8.22.25 — Smart Painting
You know the presumed evils of smart phones and the toll on young adults. They make it impossible to concentrate on books and chores. They drive teens to suicide.
But you have heard all that before, endlessly, whether it is true or not. You could call it a meme. Go easy, though, on the warnings—of bullying and peer pressure, fraught communications and awful isolation. They might apply tenfold to a woman reading a letter. They might have you looking again at a woman, her maid, 
and a love letter from Jan Vermeer. With “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” at the Frick Collection through August 31, you may wonder how painting itself communicates.
To be sure, not every age is alike, and I lack credentials as social and technological commentator. Nor do I mean to distract from a favorite artist and a wonderful exhibition. I made a vow long ago to see every one of his roughly thirty-five paintings—and came seriously close after a 1996 Washington retrospective. Already by then I had written at some length about his Woman Reading a Letter in Dresden and how such modest means convey inner hopes, inner turmoil, a private space, and a larger world left unseen. The woman stands facing the window effectively looking out without once looking up.
Vermeer encompasses every variation in light—reflected off surfaces and in transit through the curtains. The woman’s face itself reflects off panes of glass, seeming to dissolve into color before one’s eyes. I asked how domestic objects become symbols and how narrative only enhances Vermeer’s reputation for “pure painting.” As I wrote then, something has entered along with the sunlight and letter, flung aside the small, red curtain above the window, and asked to enter even into her bed. Her downcast eyes direct a viewer’s own into the painting and into her very being, just like the reflected light that points into the room. I continued in a review of his retrospective to map his career, optical command, and visual questioning—and a third review pursues Vermeer’s women still further, through a Young Woman Seated at the Virginals.
Far be it from me to repeat all that. Rather than start over, I can only direct you to my words from so many years ago. (Yes, this Web site has been around a long time and accumulated a lot of history.) Nor need I argue that letters could stir up pretty strong feelings—feelings about a woman and her lover. The very first novel in most accounts (and surely the dullest), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, unfolded entirely in letters, and it was not just a plot device. Needless to say, a painting or a novel about communication is also reflecting on itself.
Stick, then, to just three paintings and a single exhibition. If nothing else, it picks up the tale of the Frick’s renovation and expansion from its April reopening. It opens a new gallery for nothing but temporary exhibitions, where the theater used to stand as a venue for lectures and music. The Frick need no longer set aside its holdings to make space for loans like, say, a past show of Dutch painting from the Mauritshuis—and a new, larger theater a floor below both looks and functions better as well. For now, three paintings hang side by side, with text on the wall facing the entrance. Each has its own partition, collectively spanning the gallery and masking the exit.
The museum, then, learns from Vermeer’s talent for confined spaces. It includes a work from its own collection (the oldest in the show), in which one can all but measure the slim space beneath the woman’s pen, its point resting on her table. She herself is measuring in her mind her distance from the letter that her maid holds out, tilted parallel to the pen—and her imagined distance from the outside world. Two more of Vermeer’s paintings remain in their usual places in the Frick. Filling out the exhibition show are loans from Dublin’s National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is a short walk to more Vermeer in European painting at the Met.
If the Frick’s contribution to the exhibition seems the boldest in light and color, it has lost some of its shadow over the years. Those who know the artist will not be surprised that its black background was originally green. The background in the loan from Dublin is still green, while the loan from the Rijksmuseum places the woman almost in the background. One approach her across a dizzying pattern of floor tiles, with more barriers to either side. One approaches her, too, with the eye alone—and I continue next time with what you approach.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.