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In reviewing “Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick Collection, I tried to stick closely to the exhibition’s three paintings. I had written often about Jan Vermeer, a favorite, in the course of thirty years, including a review of his 1996 Washington retrospective, so I kept focused on the exhibition, relying on past reviews for a fuller picture. Allow me here to except from the first and longest as a brief guide and a teaser.

So little seems to be going on—a woman alone in a private room, few props, no motion, no overt emotion, the letter itself a slim ribbon of light. Jan Vermeer makes no fuss about what she might be reading, what it means to her, and why it deserves to be painted. He seems to lavish all the subtleties of a great colorist and observer on next to nothing.

I keep looking for meaning in Vermeer’s gestures. And I keep returning to the same characteristics—reflected light, intricate but confined spaces, and the slow movement of the eye across a flat surface. He captures only the nuances of reflected light, the edges of a stark room of indefinite dimensions, and a surface almost compulsively divided by a window pane and green curtain. Its implied grid calls to mind the explicit cast-iron grid of the window. In his Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a blemish in the wall captures the light. In room after room of his retrospective, they have filled a museum with clarity and light.

It is an old debate: is art best defined as symbol making or as something that resists interpretation? Does its allegory have a subtext? Has contemporary art triumphed over old narratives with “pure painting,” or is it telling new stories entirely? Do true artists never explain their work, or are they the only ones with the right to try? Both sides beg for the vast institution called art history, and neither side is ready to ask how uniform and coherent that institution really is.

But can labels begin to explain a painting that will not let anyone read its letter? No wonder Jan Vermeer is known as the painter’s painter, the one who most avoids associations with the transient and the insignificant. For many modern admirers the word anecdotal, mere storytelling, is an insult—and an allegory a thing of the distant past. A nearby Dutch interior by another fine artist, Gerrit Dou, could indeed be the anecdotal version. I can enjoy it, but I could stare far longer at Vermeer’s warm, even light. I could feel time pass as it slips from window to wall to her face, then back again to her reflection in the window.

Vermeer keeps returning to women awakening to adulthood. They all struggle to manage their sexuality, self-esteem, and some dubious male propositions. A woman at a window raises her pearls or turns her gaze toward the warm, enveloping light. Another woman hides her face in a drink. I do much the same at parties now. In a later painting, a man again leans over a woman’s shoulder. She looks out, toward the viewer, with a grin somewhere between dazed, ill at ease, and inane. And still they retain that sense of wonder behind the apparent reserve.

Maybe Vermeer is the ultimate postmodernist. His women hold a letter the way a saint might hold the instrument of her doom or her miracle. Like a saint, too, she is left with the same demand to think about her virtue and her fate. Religious painters had used props to evoke texts that had already become canonical. Vermeer creates an artistic canon from a fictitious text and makes that text emblematic of his art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To wrap up from last time on Vermeer’s love letters, plainly Jan Vermeer does not like to repeat himself. Any artist’s studio is a confined space, with luck big enough for whatever is needed. And buyers often push for repetition, so that they know what to expect.

This painter, though, makes each painting its own variant on a woman, a letter, and her maid. Each is a study in uncertainty, hopes, and fears. Each could belong to a larger story as well, without so much as the need for a maid.

Three paintings can take you only so far, even from someone with so small and so stunning an output as Vermeer. Think of them, though, as just three scenes in lives awakening to adulthood and to love. Women keep reading a letter over and over, like the woman at the window in Dresden, long after the servant who delivered it has gone. The man who sent it appears at last, the cape of a gallant or soldier fully framing her as she turns away, uncertain whether to take pleasure or to flee. He embodies a wider world that she cannot fully enter, much like a map on the wall behind them both. He may have fought for the very city in Vermeer’s light-filled view of Delft.

The three paintings on display put her through her paces. She prepares for the worst, hand to her chin, as the maid delivers the goods. She accepts the letter while still at her music, sign of love. She begins her reply. She bathes in sunlight from a visible stained-glass window. She lets the light define the interior, a woman’s place, the window unseen.

She dresses as a lady, but she sits with a broom, a basket of dirty clothes, and a darker room to the side with a cabinet and linens. After all, she commands a wealthy household, but a woman’s field of command includes cleaning house, and the maid is her intimate. She commands lavish pictures on the wall as well, including fertile Dutch landscapes that Vermeer would have known from his day job, as a dealer. The largest painting within a painting, The Finding of Moses, tells of an infant left to die in Egypt and his rescue by women. Who knows how far sexually Vermeer’s woman has gone? Who knows, too, whether the fruit of love will lead the Jews or the Dutch to piety or to freedom?

Who knows anything for certain? As I wrote after his 1996 Washington retrospective, I may believe in Vermeer’s perfection, but I want to imagine his doubts—or are the doubts my own? The letter is often the brightest spot in a painting, but one cannot read a word of it. Nor can one quite read the women’s faces. As the curator, Robert Fucci of the University of Amsterdam, argues, they always look away. Look again, though, and they are questioning, smiling, angry, or close to tears.

Look again, too, at the woman already intent on writing, a draft crumpled on the floor. Maybe the soldier’s letter angered her, and she rushed to begin a more disillusioned reply. Or maybe she thought that she would never hear from him again, only to begin a more hopeful letter before it was too late. Look again, too, at the woman already intent on writing, a draft crumpled on the floor. Maybe the soldier’s letter angered her, and she rushed to begin a more disillusioned reply. Or maybe she thought that she would never hear from him again, only to begin a more hopeful letter before it was too late. Whatever the truth, Vermeer creates the space of a woman’s world. He trusts to an economy of vision that for many a modern viewer nears abstraction. He leaves everything uncertain except for the light.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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.

To wrap up from last time on a larger home for the Frick Collection, what has changed in all those new square feet (eighty-two thousand of them, should you be keeping track)? You may be tempted to say nothing—and a good thing, too. It would take a remarkable memory anyway to spot the new, beyond a room for drawings.

Could two of the three Vermeers have left that one large room, and could anything else has moved with them? That glass-enclosed corridor offers a clue. It now displays porcelain, as does a room just past the long one, with a surprising clarity of color and representation. They signal a renewed effort to integrate the decorative arts, but as art rather than the highly wrought luxury goods of the Eveillard and Moore gifts just months before.

That second room for porcelain used to hold a standing saint by Piero della Francesca—whose scowl, bearing, and red robe should stop you in your tracks. Beside it hung a painting by Jan van Eyck completed after his death, with the broader strokes of Petrus Christus. van Eyck’s sunlight is as intricate as his city, its urban architecture a tale of suffering and release. Both paintings have moved upstairs. While not imposing order on a seemingly untouchable collection, the second floor does now frame the whole with the Renaissance and pre- or Post-Impressionism. Art itself provides the map.

Reaching them delivers the most startling change of all. A lavish stairwell, unlike a second just past the ticket counter, was there all along, where a museum visit might once have ended. The mansion is that much more one’s own. Is Frick’s daughter coming down soon for breakfast? You can judge better when the restaurant opens in summer, but I suspect not. The rooms upstairs have found a purpose in art, but memories of home are thoroughly erased.

It is not the museum I once knew, only not in the way I expected and feared. After the luxuriant architecture of the old museum, the upstairs rooms seem modest and cold. They have a more conventional symmetry, to either side of twin corridors, in cramped quarters with no invitation to the eye between rooms. They have almost no decorative detail, and the corridors are barer still. They can make art look abandoned by mistake—and a visitor an intrusion. Rather than a museum or a mansion, one could be casing out a New York apartment.

Then, again, architecture can change only so much, and art has a visible and palpable presence all its own. It surprised practically everyone that the Frick Collection looked great in its temporary home at the Frick Madison (the Whitney’s former home and the former Met Breuer)—but a collection this good would look halfway decent on the subway. Bellini’s Saint Francis really could hold a room to itself, and it can hold its place in the mansion now. An expansion is no less needed, and the bareness also signals a proper restraint. Piero, Hans Holbein, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya can still send you home in fear for your life. Still, this may be only the start of hangings and rehangings yet to come.

Meanwhile, they bring home the greatest change of all. No longer my private museum, the new Frick is downright packed, even on a weekday. And the crowds may find a map right within that great hall and within the art. Jacob van Ruisdael takes care to paint alternate paths through a wooded Dutch landscape, to let you know exactly where you might go. Vermeer’s woman with a letter holds a pen with its point on the table and a space above that increases millimeter by millimeter, ending in her hand. Imagined or observed, art knows to take their measure.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To continue from last time on a larger home for the Frick Collection, I am used by now to museum expansions, and museums are all but obliged to have them. The New Museum, once a fancy designation for one-room installations curated by its founder, Marcia Tucker, is letting its stacked boxes tumble south along the Bowery (a work in progress), and the Met will soon revamp its incursion on Central Park for modern and contemporary art.

A 2015 home for the Whitney by Renzo Piano still looks like a hospital or a prison, but it works very well indeed. A 2019 expansion almost rescues the Museum of Modern Art from its disaster of an expansion in 2004. Piano reveled in excess again at the Morgan Library in 2016, moving the entrance from J. P. Morgan’s actual library to an atrium devoid of art. The Bronx Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University Museum are wrapping up their expansions right now—and, sad to say, I could go on.

But never mind. I have lost that battle long ago. Museum-goers no doubt deserve a place to eat and an education center—the thrust of a Lower East Side building for the International Center of Photography. Even the Morgan puts out children’s books and crayons in its atrium. And the expanded Frick Collection looks promising enough from the outside. Little above ground is brand new, and additions adopt the same Indiana limestone as Carrère and Hastings for the mansion in 1914 and John Russell Page for the museum in 1935. The garden looks lusher than ever, and it seems only right that the Frick reopened April 17, at the height of spring.

The architects have their priorities, and they are good ones. The same grand old entrance now leads to a larger ticketing area to handle larger crowds, with the restaurant safely upstairs. Better yet, unlike at the Morgan Library, I could then head back from there the old way, to the magnificent indoor fountain and beyond. To be sure, I had better things to see than a fountain, however grand. But I had found comfort there many a time after a walk from the subway. Selldorf Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle could have been thinking of me all along.

I stepped next into the same room as in the past, largely for James McNeill Whistler, and then to its right, where traveling exhibitions have often displaced Thomas Gainsborough. There is as yet no sign of them, although “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is already on its way. Nor is there is a contemporary artist or two to make history “relevant” to newcomers, although the Frick is not above that museum fashion either. Instead, to Whistler’s left, I could walk right into the Frick’s largest room and my most precious memories. There a woman sits for her maid bearing a letter—one of three paintings in the collection, all by Jan Vermeer, that place men and women in a larger world of maps, signs, budding empires, and love. Like her, so much of my feelings about art come out of the Frick, along with this Web site, and I shall try not to mention them all.

That room also has a seated self-portrait by Rembrandt, all but enthroned without possessions, apart from rags and an artist’s imaginings. It has his Polish Rider, which had me arguing for the value of critics, historians, and attributions in keeping the past alive. As I continued to other rooms, I could encounter again Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable, with his uncanny mix of Romanticism and precision—and Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini, with sunlight and the stigmata as a single gift of god. Portraits by Titian hang to either side, from an artist old and young. That Rococo playroom and garden, from François Boucher, still lies beyond, crazy as ever. Even I have offered a token defense.

They could serve as a pocket history of Western art, as textbooks once saw it and as new generations renew it. To help, the Frick has preserved its old-fashioned labels rather than tedious wall text—directing visitors to their phones and Bloomberg Connects for more. To help, too, renovation has included a “skylight project,” like the Met’s but with less hoo-hah, for a healthy cleaning to let in the light. Exterior light itself now enters a glass-enclosed corridor surrounding the garden. For the first time I found myself aware of which rooms face Fifth Avenue and the park. I might have found a map, and I wrap things up next time on where it took me.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

It’s the perfect long weekend to celebrate this. I have never had a map to the Frick Collection. I never needed one. From the moment I returned to New York after college, it was a place to call home, and now it is back.

It was a place to find myself and to discover art, just as Central Park across the street had served me in growing up as a place to find myself and New York. Not that I shall ever have an actual home like the Frick, a stone mansion with ever so many rooms. Nor should I want one, when the city has so many marvelously adult places to work and to play. But Henry Clay Frick did, and his children could come downstairs in the morning to what has since become a museum for the likes of Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer. Wall paintings transform a room into a Rococo garden in defiance of gravity and Central Park, with a commanding cast in portraits to chastise me for my frivolity. The collection runs from the early Renaissance to the early twentieth century, with so much more along the way.

Now, though, I had to wonder. At last, the Frick invites visitors upstairs, if not for breakfast, then for a proper café and still more room for art. It has emerged from expansion, remodeling, and recovery with almost a third more exhibition space, a larger auditorium below ground, and other features of a modern museum. I wondered if I might need a map after all, and I should not begrudge you if you do. It is a respectful expansion all the same—respectful enough that one would need to look long and hard to know what has moved and why. It has earned uniform critical praise, but still I felt out of place in the old family rooms upstairs—and I tell you why in two posts, starting next time.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.