Biljana Doj\u010dinovi\u0107, University of Belgrade, recently published this critical notice of the most comprehensive Vermeer exhibit ever assembled, which she was kind enough to translate for us: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The largest Jan Vermeer\u2019s exhibition has been opened in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on February 10, 2023:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe 28 Vermeer paintings are presented in a spacious setting that spans all ten galleries of the museum\u2019s Phillips Wing. In 11 thematic sections, the exhibition brings visitors closer to Vermeer and offers rich insights into the life and paintings of Vermeer, including: early ambitions, first domestic interiors, balance between the indoor and outdoor worlds, the letters, musical seduction, outlook on the world and inner values,\u201d says Taco Dibbits, General Director of the Rijksmuseum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This, largest ever, exhibition of Vermeer will be open until June 4th<\/sup>, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\u00a0 \u201cmaster of light\u201d had a great impact on John Updike and his fiction, as pointed out in James Plath\u2019s seminal article \u201cVerbal Vermeer: Updike\u2019s Middle-Class Portraiture.\u201d Plath named Updike a Verbal Vermeer when exploring the visual aspects of Rabbit novels. The phrase itself is an ingenious way to describe Updike\u2019s complete opus. The alliteration and assonance (Ver<\/em>bal Ver<\/em>meer) point to the poetical aspects of the pun, while its meaning connects the medium Updike uses (words) with his favorite painter \u2013 Vermeer \u2013 mentioned many times especially in his early work. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vermeer is for the first time mentioned in Updike\u2019s fiction in the early story \u201cLucid Eye in Silver Town,\u201d in which a boy travels with his father to New York hoping to buy a book on Vermeer. \u00a0In Updike\u2019s second novel, The Centaur<\/em>, published in 1963, the young protagonist, Peter Caldwell, wants to become a painter, and not \u201cjust any\u201d painter, but Vermeer himself:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and may skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. \u201c (Updike 1993: 62)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the poem \u201cMidpoint\u201d Vermeer is grouped with some other painters and visual artists, including Walt Disney:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Praise Disney, for dissolving Goofy\u2019s stride In the essay \u201cVerbal Vermeer,\u201d Plath names domesticity \u2013 i.e., the importance of objects which are equal to humans, the usage of light and the phenomena of \u201cdynamic stasis\u201d \u2013 as methods that Vermeer and Updike had in common. Domesticity refers to the people Vermeer had presented at his canvases: the cozy life of middle class in the 17th century Delft, in what was later named genre painting<\/em>. Plath emphasizes the importance of objects, which were not merely a background for Updike:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because he treated objects and humans equally, the former acquired a sense of importance, and the latter a kind of memorialized stasis \u2013 each \u201cfavored\u201d by the artist\u2019s even, modulated light. (Plath 1998: 208)<\/p>\n\n\n\n James Plath argues that Updike makes the traditional archetypal connection of light with the truth, deliverance, knowledge, and transfiguration \u2013 in contrast to darkness and shadows. Thus the usage of light is actually a connection with the Creator: both Vermeer and Updike like to dwell at the first and most sensual level of creation, the moment closest to the birth of an object (see Plath 1998: 221). According to Plath, light also means present. Further, he de- scribes the present tense as something like \u201cdynamic stasis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The similar effect is poetically presented in Wislawa Szymborka\u2019s poem \u201cVermeer\u201d[1]<\/a> :<\/p>\n\n\n\n So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum (translated from Polish by\u00a0Clare Cavanagh\u00a0and\u00a0Stanislaw Baranczak)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1]<\/a> Wislawa Szymborska, the Literature Nobel Prize winner for 1996, was a great friend of Blaga Dimitrova, the poet who had been the prototype for Updike\u2019s 1965 story, “The Bulgarian Poetess.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/strong> Plath, James. \u201cVerbal Vermeer: Updike\u2019s Middle-Class Portraiture.\u201d Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike\u2019s Rabbit Novels<\/em>. Ed. Lawrence R. Broer. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama \u00a0Press, 1998. Online at https:\/\/digitalcommons.iwu.edu\/eng_scholarship\/42\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Into successive stills our eyes elide;
And Jan Vermeer, for salting humble bread
With Dabs of light, as well as bricks and thread. (Updike 1995: 96)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn\u2019t earned
the world\u2019s end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dibbits, Taco https:\/\/www.rijksmuseum.nl\/en\/press\/press-releases\/vermeer-exhibition-opens-at-rijksmuseum<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n