Tim's Vermeer -- Film Review
Tim's Vermeer
Directed
by Teller
This is a film that is going to appeal mainly to people who
have a special interest in art history or painting. It may have some appeal to the museum-going
general public, but the audience on the night I attended was sparse. There is not a lot of action -- no, that's
not right. There is not any action, except the slow process of
creating a painting stroke by stroke -- sort of like watching ice melt, for
those of you on the East Coast. But that
can be very interesting, and it is, but you have to be interested in
painting. If you have ever tried to
paint anything with any kind of realistic likeness, you'll understand what I
mean.
This film is slow moving and cerebral. It is a documentation, a realization, of a
theory advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco in 2001
that Renaissance masters like Van Eyck and Vermeer and others across Europe
used optical techniques incorporating lenses and mirrors to create their
stunningly accurate realistic images. They
did not just eyeball their subjects to realize the kind of microscopic accuracy
that characterizes the Dutch Masters style on a painted canvas. Tim Jenison, an inventor from Texas with no
particular ability in art or painting, became familiar with Hockney's theory
and hatched the crazy idea to replicate Jan Vermeer's studio, materials, and
techniques from scratch and recreate one of Vermeer's masterpieces, The Music Lesson, himself, using the
techniques suggested by Hockney and Falco.
The film documents this process with attention to all the minutiae one
might find in one of Vermeer's paintings.
I saw this when I was rather tired after a long, busy weekend, and I
started feeling a sense of tedium even though the subject and the process were
very interesting. We get to see shots of
mixing paint from pigments, grinding a lens, carving a table leg on a lathe,
building a studio, and gradually watching the painting take shape a few strokes
at a time over a period of, I think, 213 days.
The result is a flawless replica of a Vermeer masterpiece. Jenison takes it to David Hockney, who grades
it favorably, and there is a discussion of the process and the significance of
Jenison's experiment.
Jenison did not prove that Vermeer used lenses and mirrors
in order to paint. Jenison's experiment
is akin to Thor Heyerdahl's sailing of Kon-tiki
from the shores of Peru to Polynesia.
Heyerdahl's experiment refuted skeptics who said such a voyage was not
possible. It did not prove that anyone
ever did sail such a route in such a vessel, but it opened an avenue of
interpretation of other evidence that
might have been closed off by dismissal or the presumption of fantastical
improbability. Jenison showed that using
only materials and techniques available during Vermeer's time, he could indeed
replicate Vermeer's achievement as an untrained
painter. This does not show that Vermeer
painted this way, because there is no documentation of how Vermeer worked, but
coupled with the fact that there is no documentation of Vermeer ever having been trained as an artist, the absence of a drawing beneath the painting that would
have served as a guide and which was customary in the work of other artists of
that time, and, most tellingly, I think, that some small "mistakes"
can be discerned in Vermeer's image that reflect distortions created by the use
of a lens, all give the argument weight and strengthened plausibility.
It is a very interesting film that should be noted by
painters, historians, and art students.
It presents a compelling case, but not a final conclusion, and I think
it indicates a fruitful direction for further historical research.