From A Distance: Gerhard Richter & Johannes Vermeer

This is probably my last post responding to Gerhard Richter’s recent ‘Panorama’ retrospective.  I want to discuss the influence of Johannes Vermeer’s work on Richter’s ‘Reader’, having seen the ‘Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence’ exhibition at the Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum last year.

Gerhard Richter, 'Reader (Lesende)',  1994

‘Reader’ is a beautiful, tender portrait of Richter’s wife and about as personal as his work gets.  Nevertheless, he stays true to form in giving us an image that explores the nature of depiction and conscious influence as much as it expresses emotional sincerity.  Anyone familiar with Vermeer’s oeuvre will recognise the subject and left-facing female profile and downward gaze from ‘Woman in Blue Reading A Letter’ or ‘A Lady Reading At The Window',  Other overt references to the Dutch master include the compositional use of background rectangles and corners, the gorgeous use of light in the describing both head and page surface and the motionless absorption of the model.

Johannes Vermeer, 'A Woman In Blue Reading A Letter'

Johannes Vermeer, 'A Lady Reading At The Window'

As usual in Richter’s representational pictures, photography plays a vital role in ‘Reader’.  There is just enough of his typical unfocussing throughout, along with the burning - out of information in the neck, to show that this image passed through lenses and light-sensitive materials before ever it met paint.  In this respect, a clear connection transcends the intervening centuries between both artists.  Vermeer famously relied on a camera obscura or similar optical device in constructing many images.  The light effects in his paintings often suggest those seen on an optical viewing screen far more than through an unmediated human eye.

Of the four Vermeers in the Cambridge show these effects are best observed in the stunning little ‘Lacemaker’ from The Louvre.  The diffusion of detail in the coloured threads reduces them to abstract splashes of colour.  Meanwhile, the illumination of the model from top right reveals as much about the flattening effects of bounced light as about coherently modelled form.  Reflected light can often unify and flatten planes in the heads of Vermeer’s models as begins to happen here and it is also beautifully evident in the profile head in ‘Reader’.  Just as Richter’s image contains intensively lit passages that the original photographic film was unable to describe in detail, so the collar of the lace worker reduces to a burnt-out slab of white.  Throughout the picture are scattered Vermeer’s trademark glittering points of highlight.  However effective they may be, they are neither natural or observable by eye alone.

Johannes Vermeer, 'The Lacemaker' 

After seeing the Vermeers at the Fitzwilliam I read Lawrence Gowing’s 1952 Monograph on the artist, [1.] - now surpassed by more recent studies but still pretty insightful on his work and apparent concerns.  An important theme is the perceived tension between Vermeer’s primary subject, - women in domestic surroundings, (either solitary or the central focus of a group), and his seeming reluctance to engage emotionally with them and recourse to consequent visual distancing strategies;

“Painter and subject both require to be free of … irksome material attachment.  And separate at last both find their natural condition, their fullest life.  The feminine subject is intact, entire.  The painter has no part in her immemorial existence.  She remains outside him, essentially and perfectly other than he.  And being so she is to him the most complete enrichment.  The necessary halves of a world have come together: it is a marriage of light.” [2.]

I’ve always loved the immaculate distillation and formality of Vermeer’s pictures but there’s no doubt that his models can seem integrated into the compositions more as mannequins in a prescribed space than as living, breathing personalities.  His strictly contained interiors, geometrically divided walls, light-emitting but viewless windows, clusters of furniture and even theatrical curtains create meticulous illusionistic spaces but also severely constraining ones in which access to the model and their own freedom of movement are repeatedly impeded.  In ‘The Lacemaker’ Vermeer observed his model at unusually close quarters but she remains engrossed in her work with averted gaze and safely barricaded behind her workstation and adjacent covered table, - but for whose safety exactly?  Does she occupy a rampart or a prison?

Johannes Vermeer, 'The Music Lesson' 

The Cambridge show also included ‘The Music Lesson’, which is a text book demonstration of linear perspective creating deep illusory space, (complete with receding tiled floor), but also employs a bizarre lop-sided composition full of barriers between viewer and distant subject [3.].  It’s like Vermeer retreated to the far end of a cluttered furniture depository, to glimpse his female protagonist’s countenance reflected through the dual filters of the distant wall mirror and his optical equipment.  The painting is pure construct; - an illusion of an illusion within an illusion and surely no painter has been more detached from a model.

We can only speculate on the psychological or sociological reasons for Vermeer’s estrangement from the women he painted.  What is more understandable, is how that lack of emotional engagement might fascinate Richter who has consistently sought images full of philosophical depth but devoid of sentiment or subjectivity.  And there is a clear parallel between the Dutchman’s exploration of the effects of contemporary developments in optical science and lens technology on picture-making and the German’s fascination with the scope of painting in a photographic culture.  In their different historical and social contexts each has undertaken a prolonged investigation into our formalised methods of capturing, recording and reconstructing imagery and their inescapable effect on our interpretation of the visual world.

[1.]:  Lawrence Gowing, ‘Vermeer’, London, Giles de la Mare, (Originally Faber & Faber), 1952, 1970 & 1997.

[2.]:  Lawrence Gowing, ‘Vermeer’, London, Giles de la Mare, (Originally Faber & Faber), 1952, 1970 & 1997.

[3.]:  Fred Dubery & John Willats, ‘Perspective & Other Drawing Systems’, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. Ltd, 1972 & 1983.

This scholarly text is the most interesting book I’ve read on the subject.  It includes a detailed discussion of Vermeer’s use of formal perspective and optics in constructing ‘The Music Lesson’.