Rijksmuseum’s Landmark ‘Vermeer’ Sold Out: What Makes It So Special?
By Heloise Pinto
Tickets for the Rijksmuseum’s retrospective exhibition, simply called ‘Vermeer’, have completely sold out. Twenty-eight of only thirty-seven known paintings by the Dutch master are being shown. Never before have so many of them appeared together. The exhibition has been called the ‘first and last’ of its kind, and ‘one of the most thrilling exhibitions ever received’. After having opened on 10th February, all 450,000 tickets to ‘Vermeer’ (costing €30 to almost all over-18s) , which runs until 4th June, had been sold by 13th. Along with its unprecedented tally of (for the most part) certainly authentic Vermeers, there’s more to this show which makes it not only an extraordinarily rare opportunity and experience for visitors but which promises, too, to amount to its becoming a seminal moment in the history of art.
Johannes Vermeer, ‘View of Delft’. Oil on Canvas. c.1660-61. Image: Rijksmuseum
Firstly, the meeting of any number of Vermeer’s works really is rare; collections from across the world have come together to lend their pieces to the Rijksmuseum – among them New York’s Frick Collection and Metropolitan Museum of Art, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, the Louvre, and the National Galleries in Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Tokyo and Washington. The risks involved in transporting these fragile paintings over such long distances mean that the museums in question will likely refrain from doing so again in the foreseeable future, and are the reason why two of the UK’s Vermeers are being withheld from the show: Buckingham Palace’s Lady at the Virginals (1660s) and English Heritage’s The Guitar Player (c.1672).
This international assembly is also being shown in quite an unusual way; the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition space, usually dedicated to much larger numbers of paintings and objects, has not been reduced. The paintings are being afforded much more space than usual, especially in an exhibition of this calibre, which means that the familiar and disappointing effect on appreciating works of art of navigating throngs of other visitors is practically eliminated. Gone, too, is the often slightly distracting presence of conspicuous plaques of contextual information, analysis and interpretation that normally sit just beside the exhibited works. The curators have elected instead to restrict the small amounts of necessary information about Vermeer’s life and work to one or two paragraphs per room, allowing visitors to form their own impressions, in their own time. This process has been optimised by the exhibition designer, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, whose choice to spread the paintings out across walls of dark red, blue, and green reveals the full force of Vermeer’s celebrated mastery of light and atmosphere in every instance.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image: fabrique.com
The size of and curatorial approach to this exhibition can also give rise to new art historical interpretations and perspectives. Vermeer 's single landscape, for example (View of Delft, c.1660-1661), usually on view at the Mauritshuis in the Hague, can now be juxtaposed with its predominantly domestically-themed siblings. New discourse has already arisen from the Rijksmuseum’s continued attribution of Girl with a Flute (c.1669-75) to Vermeer. Last October, it was declared by Washington’s National Gallery of Art – where it is usually displayed – to have been painted by an unknown close associate of the master due to inconsistencies with his other works identified during research. It is nevertheless being hung in Amsterdam as an autograph Vermeer, prompting a general desire for a conclusive answer, and a fresh possibility that Vermeer could have had a pupil.
A two-day symposium will be held in association with the exhibition across 28th and 29th March, organised by the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis, in order to present the findings of new research carried out into all of the paintings on display in preparation for 'Vermeer’. Non-invasive imaging technologies have revealed, according to the museum, new insights into the artist’s materials, processes and techniques, whilst art historical research for the exhibition has resulted in a greater depth of understanding of his life and career. The topics to be presented are numerous and diverse and, although they do not include debate over the authorship of Girl with a Flute, the final lecture will address questions of authenticity and approaches to establishing it in general.
Bibliography
“The Complete Sortable List of the Exhibitions of Vermeer’s Paintings”. Essential Vermeer. 10.22. http://www.essentialvermeer.com/references/vermeer_exhibitions.html
“Vermeer”. Rijksmusuem. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/vermeer
“A Two-Day Symposium Focusing on Recent Technical and Art Historical Research”. Rijksmuseum. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/lectures-symposiums/vermeer
“Provisional Programme”. PDF. Rijksmuseum.
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