Since his rediscovery in the later half of the 19th century, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) has been one of the most admired and influential European painters. His extremely private life, his supposed use of a camera obscura, and the fact that his teacher remains unidentified have, until recently, encouraged a view of the “Sphinx of Delft” as an isolated genius shrouded in an air of mystery. Walter Liedtke’s new monograph reveals Vermeer’s life to be well-documented and places his work in the context of the Delft school and of Delft society as a whole. Vermeer’s many admirers will relish Liedtke’s exploration of subtleties of meaning and refinements of technique and style. Alongside the most historical approach to Vermeer to date, the annotated color catalogue of Vermeer’s complete paintings reveals a master whose rare sensibility may be described but not explained.
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About the Author
Walter Liedtke is Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has written widely on Dutch painting and the Delft school.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Through a Glass, Too Darkly,
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This review is from: Vermeer: The Complete Paintings (Classical Art) (Hardcover)
For more than a decade, Walter Liedtke has publicly channeled his erudition and seemingly boundless energy in the cause of Vermeer scholarship. As curator of European painting for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, he produced the book, A View of Delft: Vermeer and His Contemporaries in 2000, marshaled the astonishing 2001 New York/London exhibition, Vermeer and the Delft School, and was the principal author of that exhibition's remarkable eponymous catalog, the best comprehensive scholarly account of Vermeer and his milieu yet achieved, punctuated as it is with scintillating, extremely faithful reproductions of much in Vermeer's oeuvre. In Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, the third volume of the ambitious Classical Art Series, Liedtke seeks to build on his previous work while distilling recent scholarship about this artist.
Perhaps Liedtke's most important contribution in Vermeer: The Complete Paintings is embodied in the title. The gravitas of his analyses leaves little doubt that the thirty-six paintings presented here constitute Vermeer's authentic canon, at least the works that have surfaced over the years, although Liedtke believes, with good reason, that the artist produced at least six other canvases that are now lost. Because he had years ago dispatched, with others, the dubious Wheelock/Kitson attribution of St. Praxedis from any association with Vermeer, Liedtke makes no mention of that benighted work. Extending his previous evaluation of the Girl with a Red Hat and Girl with a Flute, small paintings on wood panels now residing at Washington's National Gallery of Art, he convincingly dismisses Albert Blankert's long-standing doubts about Vermeer's authorship of these paintings, although he's aware that the latter work suffers from a lack of the artist's finished refinements, most likely the result of another's (clumsy) brush. And he is the first serious scholar to bring on board the newly reattributed Young Girl Seated at a Virginal, now the only Vermeer painting in private hands. Liedtke's standardization of Vermeer's oeuvre will inform all future scholarship about the Delft Master, no small accomplishment. In too many other ways, however, Vermeer: The Complete Works disappoints. In books of this kind, Vermeer connoisseurs should expect vibrantly true reproductions of the master's paintings, allowing them to enjoy stellar facsimiles of Vermeer's art without trekking hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to see the originals in museums, although extraordinary reproductions often stimulate the desire to do so. However, with but few exceptions, the quality of the reproductions here is substantially below the quality of Liedtke's 200l exhibition catalog. Only the superbly restored The Procuress passes muster, revealing the magical silvery light that also permeates many other Vermeer paintings. Overall, the reproductions seem devoid of the vivacity characteristic of the first rate. Many are too dark in key areas, hiding telling details. Some are dreadful, notably both Ladies Standing and Seated at the Virginal, extending out to Woman with a Balance and The Milkmaid, and including the Girl with a Pearl Earring (so pinkish) and the Woman in Blue Reading (with those yellow walls). Pictures of The Little Street, the majestic View of Delft, the operatic Art of Painting, and the Girl with a Red Hat are of average quality but a side-by-side comparison with the same works in the Delft School catalog discloses their deficiencies. To be sure, Vermeer's subtle glazes and nuanced tone don't lend themselves to high fidelity copy. Nonetheless, The Complete Works is not an inexpensive volume; it costs more than the 2001 catalog, where good reproductions abound. Generally better copies also exist in Irene Netta's Vermeer's World, as well as in Mariet Westermann's Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Although Liedtke makes many accurate observations about what is known of Vermeer's history and his surviving paintings, and occasionally writes with wit and pleasure about his subject, he also fails to deliver on his promise of showcasing relevant new material about the artist's work, often ignoring or unfairly discounting a good deal of compelling research. Throughout, he's often in conversation with himself, frequently referring back to his previous work to confirm his present opinions, while sometimes fashioning circular tautological explanations for why Vermeer's themes and optical effects seem related to those of his peers. He also writes long passages in Jack Van Impe fashion. Van Impe is the bizarre televangelist who rationalizes eschatological prophecy by linking a series of Old and New Testament verses together to "prove" how scripture reveals the coming end times. There are scores of these kind of name-dropping passages embedded into the fabric of Liedtke's narrative: "For all these possible and indisputable sources, however, it is not enough to say that A Maid Asleep is a Delft version of pictures by Maes (with a touch of Ter Borch), any more than The Procuress (cat.3) may be seen to closely resemble a Caravaggesque picture by a painter from Utrecht or even from Delft (namely, Van Couwenbergh; fig. 3b)." Vermeer lived in a world filled with artistic creativity, and his work, like Shakespeare's, was informed by varied influences, including the tropes and styles of many artists, the imagery and icons familiar to his society, as well as the visual, even musical, entertainment rhetoric favored by the wealthy. Vermeer also inhabited a world of philosophers and proto-scientists keenly interested in the nature of perception and the acquisition of veridical knowledge, often deploying optical aids as part of their inquiry. His art bridged and assimilated both worlds. Of all the artists in the Dutch Golden Age, perhaps Vermeer best achieved the ideal known as houding, a theoretical precept by which painters of his era sought to demonstrate their mastery by blending abstract, almost musically harmonious perspective design with convincing illusions of images in space to fool the eye and engage the viewer. Moreover, the range of Vermeer's genius--esemplastically encompassing scientific and philosophical investigation, pictorial and painterly virtuosity, musical, philosophical, and literary allusions--was enormous. The eidetic quality of his images in some cases was placed in service to allegory and reification, answering such questions, for example, as what would music look like in concrete, visual form. Poetically, he nested layer upon layer of diverse meaning into the best of his works. Although the Woman with a Balance is surely about equipoise, as Leidtke posits, perhaps even with religious connotations, it could also serve as the cover for Descartes' Meditations as the pictorial symbol of the cogito at work. And it could be a punning critique of religiosity as well, as the poet Edward Snow has suggested. Nothing serves an appreciation of Vermeer's intentions better than an understanding of his penchant for paradox, the idea that two opposing ideas can both be true. Along with what Gowing has called Vermeer's special "optical way," it is the artist's enchantment with paradox that appeals to modern experience and sensibility. He was an entertainer of the highest rank. Vermeer seemed obsessed with ambiguity, likely recognizing its importance for creating tension. He took pains to minimize explicit narrative. One of the reasons to treasure Vermeer's art is the way the artist sets a tumult of painterly images and thematic activity against each other but then resolves the complex tensions as one perceives the work in whole, where one is struck by a sense of serene balance, even stillness, with everything in harmony, much in the way fugal contrapuntals in a Bach orchestration are ultimately resolved by the end of the score. Liedtke imparts little of this complexity. He typically deconstructs Vermeer's paintings with prosaic, comparatively narrow explanations, as if relating how Huckleberry Finn is a story about a boy on a raft. Perhaps he should read Don Delillo's novel, Underworld, particularly the first chapter--and note the Vermeeresque way DeLillo engages a baseball game, a quotidian contemporary trope. The novelist unleashes intricate energies, ultimately boiling down the sport of baseball and the era this game was played into their essence. This is what genius does. What Vermeer did. Liedtke admits that a formal School of Delft painters is a fiction. But no one--from Thore-Burger down through Hale, Gowing, Descargues. Blankert, Wheelock, Westermann, among many other scholars--ever doubted that Vermeer both influenced and was influenced by such contemporaries as Ter Borch, Fabritius, De Hooch, Van Mieris, Maes, Metsu, Steen (some of whom lived for a time in Vermeer's Delft), and a plenitude of others, going back to Campin. By insisting that Vermeer's art owes so much to the artist's ability to synthesize the work of others, Liedtke is beating the deadest of horses, which expired no doubt from the overwork of plowing no new ground. Discerning eyes recognize familiar settings and themes but all acclaim that Vermeer's style is unique, transcendent. The artist's paintings appear different from the work of contemporaries, set apart with the glow of optical, highly cinematic sheen, much as if they were lifted out from a movie reel. This is largely the reason so many art experts believe Vermeer was greatly indebted to the images produced by the camera obscura: the facture of his paintings shimmers with soft edges, intense color saturation, and an inner light characteristic of the pictures projected within that device. Indeed, Vermeer's paintings exhibit all of the features captured in a camera obscura. Liedtke can huff and... Read more ›
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
IVM/Genius,
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This review is from: Vermeer: The Complete Paintings (Classical Art) (Hardcover)
A must addition to the library of anyone with a serious interest in Johannes Vermeer's artwork.
Walter Liedtke, a very informed author, has assembled a book that both nicely presents all the known paintings of the Delft master and gives expert, yet understandable, commentary on each. Also, much useful information is contained in the appendixes, such as a discussion on the disputed issue of the use by Vermeer of a camera obscura as an aide to his stunning art. Those with a deep interest in this shadowy painter may also want to read Dr. Binstock's 2009 book, "Vermeer's Family Secrets" for oftentimes quite different opinions on this same body of work.
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