skill of professional golfer."
No, really, modern digital tools are friggin awesome!
What I intended to convey that a person should really try painting once in their life, but they don't need to set up a studio with good lighting, get solvents and paints and brushes and so on.
I say this as a lifelong art enthusiast who loves his pens, charcoals, inks, acrylics and oils. And the IPad Pro with an Apple Pencil fits there actually really, really well. Similar experience can be had on a Wacom tablet and Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Krita or what ever program that takes into account artistic sensibilities in their tooling.
90% of the problematics constructing a painting can be investigated using a digital medium.
Oils bring in the pigments and their interaction with each other and medium, but that's kind of an added layer of complexity on top of the artistically critical elements - shape, color, detail reproduction and so on. Because when you paint, it's not an act of photography, but a process where one needs to decide on lots of these issues.
You can take what ever course or book that teaches oil painting, and apply it on a digital medium quite far.
The key tools are 1. a brush that maps pressure to size 2. a brush that maps pressure to opacity 3. a blend tool to blend the colors. Layers help in keeping things tight. It's really nice if the software attempts to provide realistic blending of colors, but it's not necessary - all of these have been available for decades on digital paint tools.
I totally agree a digital painting lacks the feeling of an actual oil painting, but the problematics are the same. As an example these include shape, tonal mapping from the scene to the canvas, choosing a palette, choosing which details to render and which not.
Leave off "basic", which I agree is polarizing / pejorative, and you go from assuming "basic techies" have low arts interest to just the fact of recognizing that n "techies" may have low interest, and then the film nicely connects those worlds. If you've read this far, there's a good chance you'll find at least the trailer interesting.
The Rijksmuseum is situated on a square in Amsterdam alongside the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk and draws a crowd for its special exhibitions and top pieces.
(Edit: Forgot to mention the Stedelijk Museum!)
Anyway, much love to the Rijksmusuem for the amount of CC0 content they have. It’s a staple for covers for my productions for Standard Ebooks.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, had a big Vermeer exhibition 25 years ago. It unfortunately overlapped with a government shutdown, which made it inaccessible for some days, until a private foundation came up with the money to reopen it. My recollection is that we visited the exhibition while it was running on donated money, meaning that it was the only part of the National Gallery that was open. But it has been a while.
Incredible work being done there. I’m glad to see they’re continuing to make headlines.
https://gemaeldegalerie.skd.museum/en/exhibitions/vermeer-jo...
The cafe is also very open and airy, though it is still indoors. I guess swallowing a herring standing outside overlooking a gracht is even safer, so it's fair to say I exaggerated, but it's also easy to find a packed bar in town, and similarly a kebab shop with indoor dining where they don't give a rat's ass about your COVID certificate.
A common theme in the Netherlands. I always joke that it's better to be an artist in Iran. Culture is a waste of time and artists are just lazy bastards who need to get a real job. A merchant Republic like Venice but it never lost its focus on money for fashion.
“Originally, Vermeer's works were largely overlooked by art historians for two centuries after his death. A select number of connoisseurs in the Netherlands did appreciate his work, yet even so, many of his works were attributed to better-known artists such as Metsu or Mieris“
His financial problems also were at least in part because he was unlucky. As an art dealer, he sat on paintings he couldn’t sell because of the Franco-Dutch War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Dutch_War). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer#Wars_and_deat...:
“In a petition to her creditors, his wife later described his death as follows:
...during the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.”
(That wife gave him 15 children, 11 of which lived long enough to be baptized, so yes, that might have been an expensive family to run)
With a family of 14 living only from their income as artist he was reasonably paid for the time, probably.