Yesterday morning, I finished reading Vermeer: A View of Delft by British author Anthony Bailey. I had always been an admirer of the Dutch artist's work since my high school art history classes. There is something both timeless and sensual in his interior depictions of women at their domestic labours. On top of this, there is an element of quiet mystery. The ladies are nameless, the letters they read and receive are equally clouded in questions and as for their duties, the lessons they receive, the men who court them, everything is secretive and hushed.
Vermeer not only inspired artists but other writers. Proust mentions Vermeer's painting, The View of Delft in his massive novel, In Search of Lost Time where Marcel, the narrator discusses how Monsieur Swann, a family friend was continually writing an essay about the artist. Interestingly enough, the writer Bergotte in Proust's grand opus collapses shortly after seeing one of the master's paintings and dies having witnessed the grandeur of the colours and the composition.
In the twentieth century, there have been numerous historical fictions about Vermeer, the most famous being Girl With a Pearl Earring, a novel crafted by Tracy Chevalier and later made into a movie featuring Colin Firth as the artist and Scarlet Johansson as his innocent muse.
Bailey is a sympathetic writer and though the details are few about Johannes Vermeer's life (Bailey spends a large portion of filling in the world behind the artist - i.e. talking about the history, the political and historical figures that had a direct and indirect influence on Vermeer and his family), what I was left with is the same appalling sadness I encounter when I think about the legacies of artists.
Vermeer married well but accumulated debts along the way to his death. He lived in the time of Holland's Golden Age. Spain was no longer a threat but in the last years of Vermeer's life, both the British and French made it quite difficult for the people of the Netherlands to feel peace in their profound freedom. The French especially, under Louis XIV invaded the region, then called the United Provinces in 1672. The Dutch armies being smaller than the French, resorted to unique tactics and flooded their landscape to thwart the king's men. The invasion was short-lived but the devastating economic effects rippled through the lives of everyday people. The fields being flood, there were food shortages which meant there were deaths from starvation and higher prices for everything edible. Also, in a time of deprivation, who needs art?
Vermeer died suddenly in 1675. He collapsed after walking through his house, looking in the various rooms at his children, his wife and their maids. The collapse, some scholars have suggested may have been a result of depression and the stresses of getting his family through a hard time. A heart attack, a stroke, it is difficultt to say but many believed he suffered from melancholy, a then catch-all word to describe the sadness and desolate emotions people experienced.
In the wake of his death, his widow struggled to keep the family together. Some of their children married well which relieved the burden but by the time Catharina passed on some twelve years later, she had nothing to leave her kin.
Today, Vermeers are worth millions of dollars. They are stolen from private homes and museums. There have been forgeries and frauds. In the twentieth century, a man considered an expert on Vermeer was fooled by a Dutch artist from The Hague. The fake Vermeer had been beautifully painted, giving the impression of being an early work of the artist. The forger used very careful and creative means to give the painting a look of being weathered by centuries - he baked the canvas in an oven, rolled it up to induce cracks and then used blank ink, rubbing it into the surface to give the impression of old dirt.
The expert simply wanted to believe that something from the fabled artist could suddenly exist, that a bit of mystery still existed out there and that fate had conspired to bring him what had been for centuries, considered lost.
The expert didn't see it was obviously a fraud. The figures in the painting had not been handled with the same plush sensuality or kindness. The forger couldn't quite capture the same magic and pensive stillness, the same warmth Vermeer is known for. No, the expert fell victim to his own deceit and belief, caught up in his own wistful longing to have something more from the long dead master. The story of how the painting was recovered (it had been in a rich family's home for generations), that it bore the same signature in Vermeer's painting - these were the things that helped fool him but the fooling was easy because the victim was so willing.
And this is where I have difficulty. It is one thing to fall in love with a piece of work, it is another to simply appreciate it because death has sealed off future works from the same hand. It is more the story than the thing itself that is loved.
Van Gogh, a few centuries later would die penniless, tragically by his own hand. Instead of walking through his rooms, Van Gogh wandered into a field and shot himself with a shotgun.
Like Vermeer, however, there is a legacy that shrouds the intrinsic beauty of his work. People appreciate Van Gogh's work, not because it is beautiful and strange and discomforting, that it doesn't follow the rules of academic art, that it breaks free - no, people are attracted to the death, to the dark story behind the work.(The fact that he mutilated himself also helps bring a touch of excitement to an already somber life.)
In a sense, people are indirectly possessed with a fascination for death.
I always think of the humorous quote by Max Beerbohm: "Death cancels all engagements." How true and sad and yet, for an artist, death cancels all commissions, all aspirations, all ideas. The viewing public, however, is more intrigued.
And this extends to the death in the twentieth and twenty-first century of notoriously famous recording artists. We had Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison in the sixties, Elvis in 1997, John Lennon in 1980, Kurt Kobain, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls in the nineties to most recently, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and of course, Whitney Houston.
The deaths of recording artists are always multi-platinum. I heard they are going to showing The Bodyguard, the famous, albeit trite Houston film in select theatres. The public cannot have Houston anymore but they can have the digital image, the replica - as if the fleeting possibility of her presence was suddenly renewed and believed in. And there is money to be made in an artist's death.
It all comes back to a banality, an unwillingness to acknowledge that death is a more fascinating aspect to an artist than the art itself. And this is the sadness I feel. Vermeer died broke, indentured, he owed people - bakers, butchers and other merchants, you name it. He owed and yet the world after him has taken and made money and profited a million-fold. It almost makes me angry. That someone with such a beautiful gift could not have ever been rescued by his future, posthumous legacy. No. People flock to see his paintings throughout the world, they revel in his work because the mystery is so pure and evocative and because he died unknown.
They see Van Gogh but they don't really see the art. Everyone a tourist, a vicarious visitor, wandering in the wake that mortality leads, the shreds of beauty that have become an industry for many and a hobby for the wealthy few.
The world is such a disparaging mess.
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