Expect ‘Girl With a Pearl’ to have Atlanta in a whirl

A NOVEL INSPIRATION

Author Tracy Chevalier on what inspired her to write “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (from www.tchevalier.com):

“I was lying in bed one morning, worrying about what I was going to write next. (Writers are always worrying about that.) A poster of the Vermeer painting ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’ hung in my bedroom, as it had done since I was 19 and first discovered the painting. I lay there idly contemplating the girl’s face, and thought suddenly, ‘I wonder what Vermeer did to her to make her look like that. Now there’s a story worth writing.’ Within three days I had the whole story worked out. It was effortless; I could see all the drama and conflict in the look on her face. Vermeer had done my work for me.

“There is so much mystery in each (Vermeer) painting, in the women he depicts, so many stories suggested but not told. I wanted to tell one of them.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

The first of the three-stop American tour of “Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis” was in San Francisco. Here’s what Bay-area critics thought:

Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle: The exhibit "does not disappoint. It will remind visitors how great artworks can unstring our sense of time. …

“Despite the (title) painting’s age, despite the heavy case work that secures it, we and ‘the Girl’ seem to inhabit a common time in a way that its mere physical survival cannot explain.”

Robert Taylor, San Jose Mercury News: "Yes, it's worth seeing this exhibit just to experience 'Girl With a Pearl Earring,' which glows with emotion, insight and presence that even the best reproductions can't convey. …

“Yet you’ll get much more for your ticket (price) beyond the darkened gallery where Vermeer’s painting is installed as if it were a loved one prepared for a visitation. There are luminescent Dutch landscapes — cloudscapes, really — and portraits that seem to draw us into the frame.”

She stares fetchingly, and as enigmatically as ever, at passing traffic from a 45-foot-tall banner stretched across the High Museum of Art’s Peachtree Street facade.

Off the elevator in the High’s Wieland Pavilion, a 14-foot-tall reproduction of the same Johannes Vermeer masterpiece greets visitors to the much-anticipated exhibition whose title borrows her name, “Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis.”

Yet in the final gallery of the exhibit of masterworks that opens June 23, the circa 1665 oil on canvas turns out to be stunningly petite: 17 1/2 by 15 3/8 inches.

“Girl With a Pearl Earring” may be modest in scale, but after the best-selling 1999 Tracy Chevalier novel and arty 2003 film starring pillow-lipped Scarlett Johansson as the quiet maid who became Vermeer’s muse, it casts an immense shadow.

The book and movie are both works of fiction, but that shouldn’t cause a furrow in the unblemished brow of the “Girl” — or anyone else’s for that matter.

“Girl” has made a remarkable journey from near-obscurity to international fame with all of its considerable mystery intact. On this rare U.S. tour, with the High stop marking the painting’s first-ever appearance in the Southeast, she’s even carrying the water (from a marketing standpoint) for celebrated Dutch Golden Age painters, including Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Jan Steen.

Emilie Gordenker, director of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis (pronounced “Mau-rits-house”), the museum-in-a-palace in The Hague, said it wasn’t always this way.

“It wasn’t too long ago that the many tourists that we get came for Rembrandt,” Gordenker said during a recent Atlanta visit, “and now Vermeer has in a way eclipsed it, and it’s a little bit hard to know exactly why.”

She’s not going to let that question furrow her brow, either.

“Times change, fashions change, people’s interests change,” the American-born museum director said. “‘Girl’ may be the magnet, but I’m hoping that people will be really interested in everything else they see.”

Compared with High Museum shows of recent years that have overflowed with treasures, including the recently closed “Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting,” “Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis” is modestly scaled. It comprises 35 paintings, many of them small.

But that’s true to the experience of visiting the Maruritshuis, the 17th-century city palace that typically shows no more than 250 permanent collection works at a time. Its carefully selected holdings provide an overview of Dutch and Flemish art from the 15th through 17th centuries. The collection numbers 800 paintings today, tiny by American museum standards.

“Everybody (who visits) loves the Mauritshuis,” Gordenker said. “One of the reasons is that you walk around and in an hour you’ve sort of seen everything and everything you’ve seen is great. And that’s something that we want to convey during this tour, to give people a sense of who we are and where we are.” (The High show includes a side exhibit on the Dutch showplace that opened in 1822.)

The classicist landmark is closed for an extensive renovation and expansion into a building across the street that will be linked underground. The American tour, in fact, is a major fundraiser for the project. And the renovation-expansion, expected to be completed in mid-2014, is the reason why the Mauritshuis is allowing so many of its riches, including four Rembrandts, out at once.

Still, it’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” that is being given the star treatment, and that is a bit surprising given the painting’s — and Vermeer’s — indeterminate place in the art world’s orbit for most of its history.

No one knows the identity of the lovely lass with turbanlike headdress and other garb atypical of her time who has stared intriguingly back at viewers with large gray-blue eyes for nearly three and a half centuries. Vermeer is a man of some mystery himself, nicknamed the “Sphinx of Delft” (for the Dutch town where he was born, lived and died) because so little was known about him.

The artist abundantly produced children (11 survived) but not paintings (only 36 today are attributed to him, with others no doubt lost to time). Additionally, he worked as an art dealer and appraiser. But he died at age 43 in 1675 from what his wife said was financial-related stress.

By the 18th century, Vermeer had slipped into oblivion, his rare paintings frequently attributed to others.

The provenance of “Girl With a Pearl Earring” was similarly murky — at least, until 1881, when it came up for auction in The Hague. Victor de Stuers, an art historian, noted that the canvas, though in poor condition, was a quality work and advised his friend, Arnoldus des Trombe, to buy it. It sold for what the exhibit catalog characterizes as the “unbelievably low price” of 2 guilders. (Today, $1 equals 1.75 Netherlands Antillian Guilders.)

When des Trombe died in 1902, it’s believed he included the restored “Girl” in a bequest to the Mauritshuis.

The painting’s fame escalated over the 20th century, notably when it was shown as part of a major Vermeer retrospective in 1995-96 organized by the Mauritshuis and Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Chevalier’s novel and the Peter Webber-directed film, of course, helped spark continued interest in what sometimes is called the “Mona Lisa of the North.”

Gordenker believes the retrospective was “the moment when people realized what a fantastic artist Vermeer was.” She praises the artist as a “fantastic technician” whose characteristically simple and uncluttered secular compositions speak with an almost modernist voice.

But what also pulls contemporary viewers into Vermeer’s paintings, the museum director said, is the sense of mystery that is especially tangible in “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” whomever the “just gorgeous” creature was.

“Is she turning toward you or away from you?” Gordenker asked rhetorically. “Her mouth is open, quite unusual for a Dutch painting. Is she about to say something? Has she just said something? The look in her eye is really inviting. And, really, what happens is, she almost invites you to fill in her story.”