This book begins with a single premise: that Vermeer painted images not only of extraordinary beauty, but of extraordinary strangeness. To understand that strangeness, Bryan Jay Wolf turns to the history of early modernism and to ways of seeing that first developed in the 17th century. In a series of provocative readings, Wolf presents Vermeer in bracing new ways, arguing for the painter's immersion in - rather than withdrawal from - the intellectual concerns of his day. The result is a Vermeer we have not seen before: a painter whose serene spaces and calm subjects incorporate within themselves, however obliquely, the world's troubles. Vermeer abandons what his predecessors had laboured so carefully to achieve: legible spaces, a world of moral clarity defined by the pressure of a hand against a table, or the scatter of light across a bare wall. Instead Vermeer complicated Dutch domestic art and invented what has puzzled and captivated his admirers ever since: the odd daubs of white pigment, scattered across the plane canvas; patches of blurred surface, contradicting the painting's illusionism without explanation; and the querulous silence that endows his women with secrets they dare not reveal. This illustrated book situates Vermeer in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, and it demonstrates how powerfully he wrestled with questions of gender, class and representation. By rethinking Vermeer's achievement in relation to the early modern world that gave him birth, Wolf takes northern Renaissance and early modern studies in new directions.
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The late twentieth century has done untoward things to Johannes Vermeer. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The late twentieth century has done untoward things to Johannes Vermeer. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Vermeer and His Peers
3 Jan 2002
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Is there anything new to say about the great Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer? Scholars have been obsessed with his paintings for years. To my delight, this book by Bryan Jay Wolf actually offers fresh insight into the issues that preoccupied the artist--and well as other Dutch painters in the seventeenth century. Issues of commerce, domesticity, private space, gender--and new innovations in technique, some of the most important in the entire history of painting.
The book is wonderfully illustrated, not just with images by Vermeer, but also by de Hooch, Metsu, Luiken, Netscher, Ter Borch, Rubens, Dou, van Hoogstraten, and Steen--and closer to our own time, paintings by Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, even Charles Addams--as Wolf explains the lasting impact of this strange and elusive artist. A must for anyone interested in Vermeer or in the social history of Dutch art.
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