{"id":197,"date":"2011-07-11T23:48:32","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T23:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=197"},"modified":"2011-07-14T20:13:43","modified_gmt":"2011-07-14T20:13:43","slug":"mothers-milk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=197","title":{"rendered":"Milkmaid"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Milkmaid<\/p><\/div>\n

From the autumn of 2009 through the end of last year, I helped Peter Georgescu, a retired CEO, write a book about his extraordinary life. The job required me to fly to Manhattan at regular intervals and stay there for as long as a week at a time.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing. This project, which was rewarding in and of itself, also gave me enough free time to wander around Manhattan to see some impressive exhibitions. There is nowhere like New York City for an education in the visual arts\u2014it\u2019s astonishing what you can learn simply wandering around for a few days. I saw a selection of William Blake\u2019s watercolors at the Morgan Library, including many he did for his version of The Book of Job<\/em>. The older I get, the more I admire and marvel at Blake\u2019s achievement, though I have almost nothing in common with his visionary aims. I love his work in a personal way partly because J.D. Salinger claimed to love it, which made me curious about the poet in college, and partly because I took a graduate seminar devoted exclusively to his poetry while at the University of Rochester. His Gnostic vision lodged itself in me in a way I\u2019ve never been able to shake. (When I got to London earlier this year, it was a joy to see how the Tate Britain gives props to crazy eccentric Billy Blake, alongside Turner and Constable and all the rest.) On this same visit to New York, I saw a tiny El Greco at the Onassis Cultural Center, The Coronation of the Virgin<\/em>, which showcased his astonishing facility with oil paint. It was a mere study, and the three faces couldn\u2019t have measured more than an inch from chin to hairline, yet their expressions were incredibly complex and full of emotion\u2014conveying three distinct and recognizable states of mind. We\u2019re talking about faces the size of pocket change. The craftsmanship required to convey this profound depth of feeling through such tiny profiles doesn\u2019t seem humanly possible. I stood in front of that image, silently, for a long, long while. El Greco\u2019s spirituality seemed to find expression as much in the way he handled paint as in any of the religious scenarios he was using it to represent. Seeing that small painting enabled me to understand why the contemporary Chinese installation artist, Chi Guo Chiang is obsessed with El Greco. <\/p>\n

At the Rubin Museum of Art, I saw Carl Jung\u2019s Red Book<\/em>, enclosed in glass, whose contents make Blake\u2019s poetry and illuminations seem as accessible, by comparison, as A Child\u2019s Garden of Verses<\/em>.\u00a0 I climbed through the big Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim. I saw the O\u2019Keefe at the Whitney–and realized how she brought an incredible level of care to every square inch of paint on her canvases, which is never evident in reproductions. And then, a little later, the Burchfield retrospective, also at the Whitney\u2014possibly the most comprehensive and revealing exhibition ever mounted on Burchfield, which gave me an \u201cah-hah\u201d moment about how indebted this great original American was to classic Chinese landscape painting. I\u2019d had no idea, and it made perfect sense, once I recognized it\u2014and it has changed the way I look at his greatest work. And then there was the show of Tim Burton drawings at MoMA, which had me scratching my head. They were excellent sketches, all right, but it looked as if a doting mother had emptied an entire wing of her mansion, where she\u2019d stored all of her precocious son\u2019s work from the third grade into adulthood. Ah, the revenue that show had to have brought in\u2014it was packed with fans\u2014yet some of the walls were so laden with Burton\u2019s drawings the joint felt less like MoMA and more like Gertrude Stein\u2019s apartment in Paris.<\/p>\n

All of these shows, except Burton, refined my sense of how personal and powerful it can be to simply to look at the actual work of another artist, rather than simply reproductions\u2014and clarified, more and more, why painting is primarily about just looking at something, anything, without any agenda. None of these shows illuminated this better than the one that came first, for me, late in 2009. I made a point to walk to the Metropolitan Museum to see only one painting, Vermeer\u2019s Milkmaid<\/em>, because the museum had built a little show entirely around this single work. You were invited to see the Milkmaid<\/em> and also get a glimpse of some supportive paintings which would give you a better idea of the context in which Vermeer had been painting. The other work has all slipped my mind. But my memory of gazing at the Milkmaid is vivid and dramatic. The Milkmaid<\/em> might be the greatest painting I\u2019ve seen in decades of attending hundreds of exhibitions. More than any other single work, and I’ve looked at thousands, this genre scene expresses for me what painting is primarily about\u2014and it\u2019s something so easily lost while trying to paddle rapidly through the whitewater of the contemporary art scene.<\/p>\n

First of all, let me get something out of the way. You can attach all sorts of commentary, and meanings, to Vermeer\u2019s painting, if you like. It struck me this morning\u2014a year and a half after I saw Vermeer\u2019s painting\u2014that it\u2019s almost a secular version of the Madonna and Child. Someone must have called attention to this already, but everything about the painting radiates that quiet sense of luminous devotion which one artist after another has brought to the figures of mother and child in Christian iconography. She doesn’t hold the pitcher in her arms, but almost. She pours the milk in a mundane, middle class setting, and her tough complexion looks almost sun-burned on one cheekbone, yet her expression glows with serenity and love. She gazes down at that pitcher with great care, and cradles it with one hand as delicately as a baby. And she\u2019s pouring milk, no less. She isn\u2019t simply a classic maternal figure, she\u2019s a stand-in for everyone\u2019s mother\u2014including the viewer\u2019s. There\u2019s no question that Vermeer was trying to convey, with his art, an overwhelming sense of the love and beauty inherent in the most commonplace moments of the most routine life of domestic service.<\/p>\n

Yet you can put all that aside. It\u2019s the purely formal qualities of the work, his handling of light and color, the way he conveys the complex topography of a basket or a loaf of bread with tiny, discreet globes of light\u2014the feeling he gets from his yellows and blues\u2014that give this interior, and most of his other interiors, a quality of transcendence. This is why Vermeer is so venerated. He’s a fellow who lived in the same building as an inn and raised eleven children, which is probably partly why he left behind only 36 paintings. He invested a world, an entire vision of life, into each one. He depicted moments most people, in reality, wouldn\u2019t pause to watch, or even remember noticing, in their own lives. And yet because of the way<\/em> he painted these moments, they offer the viewer a sense of rare privilege, as if you\u2019re seeing something for the first time. Which you are, if you\u2019re standing in front of Milkmaid, as I did, without ever seeing the painting before\u2014you\u2019re seeing the operation of a unique genius at the height of his talent. But mostly your sense of awe derives from the way in which you seem to glimpse something eternal shining through the temporal accidents of this woman\u2019s daily work. Everything looks real enough to touch, with no distortion other than what the physics of oil paint and brush unavoidably bring to the canvas\u2014which are the record of the thousands choices Vermeer made as he brought forth his lights and darks, his yellows and blues. Somehow, because you are looking at this facsimile of a woman pouring milk\u2014rather than the actual woman\u2014you see<\/em> something deeply significant and beautiful that inheres within every moment of a person\u2019s life. And nothing has really been added here, no consciously stylistic flourishes or expressions of Vermeer’s personality. You are gazing at a small rectangular object consisting of nothing but cloth and minerals. The actual scene of a woman pouring milk wouldn\u2019t even catch my eye, as I went about my day, back home, in my own kitchen. My wife pours it every morning. Trust me, I don\u2019t watch. (Though having seen this painting, maybe I should give it a try.)<\/p>\n

None of this is news to anyone who pays any attention to painting. The question is: why is this the case? How in the world can a painting, in this case Vermeer’s assiduous effort to represent the way actual life looks\u2014in other words, to show exactly what anyone would see at a glance into a kitchen\u2014the way sunlight falls, the way one pane of the overhead window remains broken, the way the maid\u2019s face isn\u2019t pretty, but weathered and roughened by years of labor, indoors and out, the way all the imperfections of a particular human life emerge in a well-worn working space, you can almost feel her aches and pains\u2014and yet all the viewer sees is universality and perfection. Those are the words that come to mind when you look at a great Vermeer. Other words tend to tag along: eternal, ineffable, radiant. I would all of these perceptions point to the heart of why painting matters–and yet what makes this kind of seeing so powerful and crucial remains, in some essential way, totally mysterious.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  From the autumn of 2009 through the end of last year, I helped Peter Georgescu, a retired CEO, write a book about his extraordinary life. The job required me to fly to Manhattan at regular intervals and stay there for as long as a week at a time. Here\u2019s the thing. This project, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMilkmaid - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=197\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Milkmaid - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  From the autumn of 2009 through the end of last year, I helped Peter Georgescu, a retired CEO, write a book about his extraordinary life. 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