by Nancy Casciato
We only see what we look at.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
I manage to keep quiet while we order our brownie and coffee, but as soon as we sit down and prop elbows across the tiny museum café table, I blurt out: “She looks just like Girl with a Red Hat!” We have just emerged from our two-hour immersion in “Vermeer,” the blockbuster exhibit, here at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. After this concentrated dose of painted beauty, we’re shocked but not surprised to encounter a young woman who even with her sleeve tattoo, nose ring, and self-cut hair, could be a Vermeer come to life.
My husband Kenn and I have come to Amsterdam precisely to see all the Vermeers in the world. Well, almost all: A few of the celebrated artist’s paintings did not make the journey to the Rijksmuseum; others played their part early in the exhibit, like The Girl with the Pearl Earring, already returned to her home in The Hague. But now, just days before the end of this once-in-a-lifetime event, twenty-eight of the thirty-five known originals remain, awaiting our arrival.
Once inside, we stand shoulder to shoulder, close enough to touch the velvet ropes that guard against over-eager viewers. At the same time, we tilt our bodies forward, as if, like the light that slants through Vermeer’s single-point perspective windows, we too could enter his rich-hued chambers. The scenes he captured capture us: Rose-gold gleams on an anxious lover’s face and soft gold spins a wine glass to shine. Shadows curl into a half-scrolled map and upholstery tacks turn to rows of precious stones. Bright white milk descends from pitcher to bowl. Pearls pulse, iridescent.
We talk in whispers, as if to raise our voices would break the spell created by our proximity to the details that create Vermeer’s vibrant hush. “In the original,” John Berger writes, describing the salient features of great works of art, “the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures.” In Ways of Seeing, his 1972 manifesto on the place of art in the modern world, Berger explains that “in the immediacy of their testimony,” when “their historical moment is literally there before our eyes,” these traces “close the distance in time between the painting and one’s act of looking.” One’s act of looking at the brush-stroke proof of human touch opens out into a “corridor” between past and present, where it becomes possible to imagine the artist as a person like oneself, subject to time: “In this special sense,” Berger concludes, “all paintings are contemporary.”
Berger’s insight holds true when we visit the Van Gogh Museum a few days later where the distance between the paintings and my act of looking contracts and then some: Vermeer’s lush silence gives way to Van Gogh’s almost sonic passion; even from across the room the golden subwoofer throb of Sunflowers pounds my solar plexus loud enough to make me sweat. When I think I’ve found respite in the fluid inflorescence of Almond Blossoms, I’m ambushed by blue-flowered limbs whose branching pigments leave me panting. More than once I have to sit down to catch my breath.
Oil on canvas, 1890.
But neither Vermeer’s gem tones nor Van Gogh’s fierce palette prepares me for the last museum on our Amsterdam tour, less museum than memorial: The Anne Frank House. Here, actual passages, narrow and cramped, give literal form to John Berger’s time-travel corridors; we follow in single file as they lead us to the Secret Annex, a warren of small dark rooms where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for two years. Just days before the end of the war, they were discovered and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.
Even more than half a century later, a thick presence permeates each space they left behind, lodged in salvaged vestiges of the home they fled: A well-worn wooden kitchen table and straight-back chairs, a sofa covered with a colored-faded crocheted blanket, stacked cups and dishes ready for daily use, framed photographs. Kenn lingers in a low-lit alcove devoted to Anne’s artistic inspiration; he moves in closer to peruse the pictures of movie stars she cut out and pinned to her wall. “Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Sonja Henje, Deanna Durbin,” he repeats in a litany, his voice wistful. “I wonder what they would think if they knew their pictures appeared on this wall.” For my part, I stare up at the single four-paned window set into the side of the roof that offered Anne her only view of the sky, reachable only by climbing the rungs of the heavy hardwood ladder before us. Tourists are not allowed beyond this point.
When we arrive at the final room that holds Anne’s famous diaries open under glass, we take our turn to walk by slowly, gazing down into each vitrine in silence. I can’t quite focus on the words on the page, even though I want to find the answer to the question everyone must have: How did this young girl with her exuberant ambition and fierce desire manage under these unspeakable circumstances to hold on? Weighed down by the gravity of history, Anne’s tragic end, I give in to a private fear that there is no answer, until one sentence startles me with its stark rejection of despair: “I don’t think of all the misery,” Anne wrote, “but of the beauty that still remains.”
In “Seeing Beyond the Beauty in Vermeer,” Teju Cole describes a startling moment on his own visit to the Rijksmuseum exhibit: “Our little group paused in front of ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,’ and it was so beautiful my heart almost stopped.” Cole takes tender inventory of the details in Vermeer’s picture that made his heart jump:
The woman, in profile, in a deep reverie, her eyes dreamily downcast, holds the letter with both hands. There are ribbons in her hair. The blue top is a beddejak, a bell-shaped house jacket. She is pregnant.
On this last point, he seems to concede: “Scholars doubt that she’s pregnant, or they say that we can’t know.” But then it’s clear that he’s not convinced: “We rely on scholars to tell us what we cannot see, not what we plainly can.” I love him for the choice he makes to allow the experts their due while remaining close to the emotional charge of his own face-to-face experience. But in the end, it’s an insight Cole offers almost as an aside that lands inside me with a visceral jolt: “All the colors are so muted, it is as though they are remembered rather than painted.” Suddenly, I’m thrown back into the Secret Annex where terror and hope pressed in so close, I didn’t just experience them in the real time of the present, I remembered them from a time before I even existed. “It felt like I disappeared,” I try to explain to Kenn. “Maybe because they were trying to disappear,” he replies. “Become invisible.”
When we get home from Amsterdam, we relive the vivid scenes of our adventure, starting with the thicket of iPhones held aloft by fellow tourists at “Vermeer.” We remember the way I forged a path through the crowd on the way to Girl with a Red Hat; secretly, I’d hoped to interrupt a perfect shot or two, while Kenn, more polite, or just adverse to appearing rude himself, waited till the coast was clear to move to my side, when everyone else magically fell away. We return to our delight at the discovery of the café barista who bore such an uncanny resemblance to Vermeer’s Girl, and our mutual agreement when I insisted “I want to tell her!” that there was no way I could. Given the vivid contrast between her living, breathing beauty and Vermeer’s flat-stare plain-faced model, she would surely have heard the comparison as an insult. “An image,” Berger explains, “is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it made its first appearance and preserved—for a few moments or a few centuries.” All paintings are contemporary, but an image detached from the place and time in which it made its first appearance remains a best a facsimile, a picture of life.
No one took pictures at the Anne Frank House; perhaps it was all we could do to not look away. John Berger concludes that “To look is an act of choice.” I want to believe that I chose to look up at the window at the top of the ladder, to that very wedge of sky, so that I might return to bear witness to what I could plainly see: The light that waited there for Anne, the light that waits for her still.
References
John Berger. Ways of Seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972.
Teju Cole. “Seeing Beyond the Beauty in a Vermeer,” New York Times, May 26, 2023.
“Sunflowers,” Vincent Van Gogh. Oil on canvas, 1889. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“Almond Blossoms,” Vincent Van Gogh. Oil on canvas., 1890. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“Girl with a Red Hat,” Johannes Vermeer. Oil on panel, 1669. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
“Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” Johannes Vermeer. Oil on Canvas, 1663-1664. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Nancy Casciato taught Literature, Writing, and Film at Portland Community College for thirty-three years. These days she pursues writing, reading, drawing, cooking, yoga, and ballet, not necessarily in that order. Her essays appear in the collection Understories, Compass Creek Press, 2020. She lives with her husband Kenn in Portland, Oregon.
After the Art 