comments are closed on this review, click here for worldwidereview home
From: Jackie A
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 26 April 2001
Vermeer and the Delft School Metropolitan Museum New York Until May 27 2001
The Met is good because it is big and you can pay what you want for entry. I recommend $1 because $0 is not accepted. 25 cents looks stingy. They have really good French C19th paintings and lots of Rembrandts and some ok Tiepolos and a nice Ingres downstairs. The Frick has a more perfect and more stunning collection and it is not far away. It will make you happier with its Fragonards, but the Met is still good.
Vermeer was quite rubbish. His paintings look like paint by numbers, which they probably were. I imagine he outlined the images using some kind of optical device, and then coloured them in. The oohaahing crowd ,7 deep in front of the few Vermeers and largely ignoring the large number of other boring Dutch paintings and drawings, seemed to be satisfied by bourgeois furnishings poorly painted. Are all the Vermeers real Vermeers? Some are really crude, perhaps he got bored by all that tiny brushing. Sometimes he got it right and one is intrigued by the frozen narrative and dazzled by surface verisimilitude. Perhaps painting invented photography. Once artists could record reality perfectly they were replaced by cameras whose pictures they had already produced.
comments are closed on this review, click here for worldwidereview home