An update on the Vermeer of the century!

Folks, I was too quick to urge all of you to travel to Amsterdam and visit the amazing Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum there. 

 

Well, if you have not renewed your passports yet, you may want to take your time. It turns out that the Rijksmuseum issued about 450,000 tickets to the Vermeer, this world-class event that has been in planning for the past seven years, but all of them were bought out within the first four days of the show. The Vermeer, as of now, is completely sold out! 

 

Of course, the show had been well advertised for months, but no one expected this kind of surge in demand and for all these tickets to be snatched up so quickly. So now the Rijksmuseum is trying to find ways to either extend the exhibition or open the museum to more visitors during the period of the show. The curators are letting it be known that they may be able to issue more tickets by mid-March, but even those are expected to be grabbed within hours. Apparently scalping of tickets is not just an American phenomenon; already tickets that had been bought by speculators are appearing on the internet at phenomenal asking prices.  

 

I found all this out myself the hard way. Carla and I had already made our plans to fly to Amsterdam and visit the Vermeer in mid-May but wanted to get our tickets before we finalized our flights. Unfortunately, it was not to be. There may be opportunities to see the exhibition if you are in Amsterdam and you are willing – and have the time – to wait for a chance at an extra ticket, but you would be taking your chances. So, the alternative, much cheaper, is to log on to the museum website and see the exhibition remotely!

 

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/johannes-vermeer

 

In the meantime, the Dutch are having a ball of a time with their Vermeer. Dutch television has launched a reality show, to coincide with the Vermeer exhibition, titled “The New Vermeer”. In each of its six weekly episodes, two professional painters and dozens of amateur artists compete to recreate one of the six Vermeer paintings which are known to have been made by the master but are now extinct, or in one case were stolen and have disappeared (“The Concert”, from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990). For some of them, there are images. For most of them, there are only descriptions, apparently written at the time of the auctioning of the paintings, shortly after the painter’s death. The assignment is to recreate these paintings, but also to make them so that they resemble Vermeer’s painting style!

                                        Nard Kwast’s reimagining of a lost Vermeer painting that won him the

                                        professional category in Episode 1.Credit...DeNieuweVermeer.nl

 

This is a serious competition, with judges drawn from the Rijksmuseum itself as well as from the Mauritshuis museum in Hague. The professional artists were given four months to produce their Vermeer-like paintings, with a lot of help and guidance from Vermeer experts on the master’s techniques and materials. Both the professionals’ paintings and the art pieces produced by the amateurs – many of them two- and three-dimensional interpretations of Vermeer art pieces – will be exhibited in museum spaces in the Netherlands.

 

For more information on this reality show that glorifies a major part of our cultural heritage, please check the very informative article “How Hard Is It to Paint Like Vermeer? TV Contestants find Out” by Nina Siegal in the New York Times of February 23, 2023.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/arts/design/the-new-vermeer-tv-show.html