What can we learn from Tracy Chevalier... ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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17 October

Well, I would listen to Richard Egarr, director of the Academy of Ancient Music, endlessly about musicianship, instruments and performance, because I know him, I trust him, and he is knowledgeable.

This filmed account of an exhibition (now past ?), co-written by Phil Grabsky (and another) under the title Vermeer and Music, probably thought it unavoidable to have Ms Chevalier in it.

Does it make as much sense for Jacobi to be a talking head on Bacon's paintings as for Chevalier to be one on Vermeer's ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 20, 2013

I do not know why. Yes, she wrote a best-selling novel about Vermeer's life, and it gave rise to a film of the same name (a vehicle for young Scarlett). The title of both renamed a painting that, albeit by tradition, already had a name. (Vermeer seems to have named none himself : nothing, other than an inventory of his house, was mentioned, whereas what I want to know is why - when he was also dealing in art - he did not have a catalogue of his own works, to whom sold, for how much, when. etc.)

The film, perhaps gratuitously, has a narrator (a woman) as well as an art historian (a man) as its host : in the discussion of the second painting that Chevalier was given space to talk about (probably four minutes of the film, twice, and so competing with the time allowed to the exhibition's curator), she called an instrument lying on its side, which the host had described a viola da gamba, a bass viol. They are not interchangeable terms.

I really do not know which speaker was right, but neither even noticed. This is meant to be a film about music, Egarr has already told us that a gamba is like a guitar on its side (it has frets), and, somewhere, the narration has said that the bass viol got taken over by the cello (via the baroque cello, I think), so there is no scope, and no credibility, in calling the depicted recumbent instrument both gamba and viol: it is just inexcusable that this level of inaccuracy is present at this fundamental level.


Am I interested in what narrative there might be in a painting (the two paintings from The National Gallery, which were flanking the guitar player from Kenwood House) ? Does that fit in with facts about Vermeer's family, wife, mother-in-law, household, children ? Do I need to give such space to this to the exclusion of further comments from curators from all over the world ?

At the exhibition itself, the AAM had been playing live – nothing gave that sense in seeing them filmed, for a short while, at the Handel House Museum, which could have had the camera moving from the players to the artwork and back, and which could have been both cinematic and evocative.

There was nothing about genuine Delftwork, no comment on the tiles that form a floor-level frieze in the two paintings that Chevalier was talking about. No mention, also, of Brian Sewell’s theory that the women in the Vermeers, because of how they are dressed, are prostitutes. Nothing, further, about how any artist who did not have brass chandeliers or any musical instrument might see examples to paint.

Nothing about the provenance of any of the works, or (except a hint, in one curator being interviewed, to the effect that Vermeer created a genre) whether he is believed to have originated them in the hope that they would sell (could any artist afford to do that ?), rather than being commissioned.


And what I wanted to know (or nearly did not get told) :

* That Vermeer  did not abandon the family business (which his deceased father had turned his hand to), because he was still dealing in art, and finding it hard to make ends meet, near the end of his life

* That the inventory tells us that the studio was in the four-storey home - but not why (unless painters worked from home) Vermeer did not incur the obvious expense, to have more space and quiet, of an external studio

* Whether it was unusual for artists' works to be untitled

* Why we only have 36 of the known 50 works of Vermeer (addressing the above - was there no catalogue ?) ?

* Do we really know nothing about whether the two to three paintings per year that Vermeer produced (compared, say, with how many by a typical artist) commanded a suitable price ?

* As to commissions, if Vermeer was dealing as well as painting, what the customary practice was - this model (a family member) with these elements and this feel and size and detail ?

* Could the woman standing at the keyboard (and her fellow, seated at one) be looking out, not at us (as we allegedly wanted the woman with the baroque guitar, in the centre, to do), but at the person who had commissioned the work


Too many such questions indicate too few hard facts, too little solid statement of professional opinion by experts...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The Vermeer girl

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 January (updated 10 February)

When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here

The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.

Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.

Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.

However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings

So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)

Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.

We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.

On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…



Post-script

Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :

1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco

2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund

3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)

4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...



End-notes

* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.


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