Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition
David Bickerstaff, UK, 2023o
The Dutch Baroque painter Jan Vermeer is regarded as one of the most subtle masters of light, yet only 37 of his paintings have survived. In 2023, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum dedicated the most comprehensive retrospective possible to him – which was sold out throughout its run. The film invites the audience on a private tour and, under the expert guidance of the curators, delves into Vermeer’s world and masterpieces, which include Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid and breathtaking views of his hometown, Delft.
The Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (1632–1675) is said to have painted little more than the 37 surviving paintings bearing his signature during his 43 years of life. Twenty-eight of these were brought together in 2023 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for the largest Vermeer exhibition ever held.
The film by David Bickerstaff vividly yet gently conveys the reasons for this hype. Vermeer is one of the most subtle masters of light. From his early mythological and biblical subjects to the breathtaking exterior and interior views of his South Holland hometown Delft, and on to his intimate domestic scenes and late allegories, Vermeer made his settings and figures glow with even greater refinement than the chiaroscuro technique of Italian predecessors such as Caravaggio and Dutch contemporaries like Peter Paul Rubens: Simply amazing how he transformed everyday scenes—devotion to work, reading or writing a letter, and the flirtations of worldly officers with bourgeois daughters trimmed in ermine—into enigmatic puzzles about key moments and their presumed before or after. Unmatched, too, is the way he made the brushstroke disappear through the application of ever finer layers, allowing light to emerge from the interplay of color nuances. The master also inspires the experts who comment on his work and the filmmakers, who immerse themselves even more deeply than in other artist portraits by the English production company Seventh Art Productions into the oeuvre and era of a great painter—especially since Asa Bennett’s restrained music perfectly matches Vermeer’s world of bourgeois discretion. Most intense, however, are the moments when the narration by Robert Lindsay merely hints at the hidden connections of meaning through dense descriptions of the scenes. There is no doubt that such effortlessness conceals a great deal of work yet, one does not feel it. Just as with Vermeer.
Andreas Furler