Watching Vermeer

Compulsion is a curious force. It suddenly wells up inside and shoots us off in the opposite direction to that of expected travel. Compulsion arrived at around 8.30 this morning and kicked me out of bed with orders to be at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien by ten o’clock. It was important that I was the first person in the building. In fact, it would be better if I could be found waiting outside before it opened.

The getting out of the house plan was put into operation. This works the same wherever I happen to be. Concentrate on the task in hand. Check I have everything. No distractions with social media or any other media, start a task and finish it before moving on to the next one. Check and double check the routine. Push aside nagging doubts and anxieties. I put on my favourite socks; not blue with clocks (in the Philip Marlowe style) but a loud turquoise colour that I’m rather fond of.

It’s 9.30 when I get to the Meidling Hauptstrasse U-Bahn station. I guess the original was heavily bombed or destroyed in street fighting at the end of the second world war. It’s not one of the art nouveau stations of Otto Wagner. It has a glass tower building on top of it, although at ground level there’s a group of shops that are always busy. A good looking kebab place that I must try, a busy barber shop and an Imbiss, which sells nothing but beer and always has a loyal crowd outside it, smoking and leaning on the wooden counters where their beer glasses stand.

The compulsion is not unknowable. I like cities early on a Saturday morning. Some of the oppression of the working week is lifted. The wage-slave relationship is temporarily diminished. Perhaps even just the slightest hint of freedom in the air.

I get off the train at Karlspltaz and walk along Nibelungengasse. I’m walking quickly but I notice that it’s past 10 o’clock. I won’t be the first one there today.

And I slowed down, past the apartment block where the Mautner family lived. There’s a Stolperstein outside the main door to commemorate them. I noticed it the other day and now I realise how close they had lived to the Kunsthistorische Museum and to the natural history museum.

I imagined Dr Friedrich and Frieda Mautner taking their son Stephan to the musuems. A small child’s wonder at the range of animals, and their shapes and sizes and colours and teeth and fangs and claws and ability to run, fly, swim and crawl through the soil and live in the treetops and the oceans.

The pleasure of a family day out and coming home for Sunday supper and bedtime stories.

Who can imagine that such a life as that can end in a concentration camp? This is where hate wants to take the world again.

A new dispute has flared up in what’s being described as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. But surely it’s an old conflict. World War Three has now begun.

Orwellian language is no longer marginalia, it’s in all the books and newspapers. Billionaires in super yachts, media moguls, millionaire politicians; all point fingers to an imaginary elite. The ‘main stream media’ is attacked by gesticulating gurus on Youtube, wilfully ignorant when it suits them, to avoid discussing who it is that owns the internet. Or where power actually lies. They preach wellness, an industry with multi-million pound profits.

Wellness is now a capitalist concern, with the same dynamics of capital accumulation as say, the scrap metal industry. But in the latter, the child labourers and wage slaves and low paid workers speak a language which is clearer and more accurate than anything the wellness gurus have to say. Those workers are forged with raw materials that have sharp edges and the relentless pressure from their bosses to constantly increase profits. Those sort of conditions generally help to concentrate the mind.

There’s a queue outside the gallery but I have my new all year ticket. I show it to the woman at the door who scans it and then asks me something in German that I don’t understand. Her colleague explains that she wants to see my identity that goes with the ticket. She apologies but I tell her it was my fault. Although secretly I’m rather proud that for a few words and a moment or two I was assumed to be a native-German speaker.

Here the compulsion presents a second order. To go straight to the Vermeer painting The Art of Painting. I walk through the galleries and there I stop. Now compulsion is satiated. I feel its force diminish and now I can sit and watch Vermeer.

There is a already a group of Japanese tourists in front of the painting. The guide is explaining with great care and erudition, slowly unravelling parts of its story for the audience. She looks at each person in turn, intently. They hardly move, occasionally moving their eyes from her still statuesque figure to the painting itself. She is using each hand to emphasis her points. I learn something at least, of the emotion the painting can create.

The group of Japanese people move off. They observe and absorb everything as they slowly walk away. I wonder what their homes are like in Japan, and where they live and what their jobs and occupations are. I should like to visit Japan, on a slow boat across the Pacific Ocean, days and weeks with nothing but the sea and sky to look at, and then one day, a brief glimpse of mountain tops far away on the horizon and each day after that, the mountains gain height and depth and eventually fishing villages on the shoreline can be seen and further to the east, the lights of a giant city.

I am alone with the Vermeer painting. It will take some time for the initial visitors to work their way through the other galleries and arrive here. The painting begins to oscillate between now and some other time; that time is in the past, over 350 years ago, but the painting is a time machine and it is pulling me through time. I am an observer, standing next to the curtain, waiting for a moment to be introduced.

Even after all these hundreds of years, the curtain has only just been pulled back, the model has only now taken her stance, the artist has only just sat down. The people and the place are not of some earlier time, they are of now, and we are of that past where time, whatever that is, has lost all meaning and sense of measurement. But regardless of this to and fro across the centuries, it always feels to the viewer of meeting these two people and absorbing the scene for the first time.

Occasionally a person wanders over, looks at the painting and wanders off. One man walks around the painting and looks at it from several different angles. Then he takes his thick green anorak off and throws it on to an empty sofa. Then he creeps up to the painting again as if he doesn’t want to disturb it.

For the most part, I am here with Vermeer, alone.

Why do we see the back of the artist’s head? It would have been possible, and perhaps more elegant to have the model as she is and the artist in profile. The person cannot be the actual Vermeer as he is the painter of the painting. This would be impossible without a complex set of mirrors. It may be a model acting as Vermeer, but it is not him. The Art of Painting is the painting itself. And it is more powerful if we imagine Vermeer not in the painting, but standing next to us, looking at it too; what might he see there?

Glaciers come and go and new star systems are formed in far off galaxies.

My perceptual reality changes once again. Now I notice the chair in the foreground, as if someone had walked on stage and placed it there while the audience were distracted by another part of the drama. The roof beams make an appearance; but they must have been there all the time. The plaster on the wall is revealed, and a realisation that there is only one wall in the picture; the wall therefore is as if a canvas, part of the background (or the ground in Gestalt terms) on which the figures act. The prominence of the black tiles is reversed so that now the white tiles are dominant. The brass studs which hold the leather to the wooden frame of the furniture glint and flash as if gold.

I am watching Vermeer and it’s the most fantastic film. All is possible, anything might happen.

Two people join me on the sofa. They talk a little and then fall silent and motionless. A small crowd gathers and disperses. The couple next to me have started talking. It’s not about Vermeer. The tone and intonation is all wrong. It’s something to do with somebody at work and how someone (I didn’t catch the name) messed up all the columns in a spreadsheet.

A woman walks up to the painting, takes a photograph on her mobile phone and then walks off away. She doesn’t even look at the painting itself. It’s just an act of instant gratification, immediate consumption, a commodification of Vermeer. And with that, the spell is broken.

The galleries are full of people now but there are always quite corners and paintings that no-one wants to see. I go off and look at paintings by Hans Memling, Gerard David, Jan Gossaert, Joos Van Cleve and Hieronymus Bosch.

I discover Lucas Gassel whose paintings I like a great deal. Landscape with Judah and Tamar, 1548 is nominally about Tamar in disguise, seducing her father in law Judah. But the whole landscape is a gigantic centre of production. Everyone is working. Tending the sheep, sailing ships, shearing wool, carrying things, lifting things, working in the fields, driving carts.

There are two waterwheels and a windmill; technologies of industrial power. It is almost as if Judah and Tamar are a metaphor for a class and religious power that is peripheral to the world of work, an after thought, a way of legitimising the actual content of the painting which is primarily about hard work and not idle religious speculation.

Little is known about the life of Gassel other than he was probably a Humanist.

The actual painting is below. As you can see, Judah and Tamar take up a tiny amount of space in the foreground. The ‘landscape’ is nothing less than the sort of technical production that Lynn White described in Medieval Technology and Social Change. See the detailed images above.

A gasp echoes through the gallery as I realise that the large painting of Lot and his Daughters is by Jan Massys.

I refuse to cobble together some half-notes on a cursory search of the internet. Little is known about Massys and there is little written about him on the web. At home I have a book about the Family of Love. It is alleged Massys was a member and any further comments will wait until that book is in my hands.

For whatever reason, and taste and subjective likes are difficult to explain, Massys is a favourite painter. There is something I find in his works which I can’t articulate. This is almost certainly due to a lack of art theory so I only really experience his works on a sensory level, with the five luxury senses (six if consciousness is included).

At this sensory level however I find Massys intense, powerful and erotic. And our own sense of erotic is probably more complex to explain than our aesthetic preferences. What I find here is a great deal of emotional power, but the story of Lot and his daughters is puzzling and disturbing; from what myth and anti-myth did it emerge?

Something tells me there will be an encore to Watching Vermeer and I go to the gallery once again (by a diversion through the galleries of the Italian Renaissance and other periods and genres).

There is a crowd, another guided tour. People are motionless and silently listening to the speaker. When he finishes there is a loud round of applause. People turn to each other to express their satisfaction, to add their own points of view, to ask questions of each other.

Several approach the canvas now with their phones held up to take a unique and individual composition. But it doesn’t feel commodified at all, more a way to sign a memento to the lecture, a reminder, of being in Vienna, in September 2023, having crossed the seven seas to be here.

The world is closing down. The tanks are taking up their positions. Secret maps recording the positions of troops and missiles and attack and defence positions are circulated to generals and commanders.

There are 7,000 spies in Vienna. But what’s to spy about? The madness of the world is there for all to see. It’s not spies we need but some form of new revolutionary movement. I’m not Lenin, I don’t know what sort of organisational form is needed. For now just to be a part of a general socialist opposition is at least a starting point.

But we really need a Lenin or two, or ten or twenty thousand. Where are such people going to come from?