Back in 2021 director Suzanne Raes heard about an upcoming exhibition of the works of Johannes Vermeer at Amsterdam’s revered Rijksmuseum, an institution particularly associated with the Dutch masters (most notably the paintings of Rembrandt).
Curated by art expert Gregor Weber, the show developed out of the unexpected availability of three Vermeer paintings from New York’s Frick Collection as its home in Central Park was about to undergo extensive building works. Many US galleries, such as the Metropolitan Museum (the Met), refuse to loan three of their Vermeers (they have five in total). This is at the specific request of benefactors (many of whom are now dead) who demanded they remain in situ State-side. The Frick offer, therefore, was too great an opportunity to miss, given that last major exhibition of Vermeer’s work in the Netherlands (The Hague, 1994) didn’t include these key works.
There are painted 37 known Vermeer paintings and so exhibition curators Weber and Pieter Roelofs embark on an odyssey to collect as many as possible from international galleries. As the Rijksmuseum has state of the art equipment the exhibition would also offer the chance for detailed and valuable academic study and analysis of the paintings.
But not all is plain sailing. Despite, the Rijksmuseum being one of the world’s most august art establishments, The Met gives a flat ‘no’ for the reasons stated above. As does the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig across the German border, on the basis that local art students are booked in to study the sole Vermeer (The Girl With The Wine Glass) for their finals later that summer. Weber suggests these same students can be bussed to Amsterdam at his expense, but this suggestion falls on deaf ears.
In following Weber’s progress, director Suzanne Rees is offered the chance not only to chronicle the business of mounting a major exhibition (and all its attendant frustrations), but also to investigate the painter himself, the provenance of his works and, specifically, to determine what makes a Vermeer. (Raes has always preferred Vermeer to Rembrandt, in the same way one would “like The Beatles over The Stones,” and in her teens would cycle the streets of Amsterdam and encounter Vermeer shutters and gables, if not an actual girl with a pearl earring.)
The 1930s was a time of Vermeer mania, when more and more potential Holy Grails were being unearthed, such as one misattributed self-portrait (Vermeer never painted self-portraits), the notorious Van Meegeren fakes which even fooled the looting Nazis led by wannabe connoisseur Hermann Göring, and many contemporaneous works painted in the style of Vermeer.
But the canon of 37 definitive works was settled upon, although some of them are disputed. As plays out in the film, the National Gallery of Washington declares that their Girl With A Flute was not painted by the hand of Vermeer (a claim counter-disputed by the Rijksmuseum). What make the Washington assertion even more remarkable is that the painting is a prized asset whose value will have subsequently plummeted post-declaration.
A further question is raised as to the authorship of Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, owned by NY collector Thomas Kaplan (whom we see in Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt, 2019). Some of the experts think it is subprime, at least in Vermeer terms, and say so, but their misgivings aren’t enough to reverse attribution to the Dutch master.
In Raes’s film, produced by Ilja Roomans of Docmakers, we meet a roll call of these Vermeer experts who attest lovingly and enthusiastically to the painter’s greatness, all the time underlining his unique skills and techniques. Shadows on Vermeer’s flesh tones are counterintuitively rendered in green, we hear from painter Jonathan Janson. His details are pure bliss, says Rijksmuseum research Anna Krekeler, referring to the tiny red shutter in The Little Street. Conservator Abbie Vandervere gets to remove The Girl With A Pearl Earring from its frame to analyse hitherto unseen details (such as curtain folds) on the canvass, while curator Weber demonstrates Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura to determine how multiple shadows fall around a subject.
Such is their love for their idol, at least two of the interviewees are, before the film’s end as the paintings are mounted in the exhibition space, rendered speechless and lachrymose as they try to explain his genius.
The film world-premiered at Eye Filmmuseum in March 2023 two weeks after the exhibition eventually opened. “The last scene of the film was shot 4 days before opening of the exhibition. We wanted to film those paintings arriving, but the film was ready apart from the last scene. we had it completely mixed and graded and everything apart from just these last shots.”
Within a few weeks, the documentary achieved Crystal Film status by reaching 30,000 ticket sales in its home country. “In Holland it was like a very big flame, shortly burning. And then to my surprise – actually I’m not completely surprised because I love the film – but Kino Lorber took it for the US. And then in November it started in Germany and it’s still playing in over a hundred theatres. It’s amazing.” Last weekend the film had sold over 40,000 tickets in Germany and won the GZDOC Special Jury Award (China).
Raes further opines how Vermeer, with his relatively small oeuvre, has a rarity value that ups the ante when it comes to putting on an exhibition. People want to come in their thousands, but museums don’t always want to lend, even when the Rijksmuseum can reciprocate ten times over from its own collections of master painters, not least Rembrandt.
“Vermeer is something else and in America the Vermeers are really treasured. Like Betsy Wieseman (Head of the Department of Northern European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) says, these are pilgrimage paintings that people come to see from very far. So they expect these paintings to be there. And a lot of them were donated with the explicit wish that they stay in place.”
In terms of the film’s premise to determine what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer, it isn’t always the science which has the final say, Raes points out. “Of course, there are technical insights, but still this technique won’t bring you next to Vermeer in his studio,” she says. “They [some of the experts] also have their gut feelings as well as their love for Vermeer.”
This is indicated in the case of Kaplan’s questionable Vermeer (Young Woman Seated at a Virginal), as they seem to intimate their scepticism as to its authenticity without actually outright saying that it’s not genuine. “The researchers could not find anything that doesn’t make it a Vermeer,” says Raes. “’We consider this a Vermeer because we cannot prove it’s not.’ It’s like a negative proof. It’s very delicately put. And maybe their love for Vermeer makes it hard for some experts to accept that the Master made paintings not as brilliant as the others.”
The film also points out how every generation of academics and connoisseurs have framed Vermeer in different ways; as a painter of common people, or as an abstract painter or as a symbolist. Latterly he is viewed from a feminist perspective, not only his attributed works but also the works to which he may have an attachment, such as Washington’s The Girl With A Flute, which uses the same model, the same pigments and is the same roll of canvas as the Girl With a Red Hat, a Vermeer painting totally beyond dispute. Raes follows the Washington curators’ speculation that, given how very little is known about Vermeer’s background, other than he lived in Delft, died when he was 43 and had 14 children, these associated works may have been painted by a daughter, his wife, even his mother-in-law.
“Why shouldn’t we open to this hypothesis that there be might be someone in his environment who is not in the written history?” asks Raes. “That’s also what they [the Washington curators] tried to do, to open this mind frame.”
At one point in the film an international row threatens to break out between the Rijksmuseum and Washington over the status of the painting [Flute] which is set to be a key component of the exhibition. So Pieter Roeloffs, the Rijksmuseum’s Head of the Department of Fine Arts, sets off on a peace-keeping mission. But this meeting is strictly off camera, and so the meeting room door gets a starring role.
“Of course, it’s a documentary film and you are used to being locked out,” Raes observes of filming the scene. “You can put as many locked doors in your film as you want, but that won’t make it a good film. But at this moment, I knew that this was really a very tricky situation, and they didn’t want us in. And then I thought, okay, let’s film this closed door and then tell as precisely as possible what happened, that they really had to make up and very cordially say, ‘okay, we agree to disagree.’…That’s what proper art historians do.”
So how does Raes reflect on her film with as we enter awards season, especially as it has such trans-Atlantic resonance. “I really wanted the viewer to have this experience of feeling what a Vermeer can be. By looking at Vermeer through the eyes of Anna Krekeler, who looks at The Little Street with its red shutter, and Jonathan Janson and his emotion when he sees his last Vermeer. And, of course, Gregor Weber when he has this lump in his throat as he tries to say something he cannot explain. I think that’s what the film is about. And as a viewer, if you experience some of the same emotion, or if you get moved by the paintings, then the film is a success,” Raes signs off.
