Primal Screen 4 (Vermeer)
August 10th, 2009 at 22:29How did the primal screen enter art history?
Let’s assume I was an expert.
Among Baroque painters Johannes Vermeer is the undisputed master of the primal screen. His paintings are famous for creating a semblance of seamlessness, an impression of inviolable privacy. In his painting Vermeer banishes the notion of rupture, forbids the intrusion of an unwanted reality. What I admire most in Vermeer’s art is its evocation of the hymen, intact.
Vermeer’s painting is blurred. Edges and borders are rare. The OED defines blurred as ‘stained,’ ‘sullied,’ ‘befouled.’ Something tells me Vermeer is more complex than that.
Consider for example A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, painted around 1657.
The elegant folds of a yellowish curtain, drawn back on a rail, bathed in light the texture of milk. Draped on a table just behind the curtain a rich oriental rug. Its thick folds breaking on the wall like waves on a cliff. A young woman, some say she’s a girl, dressed in fine garment is standing in front of an open window, absorbed in a white sheet of paper she is holding gently between the fingers of her hands. A letter? The title of the painting, A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, wants me to believe precisely this. But there’s nothing written on the glowing piece of paper in her hands.
The young woman is presented to me in profile. Her face — attentive, composed, even-minded — is as unreadable as the sheet in her hands. What is she thinking? What are her feelings? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. What draws me to this painting is its air of imperturbability. Nothing can disturb the privacy of this intimate moment. The paintings appealing surfaces further emphasize the impression of an intimacy that can’t be violated. The softness of the oriental carpet; the silky smoothness of the wall; the creamy brightness of the light from the window that doesn’t offer a view; the almost weightless density of the blank sheet between the woman’s fingers.
If it is indeed a letter she is reading, it announces nothing less than an exquisite superficiality. The paper, floating like fine cloth over the woman’s loins, re-calls the Madonna del Parto’s unblemished hymen.
Piero della Francesca foregrounds religious orthodoxy — the pregnant madonna does not permit doubting the divine nature of her virginity. Vermeer, on the other hand, shows the primal screen as fabricated. Where Piero denies lived history, Vermeer preserves traces of the past.
The Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window is not alone. There’s a ghost in the room. Behind the leaded window frame pushed towards the wall — impossible not to recall Alberti’s Velum — I detect the fleeting reflection of the woman’s face at a slightly different angle. Reflection is the wrong word, for the face appears behind the glass. A doppelgänger. Blurred, uncanny. Like a stream falling from the ceiling, a red curtain spills over the window frame towards the ghostly face. The specter of the torn hymen contained behind Alberti’s grid. Now I understand why the Girl Reading a Letter by an Window seems unperturbed. Protected by the Velum she has nothing to fear.
Even submitting the painting to an X-ray examination has not succeeded in violating its privacy. As if Vermeer anticipated modern technology, he hid a glass carafe under the curtain. I cannot disturb the woman’s solitude — unless I destroy the painting.
Sometimes works of art watch out for one another. In my mind Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, his smallest work painted between 1669 and 1671, makes sure the privacy of the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window will always be protected.
The Lacemaker at her desk, bending over her needlework with the greatest concentration. Her face is relaxed, her eye lids drooping. Is she sleeping? Dreaming, perhaps?
Like the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window the Lacemaker, who is unawares of my watching her, remains undisturbed by my gaze. I’m not intruding upon her. Vermeer does not allow me to see what she is making. She sees more than I do. From my perspective most of the painting is blurred. The Lacemaker’s fingers — gentle, tender, precise — are holding two bobbins each furnishing a thread of exquisite thinness. These two threads, white and crisp, are the painting’s sole sharp focus.
(Enter Freud) “It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented — that of plaiting and weaving. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together.”
Making lace, this “fine web which feeds the pride of the whole globe” — a symptom of penis envy? I’m not convinced Vermeer shares Freud’s view. Let’s take a look at the prominent blue naaikussen (sewing cushion) in the foreground from which are gushing streams of red and white thread. Blood and milk? Sperm? Menstruation, defloration, birth? It doesn’t happen often that a painting invites the spectator’s associations to return to the bleeding womb. Under normal circumstances a lacemaker would place the naaikussen — her work box — on her lap so that she could easily reach for needles and thread. But in Vermeer’s painting the cushion is put on display, begging for my attention.
(Re-enter Freud) “We should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive, all the threads of the analysis have led up to it, castration might be more than an empty threat.”
Listen Sigmund, Vermeer’s art is not cruel. Even though he imagines a memory of your origin, he doesn’t mean to frighten you. This is The Lacemaker’s promise: there will be veils and screens, there will be imaginary hymens, always. The Lacemaker’s precise vision & skilled fingers, “making the threads adhere to one another”, a metaphor for the painter’s craft to cloak what is regarded as stained, sullied, befouled.
Vermeer knew of the pleasures of blurredness. The Oxford English Dictionary has yet to catch up with the master of the primal screen.
The Lacemaker, measuring only 24 x 21 cm, is smaller than Veruschka.
Vermeer was a perfectionist.
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A GIRL READING A LETTER BY AN OPEN WINDOW (Brieflezend Meisje bij het Venster), c. 1657, oil on canvas, 83 x 64.5 cm. (32 3/4 x 25 3/8 in.), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden THE LACEMAKER, c.1669-1671, oil on canvas, 24.5 x 21 cm. (9 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.), The Louvre, Paris Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955). go back to primal screen 3 + proceed to primal screen 4Posted: August 10th, 2009
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