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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)
