Tim’s Vermeer

"The Music Lesson” by Johannes Vermeer

Who was the greater genius Tim or Vermeer? It took Tim Jension 1825 days to figure out how Vermeer painted "The Music Lesson." Or tried to figure it out, since there is no way of proving anything. It took 213 days to recreate the room in which Vermeer painted his masterpiece, in Jenison's San Antonio warehouse and 130 days to actually paint the work. Tim’s Vermeer is a film created by the famed magicians Penn and Teller (Teller directed and Penn Jillette produced along with Farley Ziegler) who obviously share both Jenison and Vermeer’s obsession with illusion. Jenison, a wealthy inventor was initially inspired by David Hockney’s theory that Vermeer had used a camera obscura to create his paintings. Hockney’s idea was also elaborated by Philip Steadman in his book Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpiece. Jenison  made a major contribution by introducing the notion that Vermeer may have used a mirror which allowed for optical inversion. The film is like one of those documentaries about the ascent of Everest since once Jension solves the mystery, he then has to implement it--dot by grueling dot. At one point he even discovers what he believes to be anomaly in the Vermeer work itself, a curvature which he’s able to  correct. Penn, who provides ongoing commentary, remarks about Jenison’s hypothesis, “Unfathomable genius doesn’t mean anything. Now he is a fathomable genius.” Tim’s Vermeer lies at the cross section of magic, technology and art. And the film underscores the point that technology would not have been anathema in Vermeer’s world. The opposition of art and technology is more a product of the modern sensibility and the inclination to separate science and art. Still, while we appreciate Jenison's inventiveness and energy and his assertion that he and Vermeer shared something in being tech geeks, one would, in the end, have to vote for Vermeer. So what that Jenison unearthed a process that literally anyone could perform. Let’s not forget that "The Music Room" (together with technique of its inception) was initially Vermeer’s idea.

The Two Goldfinches

The Goldfinch—both the Donna Tartt novel and the 17^th century masterpiece by Fabritius—is much in the news lately, the former on the bestseller list and the latter in the “Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshaus” show currently on exhibit at the Frick. Here is Francine Prose in an essay about the book  (“After Great Expectations,” The New York Review of Books, 1/9/14), meditating on the painting, “When we look at Fabritius’s painting…we still understand a truth about visual art that we seem to be forgetting about literature and the language in which it is written: what moves and delights us, what makes us return, again and again to discover what a work of art can tell us, is finally not the image, but the artfulness with which it was created.” Prose has reservations about the book, whose technique she compares invidiously to that of Dickens. She even goes so far as to quote the passage from Great Expectations in which the novelist unearths Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed digs, to underscore what’s the real deal. Celebrity paintings like The Goldfinch and The Girl With the Pearl Earring have seen their superstar status increased even further when they’re appropriated by authors whose books become bestsellers. Tickets for the Frick show have been hard to come by. But if you look at Officer and a Laughing Girl, a Vermeer that’s a staple of the regular Frick collection, you could easily feel the same kind of reservations about the The Girl With the Pearl Earring, as Prose felt about the literary version of The Goldfinch. Officer and a Laughing Girl has four elements that blow all comers out of the water: the open mullioned window which is the source of the light, the wall map which is the source of historical context, the soldier with his big dark hat who sucks the air out of the room and of course the enigmatic laughing maiden. Is she seducing or being seduced? The Girl With the Pearl Earring is a tronie, an idealized portrait, whose power derives from its control. However Officer and a Laughing Girl exemplifies both the craftsmanship Prose is talking about and the power of the object or set piece on which it’s applied--in this case the breathless apprehension of a new world.