One less Vermeer in the world

October 7, 2022 11:24 AM

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has determined one of their Vermeers was not actually a Vermeer. (WaPo gift link)

The closure due to covid allowed the museum to investigate their Vermeer holdings without audiences getting angry that they were off view. They were able to make other interesting discoveries about the way the artist worked.

posted by PussKillian (37 comments total)

Fascinating, if disappointing, if not entirely surprising.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:37 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

that's certainly a concerning way to title the post!
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:41 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

And one more Fauxmeer.
posted by jamjam at 11:47 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wait, Girl With the Pearl Bluetooth Headset was a fake?
posted by Etrigan at 11:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [19 favorites]

Thanks for posting. Vermeer is such a fascinating artist, and I think the forgeries and in this case a more legitimate "in the school of" painting shows us what different times have focused on when they saw the works. When you see the van Meegeren fake Vermeers today, it is really hard to understand how people could have been fooled. But to me it says that people in the first part of the 20th century saw Vermeer's paintings differently than we do. With this new discovery, we can learn that people in Vermeer's lifetime saw his paintings differently than we do.
Isn't that part of the art value of his work: that each generation can find new things to admire and learn from?

I didn't even remember seeing the the "Girl with a Flute", so that might be an intuitive dismissal, but when I look at it now, it seems very obvious that it isn't a Vermeer, and the curators were suspicious even before they did this research.
posted by mumimor at 11:52 AM on October 7, 2022 [20 favorites]

They could take the painting off the wall, then replace it with a display showing this movie on continuous loop.
posted by doctornemo at 12:30 PM on October 7, 2022

Wonder if this changes any of the theory about whether he used a camera obscura?
posted by rivenwanderer at 12:31 PM on October 7, 2022

"If all this is true, it alters our understanding of Vermeer, who has long been considered a lone wolf working without assistants or students. The question becomes: Who was this artist who had access to Vermeer’s studio and used many of the same materials? And what might one day be discovered about their relationship?"

It's amusing to consider that he tried having an apprentice & this being the best they could do* gave up teaching. I mean it must have been a challenging technique to transmit to someone else especially when many of the concepts will be very new to them.

*Not to insult the painting as it's better than anything I could do but imagine Vermeer being like "Well I told you how to do it & that's what you did but it didn't work.."
posted by bleep at 12:36 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

this changes any of the theory about whether he used a camera obscura?

I can't imagine he would have used camera obscura for the portraits. Though it is a good question, because one of the things that for me makes the "Girl with a Flute" different is the representation of space in the painting.
posted by mumimor at 12:54 PM on October 7, 2022

I thought the speculation was that he was using a camera lucida (and definitely see Tim’s Vermeer if this interests you).
This isn’t a complete surprise — something about this particular painting always looked just a little bit off, but I used to suspect that was because it was more an experimental sketch, or that Vermeer abandoned it 85% of the way through because it wasn’t turning out perfectly.
posted by newmoistness at 1:31 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Well, I mean, when you look at it, it's kind of obvious.
posted by nicolin at 1:31 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think Lizzo played that flute
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 1:31 PM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

it is really hard to understand how people could have been fooled.

Tim Hartford (Undercover Economist, Cautionary Tales) covers this in his book The Data Detective. His general hypothesis, also discussed on his podcast is that van Meergeren covered for his poor technique by appealing to academics' pet theories about Vermeer's life. He didn't just show up with a painting, but with the evidence they needed to prove the critic right all along, and from there motivated reasoning kicked into gear.

Though its not like we can prove one way or another, and maybe Tim is subject to his own motivated reasoning 😉
posted by pwnguin at 1:34 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's amusing to consider that he tried having an apprentice & this being the best they could do

I briefly imagined that it was some convoluted Mission Impossible-style plot, where somebody needs to bust into Vermeer's facilities and create a believable Vermeer for some contrived reason, but then I remembered that the original Mission Impossible TV series had an episode where they basically did exactly that.
posted by mhoye at 1:39 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

More like Vernear, amirite?
posted by MrJM at 1:46 PM on October 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

he was using a camera lucida
Really? I suppose I can't remember. I have seen Tim's Vermeer, and highly recommend it, but it seems I don't know what I saw. Which proves my point, that we see what we want/need/are conditioned to see. I love the camera obscura, and am thus biased to only notice that.

A camera lucida would make sense for a portrait, and maybe also be something he wouldn't share with an apprentice.
posted by mumimor at 1:52 PM on October 7, 2022

Eventually there will be no Vermeers left. They will all be identified as fakes. But then we will be forced to wonder "what are they fakes of?" If there are no authentic Vermeers, what could the fakers have been aspiring to? If there are no authentic Vermeers, can a fake really be a fake?

Umberto Eco could get several thousand words out of that. He probably did.
posted by Grangousier at 1:56 PM on October 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

Looks a lot like Girl with a Red Hat.
posted by vacapinta at 2:03 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Guardian on the camera obscura theory posed by David Hockney in 2000.
posted by LionIndex at 2:05 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's the same model as Girl with a Red Hat, clearly, but not the same artist. The Post article says:

Despite all that, scholars have long doubted whether Vermeer painted “Girl With a Flute.” It just didn’t look good enough. The transitions from light to dark, especially around the face, looked awkward and abrupt. The green shadows were heavily applied, creating what the “Vermeer’s Secrets” wall label calls “a blotchy appearance under the nose and along the jawline.”

In the 1990s, NGA curator Arthur Wheelock, an acknowledged Vermeer expert and recently retired, had “Girl With a Flute” designated as “attributed to Vermeer.” That designation, said Wieseman, was Wheelock’s “way of explaining why it generically looks like Vermeer but qualitatively doesn’t come up to the standard.”

I had noticed the "attributed to" language on the placard on my last visit to the National Gallery and I have to admit I wondered how long that would remain true. I'm certainly not going to be hanging up a shingle for my art authentication business any time soon. I hadn't paid any attention to that placard on previous visits, but in retrospect, for me at least, I wouldn't quibble at all with the decision to remove the attribution.
posted by fedward at 2:12 PM on October 7, 2022

I went to that 1995 exhibit, taking an overnight train down from Boston; it was a wild dream.

I've been wondering lately how long it will be before we're able to do a sort of "reverse DALL-E" on paintings like this. Right now the AI is being trained on lots of images to be able to generate plausible versions of x in the style of y; at what point will it be able to say that a particular image is not a plausible version of x in the style of y? It wouldn't displace other forms of analysis, of course, but what we're all doing here is not responding to quality so much as an intuitive sense of appropriate technique, no more advanced than Bernard Berenson making his lists a century ago.
posted by praemunire at 2:22 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was expecting an equally compelling mystery about why curator Marjorie Wieseman is called Betsy, but it turns out Elizabeth is her middle name. Let's see then make a Mission:Impossible episode about that!

Also, the particular screen resolution I'm using lined the word "partly" directly under the word "paltry" in the first article, and I gave myself a headache trying to work that around the blind spot in my good eye.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:23 PM on October 7, 2022

Umberto Eco could get several thousand words out of that. He probably did.

Borges would handle it in five pages.
posted by LionIndex at 2:27 PM on October 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

but what we're all doing here is not responding to quality so much as an intuitive sense of appropriate technique, no more advanced than Bernard Berenson making his lists a century ago.
Yes, that is what we're all doing, but the scientists and conservationists who have proved this are using scientific methods and technologies, and that includes the art historians who are just really good at seeing what is going on in a painting and describing that. I think that if there was the economy in it, you could pretty easily build an app that could identify an artwork and determine its veracity, but it would be pretty costly to get the experts to comply all the elements. For the few ultra rich and top museums for whom this is important, it's easier to just get the relevant expert to come see.
posted by mumimor at 2:31 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

that is what we're all doing, but the scientists and conservationists who have proved this are using scientific methods and technologies

I did read the article. Physical techniques are valuable but they also have certain limitations and can be expensive to bring to bear. It would be valuable to be able to apply a kind of analysis that doesn't require scanning and chemical analysis, with their attendant risks and costs, though I wouldn't want it to displace all other forms.

that includes the art historians who are just really good at seeing what is going on in a painting and describing that

This isn't scientific, though. You can argue it's valuable without arguing it's scientific. The number of skilled art historians who have fallen for forgeries in doing stylistic analysis is substantial. The Met published two fat volumes on this problem with "Rembrandt" paintings alone.
posted by praemunire at 3:15 PM on October 7, 2022

Looking at things and describing them for other people to understand them is what science is. It's the same ability that let us be good at choosing things to eat. All these folks needed was some simple, regular quiet time to do their job. I think we'll find it a lot cheaper & better for everyone to just give them more of that.
posted by bleep at 3:30 PM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

I knew they were testing their Vermeers, and I'm so relieved "Woman in a red hat" is still a Vermeer. I remember the first time I saw it. I was stunned.
posted by acrasis at 4:06 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

No one was like Vermeer, except for this one guy
posted by anazgnos at 4:56 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's always seemed a bit silly to me how much emphasis the art world puts on who made the painting. With this determination the painting will get a fraction of the attention it used to. Same exact painting, same frame, but different artist and suddenly it's less worthy. I guess the nature of humanity is that every so often we reinvent NFTs.

For the opposite here is a painting that is now attributed to a famous artist.
posted by ockmockbock at 6:40 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

googling images led me to Jan van Bijlert's "Girl with a Flute" where the titular girl is sitting with one breast sort of out & a look on her face like "Eyyyyy I got a FLUTE" & I have never been more charmed by an oil painting
posted by taquito sunrise at 8:29 PM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Girl with a flute.

It's a good painting, pairs well with Boy with Apple
posted by kaibutsu at 11:50 PM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Visitors to a new NGA exhibition, “Vermeer’s Secrets” (Oct. 8-Jan. 8), can see some of what the research team uncovered before the works are sent to the largest-ever Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (Feb. 10-June 4). The display includes the NGA’s four Vermeer paintings (now three) and two 20th-century forgeries that are still in the gallery’s collection. (How these grotesque parodies were ever taken seriously as Vermeers is difficult to say.)

I am excited for this exhibition in Amsterdam and already have tickets!
posted by vacapinta at 11:52 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's always seemed a bit silly to me how much emphasis the art world puts on who made the painting

I think the silly thing is the connection between monetary value and who made the painting. And then that some people are fascinated by that value and pay more attention to the more valuable paintings. But it is an important part of the method and theory of art history to be able to attribute work correctly, and I feel it is a useful part of it, because it makes art historians pay attention and try to understand what the artists were actually doing and why. I remember the Guardian article posted above by Lionindex very well, and I agree strongly with David Hockney:

Hockney complains: 'Many art historians regard themselves as too lofty - too concerned with the history of ideas, of iconography and so forth - to bother with questions about the mere craft of a painter's making.

'I must say, frankly, that I'm not all that interested in what sometimes passes for art history.'

And here is the larger significance of Hockney's challenge. It goes beyond a dispute, however fascinating, about whether the Old Masters traced some designs using lenses.

It is also an argument about how we regard 'fine art' generally. To say they 'cheated' with camera-like techniques is silly, in the end, because it suggests that this invalidates their skills in composition, colour, imagination, the handling of paint and so on.

Is it so qualitatively different from using grids, plumb-lines and maulsticks? Yes - for those who regard these painters as a pantheon of mysterious demigods, more than men if less than angels, anything which smacks of technical aid is blasphemy. It is akin to giving scientific explanations for the miracles of saints. And in an age which regards paintings as a substitute for religious faith, where art-worshippers mutter in hushed awe at the images in high-ceilinged public temple-galleries, this is a serious offence.

Hockney is reminding his critics that art is not so mysterious or so prissy. It is also a physical business of making. It is not a refuge from technology and science, though a great division in Western consciousness has tried to make it so. In fact, the two have always been closely connected.

posted by mumimor at 12:23 AM on October 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I remain suspicious of The Guitar Player and would be curious to see what careful scrutiny might reveal.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 9:26 AM on October 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I did art fraud to prove a point by the Answer in Progress channel is a great 19-minute video on different types of art fraud and what it means to be authentic art.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:53 PM on October 8, 2022

If you've never seen Orson Welles's F for Fake, I highly recommend it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:31 AM on October 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

The number of skilled art historians who have fallen for forgeries in doing stylistic analysis is substantial. The Met published two fat volumes on this problem with "Rembrandt" paintings alone.

Lawrence Block had a line about fake Rembrandts in one of his Bernie Rhodenbarr Burglar books;

"What is it they used to say about Rembrandt? He painted two hundred por­traits, of which three hundred are in Europe and five hundred in America.”
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:08 PM on October 9, 2022 [3 favorites]