The Beauty of Vermeer and Our Largest Hope
I love the paintings of the 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, and very much The Milkmaid. How beautifully the warm expansive light from the world outside illuminates the interior of this room and the figure of a woman pouring milk. The quiet drama in this painting and Vermeer’s glorious light have moved me to my depths, as they have people the world over. I am very grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great poet and critic Eli Siegel, that what Vermeer achieves on this canvas is a beautiful resolution.
In “The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict,” a chapter of his book Self and World, Eli Siegel wrote: “The basic conflict in the human mind…is that between a person warmly existing to his fingertips, and that person as related to indefinite outsideness.” He showed that art is the means of seeing the true relation of our intimate selves and the world outside of us.
This Aesthetic Realism principle makes this seeing possible: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Our largest hope is to do what art does, put opposites together. This is the most hopeful thing I know and has been the basis of classes I taught at LaGuardia High School in New York City.
Opposites beautifully one in the paintings of Vermeer are inside and outside, the contained and expansive. In this past year we all have had a keen, new awareness of these very opposites. Needing to stay within our homes for many months due to the Coronavirus has been difficult. People have felt bored, “stir-crazy,” lonely. But inside and outside, ourselves to ourselves and in relation are big matters in our lives at all times.
The art of Vermeer can help us see these opposites in a way we can honestly like. The catalog for the 1995 Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery describes the artist as “a poet who searches for the essence of reality.…in the confines of a private chamber.” In The Milkmaid, which measures a mere 17⅞ x 16⅛ inches, the artist saw tremendous meaning within the confines of a room. In his historic “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?,” Eli Siegel asks about Universe and Object.
“Does every work of art have a certain precision about something, a certain concentrated exactness, a quality of particular existence?—and does every work of art, nevertheless, present in some fashion the meaning of the whole universe, something suggestive of wide existence, something that has an unbounded significance beyond the particular?”
Vermeer shows that this particular room and woman doing a particular task are inseparable from unbounded universal reality. The woman’s presence in this room takes on a monumentality. She is alone, yet the bright and subtle light from the window relates her to all that is within and to the wide world without.
Vermeer takes no object for granted as we can easily do. The radiant still life on the table, the window, the wall, and the thoughtful milkmaid, are painted with breathtaking exactitude, and every inch seems to throb with meaning. With stunning particularity Vermeer paints the golden loaf of crusty bread in a woven basket, the ceramic tankard with a metal lid, and the earthenware pitcher and bowl. These inanimate objects seem to have an inner life as they glow with “something suggestive of wide existence.”
As we are alone in a room, within the privacy of our thoughts, how does the outside world fare? Does it become dim? This was a big question in my life. I could get bored very quickly, and easily dismiss other people and things—for example not remembering the name of a person I had just met, or seeing the feelings of my mother as uninteresting compared to my own. In a college Art History class, as I took notes on Vermeer I had no idea that the opposites I was moved by in his work, were at war in me. When I began to study Aesthetic Realism a question I was asked in a consultation was “Do you grant other people an inner life as real as your own?” I didn’t! I was cold to the feelings of other people. My consultants explained: “In order to keep ourselves intact we can’t allow the world to get into us very much.”
The way I put on an outward show to impress, while I remained intact and unaffected was the reason I often felt so empty. This, I learned, was a form of Contempt, the “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Without realizing it, I got a victory through looking down on people. Contempt can seem very ordinary, but it makes for the greatest horrors, including racism and war.
It is also the enemy of art. How life-saving it was to see that the “false importance” I got from “the lessening of things" was utterly opposed to the honest victory I was hoping for in the sculpture studio—to find new form and beauty in clay, wood, and stone. The success of an artist depends on how deeply he or she wants to be affected by the meaning and structure of reality. And the paintings of Vermeer represent that beautiful intention in a way people treasure, and now can learn from.
In The Milkmaid Vermeer magnificently shows a person, as Eli Siegel wrote, “warmly existing to [her] fingertips” and richly “related to indefinite outsideness.” She is contained, thoughtfully composed, as she reaches out to that humble yet magnificent pitcher. A bright stream of milk flows from the perfect circle of its rim, emerging from its mysterious, dark interior. And Vermeer directs our eye to the pitcher from many angles in the room: the downward diagonal lines of the window, the slant of the basket hanging in the corner, the strong and steady arms of the milkmaid herself, and the lovely tilt of her head. The milkmaid and every object in the room are related through the composition and the warm glow and shadow of Vermeer’s exquisite light.
Even an ordinary plaster wall, which we might dismiss as boring, Vermeer sees has the grandeur of the unlimited. With its cracks and nail holes, its imperfections, this wall is lovingly painted as a trembling drama of light and shadow and space.
Vermeer shows there is a beautiful relation between the ourselves and the outside world which includes immediate objects and all indefinite space and time. And that relation it is the purpose of our lives to know and love.
Resources:
Siegel, Eli. "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" New York: Definition Press, 1955. Terrain Gallery.org
Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? by Eli Siegel terraingallery.org).
------------. "The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict." Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism. NY: Definition Press, 1981, pp. 93.
The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict - Aesthetic Realism Online Library.
Vermeer, Johannes. The Milkmaid. Oil on Canvas. c. 1660, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Rijksmuseum.nl,
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/johannes-vermeer/objects#/SK-A-2344,0.
Wheelock, Arthur K., ed. Johannes Vermeer. 1995. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Johannes Vermeer
at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.