Getting to grips with Vermeer

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Vermeer: A Study

By Max Kozloff

If you have cut your teeth on coffee table books on Johannes Vermeer and are now ready to exercise your molars, this treatise is for you. What Vermeer: a study lacks in volume, it compensates for in density.

Simply put, it is not for the faint of heart.

Even the 24 colour plates in this book are for reference, not to cleanse your visual palate. One must stay focused because with no table of contents, chapters or sub-headlines, there are only asterisks to signal when Kozloff is changing gears. Vermeer: A Study is the kind of book you should have with you directly before or after viewing actual Vermeer paintings when the mind and eye have taken their refreshment but still want to savour the experience.

Of course, if you want to see a Vermeer, there are a paucity of choices with only 35 known paintings, eight of those being in New York , divided between the the Metropolitan Museum of Art (five) and the Frick Collection. The three at the Frick never travel. There are four in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, three in the Mauritshuis, The Hague and two in London's National Gallery. So these works are thinly spread.

Although there are so few Vermeer paintings, his name is a household name. Behind da Vinci, Picasso and Van Gogh, to be sure, but in the stratosphere with other artists who guarantee a blockbuster. Which other artists have inspired five novels, a movie and an opera? We won't go into the calendars, bookplates, address books, note cards, tote bags, posters and, eek!, coffee mugs here because that would be gauche. But if you haven't personally experienced The Girl With the Pearl Earring (the painting in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, not the novel or the movie), it's because of an ambitious licensing agent that you are able to conjure up an image of what it looks like.

Vermeer, no doubt, would have? might have? been mortified by such over-saturation. But he was not against earning a living to support his wife and 11 children. After making his painting debut with The Procuress at the tender age of 24 (which in 1656, might have been considered middle-aged) his work was well received and shortly thereafter an Amsterdam minor nobleman Pieter Van Ralven was buying half of Vermeer's output. The access to the output was guaranteed by an annual stipend of 500 guilders, assuring Van Ralven first refusal.

Vermeer could paint what he liked, which meant he focused on cityscapes and figure-in-the-interior works. And this is where Kozloff's intellect gives us something to masticate. Forget Art History 101 and learn about whether a painting is a ‘frame dissident’ or ‘loyalist’. Think about the differences in the types of action portrayed by Vermeer's subjects, whether they are pouring milk, making lace or stringing pearls. With traces of Art History 101, Kozloff will remind you to think about what the various objects in a Vermeer symbolize. Laurel wreaths, large books and trumpets all have their close-ups. And yes, the type of clothing worn by the subject, and what it ‘means’ is given its due.

Kozloff, former art critic for The Nation, is there to guide you vis-à-vis the intricacies of Vermeer's work. He has taken his magnifying glass to Vermeer, not as a conservator might, but as a true art historian. At times his passages are tedious: densely written, overly arcane and self-important. But at other times, his wit shows through:

The arm folds of his black tunic and white under blouse are given as a sequence of scribbles. For a painter of that time, such a passage was the equivalent of loose living.

It is when Kozloff provides these oases of levity that we eagerly look forward to swimming to the next shore.

Vermeer: A Study by Max Kozloff is published by Contrasto, Rome, 2011. 79 pp., 24 colour illus. ISBN: 978-88-6965-279-0