2.24.25 — The Death of the Symbol
So little seems to be going on—a woman alone in a private room, few props, no motion, no overt emotion, the letter itself a slim ribbon of light. Jan Vermeer makes no fuss about what she might be reading and why it deserves to be painted. He seems to lavish all the subtleties of a great colorist and observer on next to nothing.
I kept looking for meaning in Vermeer’s gesture. And I kept returning to the same characteristics—reflected light, intricate but confined spaces, and the slow movement of the eye across a flat surface. He captures only the nuances of reflected light, the edges of a stark room of indefinite dimensions, and a surface almost compulsively divided by a window pane and green curtain. Its implied grid calls to mind the explicit cast-iron grid of the window. In his Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, a blemish in the wall captures the light. In room after room of his 1996 Washington retrospective, they have filled a museum with clarity and light.
It is an old debate: is art best defined as symbol making or as something that resists interpretation? Does its allegory have a subtext? Has contemporary art triumphed over old narratives with “pure painting,” or is it telling new stories entirely? Do true artists never explain their work, or are they the only ones with the right to try? Both sides beg for the vast institution called art history, and neither side is ready to ask how uniform and coherent that institution really is.
I want to make the question more concrete in a context of real history. I want to follow my own adjustments as I faced the mutest artist of all. Maybe my favorite work from a visit to Dresden is one of the city’s two by Vermeer. It shows a woman reading a letter. What if I could stand at her shoulder and read along with her? I shall never know for sure, but that resistance to reading is a kind of meaning, too—one that could never have existed without Vermeer.
In the twenty-five years since this Web site began, it has become a reference in contemporary art and art history on a scale that I never imagined. When I started, I could only share my thoughts on exhibitions then and some of my most treasured artists. Vermeer was one of them, and in those pre-Google days you could search the Web for him and find me among the top three or four hits. It seemed all the stranger to me, since they were personal, even private thoughts, much like the woman’s reading a letter. If mine could become so public, could I somehow share in hers and share it with others, too? I had to explain to myself the painting’s narrative and its apparent reserve.
Back then, too, I was making up for lost time, with thoughts from before I began to write. That included more “theory” than I would dump on you today. My answer had to reconcile symbolism and “pure painting”—the tools of art history and everything that art had learned since Modernism. It meant facing how much Vermeer owed to tradition and how much he changed it. It meant asking how the consummate artist of light and space could also be painting love. Something has entered along with the sunlight and letter, flung aside the small, red curtain above the window, and asked to enter even into her bed.
Every so often, let me use this page to return to a much earlier article, with apologies that it is longer and more ambitious than I would allow myself today. With a little luck, I can still evoke the work at hand (aided by some present-day revisions with just that in mind). I am talking about a seventeenth-century girl on the threshold of seduction or marriage—but not only that. From hidden religious doctrine, I wrote, Vermeer moves to the secrets of the heart. From the experience of a sacred figure, he moves to the sacredness of experience. By refusing to let you or I read his symbols and his letter, he has found a greater realism and a more modern art.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.