Literary Imagination

It used to be that you rarely saw a poem about a painting by Vermeer. He could have been your long-lost Dutch uncle twice-removed in the days before those twenty-one Vermeers migrated from Vienna, Paris, and The Hague, a secret armada traveling by sea, by land and air. Four of them housed in the National Gallery’s permanent collection were hand-carried down the back stairs to join the month-long Vermeer reunion, tickets more precious than the Super Bowl’s. Waiting for hours in the snow, funneled twenty to a group, deposited four-deep, Vermeer-lovers nudged aside Vermeer-hoggers who stared longer than the Vermeer-polite-viewing-time allowed. Exiting the gallery, you could not reenter it, but Vermeer-bereft-viewers could traipse upstairs to the empty gallery of the contemporaries of Vermeer, whose names sounded like you were gargling, and who painted scenes of hair-washing and cooking, sleepy barmaids, and pickpockets bilking passed-out cavaliers… In the packed galleries of the Vermeers, the mood was festive, courteous, hushed. It was a summit conference of Vermeer-VIPS: museum guards whispered into walkie-talkies, and scanned the crowds for Vermeer-violators— paintings accidentally touched by some near-sighted senior’s index finger that got too close, but not, thank God, like that crazed madman in 1972, who attacked Michelangelo’s Pieta with a chisel, (she lost a piece of her nose forever). In the months following the exhibition, there proliferated poems about Vermeer, Vermeer postcards and notebooks and tote bags, facsimiles of pale girls and women wearing a red hat or blue turban, women holding a flute or reading a love letter or pouring milk or weighing gold coins as they multiplied on coasters, on posters, on note cards; Girl with the Pearl Earring gazed up at you from the bottom of your mug at your last swallow of coffee; her face undulating from scarves, on open umbrellas, her cheek pecked by raindrops. And there’s my friend who spread Girl Pouring Milk from a Pitcher chopped up into 2,000 jig-saw puzzle pieces all over her dining room table. For weeks, her family retreated to the sofa to eat. The surface, the brush strokes, larger than life, were reproduced down to the craquelure— so real, yet a replica, yet very unlike the actual painting… Which is what Walter Benjamin said in his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”— about how modern technology caused a “loss of aura,” the special feeling that comes when you view the work of art face to face. The girl of Girl in the Red Hat, for example, actually looking back at me looking at her, our eyes locking, her face on a cocktail napkin not a blotter for my lipstick. In person, you can see for yourself the perfect lines disappearing into a pinhole in the canvas—the vanishing point around which were traced the angle of trickling milk, the waterfall of sunbeams streaming from a window, the exquisite icy pinprick of light on a pearl.