While admiring the artistic technique of a painting at the National Gallery’s wonderful exhibit about Vermeer and his contemporaries, I overheard an individual exclaim: “Vermeer is all about the light”.
“Poor person”, I thought to myself, “now he was going to look at all these paintings constrained by that insight.”
Of course Vermeer uses light creatively. Vermeer is not, however, all about light, any more than Beethoven is all about allegros, or baseball is all about nicely thrown curve balls.
Understanding artistic technique requires you to understand why a particular technique was used. Unless you emotionally connect with the art, you will never appreciate the genius of the artist in using that technique.
To emotionally connect with a Dutch genre painting of that era, you have to understand the story the painting tells. Painters sold to the growing middle class, and the bourgeoisie expected to read a story into them. Art for art’s sake was about 170 years in the future, rooted in a society and culture very different from Dutch Calvinist Netherlands.
Vermeer started out life as a history painter. History painters inherited the medieval tradition that a painting embodies a story, message, or moral. He was unsuccessful, so he started painting genre scenes of everyday life. Gerard Ter Borch brought psychological insight into genre painting. Vermeer enriched the artistic technique with the insights of history painting. Often this was accomplished with objects in the painting not necessary for the representation of everyday life.
Consider Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.
The light emphasizes the manifest story: the lady writing the letter, her loyal maid staring off at the window, and the open letter and seal on the floor in front of the writing table.
Genre painting letters were almost always love letters. One would then assume the lady is writing in response to the opened letter on the floor. The discarded, ripped open letter at the foot of the table indicates the strong emotion generated by it, or the haste as to which she set her reply.
In a world without a postal system, the loyal maid would deliver the letter. Perhaps she is thinking about the recipient of the letter and his reaction, the pain or happiness of her mistress, or the difficulties she will encounter while delivering the letter.
What is not illuminated is the inner meaning of the story – the painting in the background.
The painting is the “Finding of Moses” which depicts the biblical story of the discovery of the baby Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter. The story relates how Moses’ mother fulfilled the edict of Pharaoh to throw Jewish male babies into the water in order to drown them. She did so by putting the baby into the water in a waterproof basket. When the baby was discovered, Moses’ sister, who had been watching, arranged for his mother to nurse him.
This unnecessary part of the scene suggests the content of the letter.
The woman is admonishing her husband/lover/fiancé, to keep ones responsibilities and faith in trying circumstances, even when faced with immoral conditions. This reflects the focus in the writer’s expression, and the maid’s focus on the future repercussions.
This allegory would mean a great deal to a purchaser of this painting. As it turned out, this painting was never sold during Vermeer’s life.
Thus, artistic technique serves the story, message, or moral. Making artistic technique primary is just skillful means, a pretty picture, or a craft, not a work of art. A preliminary sketch might be interesting, but it is the rare artist that can make an étude a work of art.
Some artists, such as Sol LeWitt, or perhaps Schoenberg, did not care that much about the audience, and emphasized that the art is the idea, or perhaps just the construction of the work of art. I believe that the world at large rejects this approach both intellectually and emotionally. Art arose as a response to human, biological needs. Unless it responds to the needs of a large fraction of society, it will cease to exist.
The ability of art to tell a story is no panacea either. An over-emphasis on storytelling, as in Thomas Kinkade, results in kitsch.
Ultimately, people will get the art they deserve. If people focus on the financial, social, or artistic technique in art, they will get art that eventually will have no emotional connection or meaning.
If you want popular entertainment, you will get sharks in formaldehyde. If you want financial return, you will get trading sardines. If you want to be told what to see, you will get spoon-fed academic irrelevancy. If you want to understand art, you will have to do the hard work yourself, and get in touch with your feelings and emotions.
There have been art and artists that were popular in their day, and then vanished. Whatever emotional connection people made with it was not strong enough to survive. Even art and artists that come back into fashion return because of the emotional relationship with their work.