A Dutch Treasure Comes To The Met
by Michael Busch
Vermeer’s Masterpiece. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There’s quite a lot riding on Vermeer’s Masterpiece, the headlining act in the Metropolitan Museum’s fall exhibition calendar. At a moment when the slumping economy has drained the Met’s endowment, forced major layoffs within the institution, and threatened to shrink the number of annual visitors, the museum desperately needed a shot in the arm to boost morale and draw big crowds. And it got it, in the form of a temporary gift generously proffered by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Ostensibly celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage from the Netherlands to New York, the Dutch shipped Johannes Vermeer’s astonishing Milkmaid to the Met where it was quickly made the centerpiece of the museum’s autumn program.
The mini-marquee exhibit, which runs through the end of November, offers a blueprint of what to expect from the Met as it moves forward with a new model of recession-special installations — small shows anchored in a prominent work or two, and bolstered by a supporting cast drawn from the museum’s expansive permanent collection. The logic of the move is clear: with a contracting endowment and significantly reduced operating budget, the Met’s recently-appointed director Thomas Campbell decided that looking inward and relying on the occasional munificence of partner institutions was the museum’s most promising tactic to cut costs without sacrificing quality. But concerns challenging the utility of this approach persist, making Vermeer’s Masterpiece the most important trial of Campbell’s young career.
Unfortunately, the budget blockbuster falls flat. To be sure, the exhibit betrays hints of limited resources. Including period reproductions of ceramic bowls and tile work, for example, is charming but suggests a quiet desperation to fill space without clear purpose in the absence of relevant content, while the comic book-length catalogue (stapled at the spine) indicates that the Met has abandoned its tradition of producing gorgeously hefty companion pieces to its major exhibits. But this is hardly the problem.
If the curatorial cocktail animating Vermeer’s Masterpiece comprises one part inadequate funding, it is most certainly met with three parts conceptual incoherence. Not content to let The Milkmaid’s reputation as one of the finest paintings in the Western tradition serve as reason enough to scramble uptown for a viewing, the show’s designer, Walter Liedtke, insists on spicing it up for the oversexed masses with promises of a radical rereading of Vermeer’s masterwork. All of which would be fascinating if it could be sustained throughout the entire exhibition. But it can’t, and the show deteriorates with impressive velocity into a slapdash arrangement of pictures bound together more by proximity than through the rhythm of an internal logic.
The exhibit’s central argument advances the proposition that Vermeer endows The Milkmaid with a heretofore unappreciated degree of eroticism. In order to mount this attack against traditionally staid interpretations of old masters, Liedtke, curator of the Met’s Dutch collection, convenes a small parade of the museum’s holdings in the first gallery to demonstrate that the stereotypical “milkmaid” colonized the landscape of European sexual imagination, exciting noblemen with the prospect of a little pinch n’ giggle when their ladies of the manor weren’t looking. According to the accompanying brochure, milkmaids were summed up by an early modern poem in which “a woman in the act of milking a cow (‘A sinewy thing she has seized with joy,’ and so on) is compared with grabbing a man’s…attention.” And certainly, the images gathered here — populated as they are by buxom women and admiring men with their bulging codpieces and cocked crossbows set “to shoot…bolts” — support the curator’s contention that milkmaids had acquired a reputation for being “sexually available” by the time Vermeer came along. Says Liedtke, “It was the old joke of the farmer’s daughter and the travelling salesman.”
If one considers, moreover, the overt sexuality of Vermeer’s early work — a topic strangely not broached by the curators in this show — the bridge between the naughty milkmaids of Dutch lore and Vermeer’s masterpiece might be easily crossed. As a young man, Vermeer saturated his work with salaciousness, painting scenes of seduction that range from the sexually subdued — as in Girl with the Wineglass, where a man eagerly plies his uncertain female companion with drink and lecherous looks while a third friend dozes in the corner — to more direct depictions of debauchery, perhaps best represented in The Procuress, where a john feels up a drunken prostitute while her madam and some random lout look on.
Still, even theoretically, Liedtke’s attempt to eroticize Vermeer’s Milkmaid wears thin quickly. Beyond his claim of potent sexuality inherent in all period representations of the milkmaid, the curator’s most straightforward charge holds that the maid’s milk jug — out of which she measuredly pours milk into a pudding bowl — represents what Liedtke prudishly refers to as “a portion of the female anatomy.” Fair enough, for the moment, but what more? The curator directs our attention to the painting’s lower right hand corner, where a small painted tile decorated with a naked Cupid poised to strike abuts an ochre foot warmer. One might question just how a dull-colored foot warmer would provoke lip-biting arousal from Vermeer’s contemporary audiences. Yet they would surely scratch their head even more vigorously at Liedtke’s giddy answer: “The mistress of the house would put her feet up. It heats everything under the skirt.” And with that, the case is closed.
But when confronted with the sheer weight of The Milkmaid—finely wrought exquisiteness packed into each pore of canvas, tender attentions that produce the painting’s photographic effects — it becomes clear that Liedtke’s theory cannot withstand the magnitude of Vermeer’s creative ambition. The piece hangs together in perfect balance, allowing its painter to showcase his dazzling command of perspective and light, in turn establishing The Milkmaid’s moving sense of serene contemplation. Far from injecting it with signposts of an ulterior motive, Vermeer strips the work of possible distractions that might interfere with an appreciation of his technical brilliance.
Digital imaging studies of the painting (also not mentioned in the exhibit) bear out the point. An infrared reflectogram of the painting demonstrates that the sexy foot warmer was not even included in the original composition. Instead, Vermeer had first painted a hulking basket piled high with clothing in the right corner, which, had it not been replaced with the smaller heating device, would have cluttered the canvas, ruining any sense of depth that the stark, bare wall behind affords. As it is, the floodlit void in the upper-right hand corner directs the eye’s attention to the lower-left hand sector where it is held captive witness to Vermeer’s serial acts of virtuosity.
How exactly he achieves such a degree of precise pointillism in the spread of bread and pottery laid out on the maid’s worktable defies easy understanding, but the effect is spellbinding. From the torn chunks of bread collected at table’s edge and the surviving loaf safely within its wicker basket, to the smooth shell of a blue beer jug and worn brittleness of the milk pitcher and pudding bowl, Vermeer uses pinpricks of paint to establish an illusionistic play of light, endowing otherwise mundane subjects with a jaw-dropping, three-dimensional voluptuousness. Indeed, there may exist no other work that so successfully ascends the heights of hyper-realism — save that found in the liquid eyes, moist lips and teardrop jewelry of Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring—and certainly not in such concentrated fashion.
Young Woman With A Water Pitcher
Once museum-goers, however, successfully negotiate the traffic jam of camera-flashing tourists and scolding guards gridlocked around The Milkmaid—roughly halfway through the exhibit — they quickly enter a labyrinth of curatorial disorder and poor judgment. Apparently having shot his wad on the milkmaids theme at the start of the show, Liedtke doesn’t seem overly concerned about what comes next. As a result, the exhibit becomes a string of pretty pictures that takes on the feel of the museum’s permanently installed Dutch gallery in the Met’s European wing, minus the majesty of its considerable collection of Rembrandts.
Haunting the vicinity to The Milkmaid’s left hangs Study of a Young Woman, perhaps signaling the most bewildering missed opportunity of the show. The painting offers another example of Vermeer’s masterful deployment of light and shadow, and the gentle brush strokes that mysteriously breathe life into his subjects. The angelic moonishness of the girl’s face, her porcelain-perfect skin surrounding a simple smile and invitation to eye contact, make for arresting portraiture. But the picture possesses no other characteristics that directly connect it to The Milkmaid, nor for that matter any other paintings in Vermeer’s oeuvre with the exception again of Girl with a Pearl Earring. What’s it doing here?
In its place should have been Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, a painting executed towards the end of Vermeer’s life, and also on view in a separate gallery. Of the paintings in the artist’s small body of work, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher offers the greatest opportunity to compare and contrast the middle and late periods of a career in full blossom. Like The Milkmaid, Study of a Young Woman offers no narrative intrigue, privileging instead mood and composition in its intimate contemplation of domestic tranquility. Here again, a young woman is depicted in placid repose, her attention apparently captured by something off-stage as she prepares her morning bath. Vermeer employs the same pointillist technique to highlight the glistening pitcher, the soft touch of velvet covering the table, and the reflections caught by the water basin’s rim. Yet these perfectly rendered details are overwhelmed by the oppressively rigid geometry that structures the space. In startling contrast to the supple curves organizing The Milkmaid, here Vermeer traps his young woman’s serenity within the stern constraints of unyieldingly straight lines, achieving a dynamic balance that frees the image to
jump off the canvas. No two works in Vermeer’s catalogue are more similar in structure and different in execution.
Another painting curiously tucked away in an adjoining gallery, Hendrick Sorgh’s A Kitchen, should have been granted pride of place in the same room as the show’s star. Sorgh’s dark, domestic interior scene, painted when Vermeer was still a child, clearly proved influential in The Milkmaid’s development. Aside from Domenico Fiasella’s Queen Artemisia, perhaps no painting made more of an impression on Vermeer in this period. Liedtke acknowledges this, of course, but understates the case. “This thinly painted and somewhat worn panel dates from about 1643 and anticipates some aspects of Vermeer’s domestic interiors, such as the abrupt recession from the left. The Delft artist [Vermeer] achieves a more naturalistic effect by bringing the viewer in much closer to the scene, and through his more sophisticated study of daylight.” True enough. But were one to crop the painting down to nothing but the maidservant in the corner, the extent to which Vermeer copied Sorgh’s composition for his own purposes becomes abundantly clear. The Met makes this point itself in the show, all the more reason to question why the two paintings have been sequestered in different rooms.
While most shows are designed to end with a bang — if for no other reason than to get museum goers excited about purchasing items from the little gift shop barnacles affixed to every exhibit these days—Vermeer’s Masterpiece peters out with a trickling whimper. Having assembled a pageant of images depicting people — their appetites, labors, and loves — the show closes with an isolated pair of paintings wildly out of place. Interior of the Oude Kerk, the shared title of these nearly identical works by Hendrick van Vliet and Emanuel de Witte, respectively, are almost completely devoid of human presence, emphasizing as they do the beauty of Delft’s iconic church. According to the Met, each work “evoked a spiritual environment and anticipated the optical approach of Vermeer,” which is fine, but why consign them to the end of the line? Had they come earlier to set the stage for understanding Vermeer’s milieu, influences and development, the church interiors would have nicely complemented the other works, building momentum toward a climactic viewing of The Milkmaid. As it is, guests leave the exhibit with the feeling of
seeing double.
Michael Busch’s critique of the Metropolitan’s Vermeer’s Masterpiece show is right on target. One hopes that curators of future exhibitions will take note. Walter Liedtke did not need to hype the “salacious” aspects of Vermeer’s beautiful Kitchenmaid in the over-the-top fashion he chose, although much of this commentary stemmed from Liedtke’s recent book; it wasn’t produced just to sell more tickets for this show.
Vermeer surely intended for knowledgeable seventeenth century Dutch viewers to take note of the sexual cues imbedded in the painting, including the footwarmer, the cupid tile, and the various anatomical referents in the form of open pitchers and erect pitchers – all in the context of the Dutch entertainment trope of sexually promiscuous female servants. Nonetheless, as others have said, Vermeer generally subverted these elements by his powerful portrayal of introspective equipoise, creating in the process a conjuring a complex poetry of reciprocal images, not a simple caricature. Here, Vermeer extends the theme of action and its consideration beyond what he captured in his Diana and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, which he then explored throughout his career. Note especially how the psychology of the Kitchenmaid anticipates the Astronomer and the Geographer.
And, yes, why didn’t the Met hang the Kitchenmaid alongside the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, for all the reasons Busch suggests? And why not exit the show with views of the Kitchenmaid, Vermeer’s “perfect painting,” which in so many ways embodies the artist’s creative raison d’être?
All things considered, it was a pleasure to see the Kitchenmaid once again on this continent. It’s a work that really must be seen in situ, for reproductions don’t do it justice. For enabling this experience, the Met is to be sincerely thanked.