Vermeer's wager : speculations on art history, theory and art museums

270 Pages·2000·2.56 MB·English

by  Gaskell

About this book Taking an analysis of a single painting by the
seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer as a case study,
Ivan Gaskell discusses what it might mean to know and use a work
of art. What are the limits of such objects? Is customary art-historical
analysis sufficient to account for their various resonances?
Before offering a new iconological interpretation of Vermeer’s
Woman Standing at a Virginal, Gaskell sets out some of the theoretical
difficulties surrounding our understanding of visual objects,
arguing that they are not reducible to texts (as some contemporary
analysts have held). He then discusses what can and cannot be
comprehended about a work of art through various means of repro-
duction, before describing such a work not as a unique object but as
a complex nexus of prototype, reproduction and knowledge.
Gaskell holds that current understanding of such objects is in fact
inseparable from an appreciation of their changing fortunes over
time, and that their proper uses are far from confined to art history.
In particular, he describes how photographic reproduction and the
arrangement of exhibitions in art museums necessarily affect the
understanding of any painting. An appreciation of contemporary
circumstances has considerable consequences for the use of pictures
as objects of study and of therapeutic solace, and as prompts to the
changing of viewers’ perceptions of their relationships to objects
and to one another as mediated by objects.
Gaskell’s discussion ranges over a wide variety of art, from
seventeenth-century Holland through nineteenth-century France to
twentieth-century Europe and America, as he demonstrates the
various aspects of museum scholarship and argues for its role in
the world of action.
About the author Ivan Gaskell has been Margaret S. Winthrop
Curator at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, where he
also teaches, since 1991. His publications span seventeenth-century
Dutch and Italian art, contemporary art and philosophical aesthetics.
He is the editor (with the late Salim Kemal) of six volumes in the
‘Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts’ (1991–2000) and co-
editor of Vermeer Studies(1998). He lives in Lexington, Mass.
essays in art and culture
The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash Visionary Experience in the Golden Age
roger cardinal of Spanish Art
victor i. stoichita
Looking at the Overlooked
Four Essays on Still Life Painting The Double-Screen
norman bryson Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting
wu hung
Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine
karen lucic Painting the Soul
Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds
Portraiture robin cormack
richard brilliant
AShort History of the Shadow
C. R. Mackintosh victor i. stoichita
The Poetics of Workmanship
david brett Peter Greenaway
Museums and Moving Images
Image on the Edge david pascoe
The Margins of Medieval Art
michael camille Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order
lindsay blair
Illustration
j. hillis miller Terminal Architecture
martin pawley
Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self
ernst van alphen Public Monuments
Art in Political Bondage,1870–1997
Paul Delvaux sergiusz michalski
Surrealizing the Nude
david scott Sex and the Floating World:
Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820
Manet‘s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets timon screech
james h. rubin
Goya
The Symptom of Beauty The Last Carnival
francette pacteau victor i. stoichita and anna maria coderch
Figuring Jasper Johns The Beehive Metaphor
fred orton From Gaudí to Le Corbusier
juan antonio ramírez
Political Landscape
martin warnke
Vermeer’s Wager
Speculations on Art History, Theory
and Art Museums
Ivan Gaskell
reaktion books
In memoriam Salim Kemal
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
79Farringdon Road, London ec1m 3ju, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2000
Copyright © Ivan Gaskell2000
All rights reserved
No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.
Series design by Humphrey Stone
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Limited,
Guildford and King’s Lynn
Colour printed by Balding & Mansell Limited, Norwich
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gaskell, Ivan
Vermeer’s Wager : speculations on art history, theory, and
art museums
1. Vermeer, Jan, 1632–1675. Wager 2. Art appreciation
i.Title
759.9’492
isbn 1 86189 072 9
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 10
1 Problems 19
2 Images 43
3 Objects 75
4 Copies 99
5 Etchings 116
6 Photographs 140
7 Commodities 165
8 Donors 174
9 Therapeutics 197
10 Subjects 210
References 233
Photographic Acknowledgements 270
With every stroke of the brush, a new field of enquiry is laid open.
william hazlitt
The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what
in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural
formations of the subject.
walter benjamin
Acknowledgements
We hear that we may speak.
ralph waldo emerson, The American Scholar
This book is the result not only of a period of study leave in
1998–9, but more particularly of looking at, reading about,
discussing and thinking about the paintings of Johannes
Vermeer, photography and art museums, over a protracted
period. I owe a great deal to friends and colleagues – artists,
art museum scholars, art historians and philosophers – too
numerous to name here. I hope those to whom I am indebted,
but who are not mentioned, will forgive me.
The Harvard University Art Museums gave me three
months of paid study leave and a further three months of
unpaid leave in 1998–9for which I am grateful to the director,
James Cuno, and to my curatorial colleague, Sarah Kianovsky.
Michael Conforti invited me to be among the first Clark
Fellows at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1998. Participation in that
programme, directed by John Onians, enabled me to advance
this project immeasurably. I am grateful to Michael Conforti
and the entire Clark staff, and also to Richard Brettell, Cao
Yiqiang, Charles W. Haxthausen, Samuel Edgerton jun., Elena
Sharnova and the Clark–Williams Program graduate students
for informal exchanges, and for criticism following my pre-
sentation of some of the ideas that find modified expression
here in papers delivered to the Clark Seminar, and the
Williams College Art History Faculty Seminar, both in
October 1998. In addition, I presented part of what here con-
stitutes chapter 1as a constituent of a paper delivered at the
first Clark Conference, The Two Art Histories: The Museum and
the Academy, in April 1999.
Two very generous friends were kind enough to read the
first draft in its entirety. In a series of weekly tutorials Justin
Broackes saved me from at least some philosophical solecisms
7
(I am wholly responsible for those that remain), while John
Walsh offered criticisms that allowed me in particular to
improve the art-historical and museological elements of the
book. I am immensely grateful to them both.
Among others whose ideas, information and encourage-
ment I acknowledge with gratitude are James Ackerman (for
comments on drafts of chapters 8 and 9), David Bomford
(for invaluable photography), Christopher Brown, Norman
Bryson, the late Nelson Goodman, Ralph Lieberman, Neil
MacGregor, Frits Scholten and Arthur K. Wheelock. My
participation in the Harvard University Mind/Brain/Behavior
Initiative interfaculty work group on ‘The Experience of
Illness’ greatly stimulated my thinking. I should like to thank
my fellow members and especially the group’s chair, Arthur
Barsky.
Part of what now constitutes chapter 3 first appeared as
‘Vermeer and the Limits of Interpretation’ in Vermeer Studies
(Studies in the History of Art, lv) (Washington, dc, 1998), which
I edited with Michiel Jonker. Some of the material that finds
revised expression in chapter 8was first published as ‘Historia,
historia del arte y museos: ¿Una conversación a tres bandas?’
in En la encrucijada de la cienca histórica hoy: el auge de la
historia cultural, ed. V. Vázquez de Prada, I. Olábarri and F. J.
Caspistegui (Pamplona, 1998).
No one ever obliged anyone else to write a book. While
Jane Whitehead and Leo Gaskell always come first in my life,
for months at a time they allowed me to put this book before
them. I can now put it before them in another sense, in what
can only ever be partial and inadequate recompense.
Many of the ideas expressed here emerged from my work
with Salim Kemal, my friend of many years and closest col-
laborator. Over the course of the last decade we produced six
books together. He offered terrifying philosophical critiques
of several of these chapters. His sudden and agonizingly pre-
mature death in November 1999robbed his young children of a
dedicated father, his wife of a devoted spouse and philosophy
of a brilliant and endlessly curious mind. These pages are
dedicated to his memory.
8