Yet we might say that this blockbuster developed as a perfect storm: It made sense that, as his last exhibition before retirement, Gregor Weber, the Rijksmuseum’s long-time head of fine and decorative arts, would apply his four decades of Vermeer expertise. As curator Karen Archey of the nearby Stedelijk museum argues in her new book, After Institutions, exhibitions of this magnetism are often deleterious to the human and material infrastructure of a museum they can even be financial calamities. “We could easily have had two million visitors, but we limited the number of tickets and stopped doing PR after a week.” Tickets to the exhibition sold out in a matter of days, reselling for extortionate amounts on the black market.
“We are actually not really interested in blockbuster exhibitions,” Taco Dibbits, the museum’s general director, told me about this year’s most-hyped show in Europe. In this exhibition, the very texture of selfhood becomes palpable, and it is not-or not only-pretty. In one early, atypical work on loan from Tokyo, Saint Praxedis is seen wringing blood out of a sponge, her face the emblem of tranquility as a man lies decapitated behind her, the usually latent existential tension dripping into the bucket, splattering onto the later interior scenes, so famous for being calm.
IN THIS MOMENT BLOOD RINGTONES FULL
His oeuvre is full of such ironies, or subtle judgments upon his subjects. In A Young Woman standing at a Virginal, 1670–72, she turns away from the window, but faces a landscape painted onto the inside lid of her instrument. 1662–64, weighs her jewelry in front of a painting of the Last Judgement. The protagonist of Woman Holding a Balance, ca. Vermeer mostly painted women, alone with themselves, engulfed in the task at hand. But as you begin to learn how they tick, it effects a kind of perversion of sentiment, like a smile twisted awry.
As the works accumulate, the result is not gratuity or excess their power is in no way diminished. Still, I am here to offer my two guilders. But few could have guessed what seeing this many of the Dutch master’s paintings together in one place would feel like, and even now, at the end of the Rijksmuseum’s landmark show that made it possible, I struggle to give words to the experience. Suzanne Raes’s new documentary, Close to Vermeer, contains several. MANY ARE THE TALES of people fainting at the sight of a Vermeer, or crying just at the thought. Johannes Vermeer, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, 1659–61, oil on canvas, 15 1/2 x 17 1/2".
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