If the Netherlands were a hair salon, it would be the kind of place with a sign in the window that says, Walk-Ins Welcome. Its athleisure-clad denizens are not particularly exclusive, the kind of people who cock a skeptical eyebrow at the hype well known to residents of places like New York or London. If a restaurant is full one night, you come back the next. If a product is sold out, they’ll call on Thursday when the new shipment arrives.
That’s why the hype around the Vermeer show that opened this past February at the Rijksmuseum seemed so un-Dutch. I’ve lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years, and this was the first time a cultural event felt hard to get into, as if guarded by the bouncers who, I imagined, held the velvet rope at Studio 54. Nearly every day, people from all over the world called or wrote—people I hardly knew—begging for help with tickets. Never mind that I didn’t work at the museum or have any special access. I lived in the Netherlands. Maybe I could help them.
In the end—and no thanks to me—lots of people did go: 650,000 of them, the largest show in Dutch history. I myself managed to go three different times. This, I marveled, was a brag, because this was the first time that old Dutch paintings ever felt chic. For so long, my own obsession with this art had felt like a hobby, a personal eccentricity, the kind of thing you had to be careful not to bore people with.
I had been haunting the museums ever since, barely out of college, I fell in love with a Dutchman and moved to the Netherlands. I was romantic, adventurous, up for anything, ballsy enough to get on a plane and move across the world. But after the initial rush, I often wondered what I was doing here. Being a foreigner could sometimes feel like experiencing dementia. You are you—same name, address, date of birth—but your past is wiped away. You don’t know what anyone is talking about or who anyone is, and you start to wonder who you are yourself.
As I tried to find my path as a writer, I found, in the museums, a whole constellation of people who seemed to be asking the same questions I was. Why do we make art, and why do we need it? Who, and what, is an artist? What does it mean to have talent, and how can one develop whatever one has been given? Can an artist be a follower, or must he be original? What is the artist’s duty to others, to society, to self? What is beauty, and how does it relate to taste? How can art help us see ourselves, and how can it help us see others? How, in a word, are we supposed to live?
It took me a long time to realize that the answers didn’t exactly matter. What mattered were the questions, and the companionship of people who were asking the same ones. Gradually, the old artists started to feel like old friends. And as I got to know them, their work had a strange effect on me. I could walk through the galleries as I might walk through a cathedral or a forest, emerging the way I emerged from a good night’s sleep or a long jog: breathing easier, more focused. Dutch art calmed me down even as it wound me up, and though this might seem paradoxical, I understood that the serenity was somehow part of the turn-on.
Nearly every day, people from all over the world called or wrote—people I hardly knew—begging for help with tickets. Never mind that I didn’t work at the museum or have any special access.
That’s why I understood the frenzy around the Vermeer show. People were frantically e-mailing strangers and flying around the world—for what? For the chance to calm down; for the chance to see something that was, let’s face it, a little boring. A woman standing at a window, putting on a necklace, chatting with her maid, sewing. It wasn’t much, and to see this many Vermeers together—28 of the 35, give or take, that are known—was to see how little he used. The same room, for the most part. The same window. The same few objects—the pearls, the yellow fur-lined jacket—and the same few faces that you recognized by the end of the show.
They’re strange pictures. They’re pictures that seem to be missing something, pictures in which, strictly speaking, nothing is happening. For centuries, people have wanted to fill that nothing in, and no Dutch painter has spawned as many novels, films, and myths. There’s something about Vermeer that makes us want to understand more about him, to get closer to him: I can’t have been the only one who felt a spooky thrill to find out that, during a recent restoration of Girl Reading a Letter, a little smudge appeared in a corner of the painting usually covered by the frame. Closer examination revealed that it was a fingerprint—almost certainly the artist’s own. Who else would have picked it up when it was still wet?
Yet it’s precisely his withholding that makes him so attractive. In a world with so much carefully marketed excitement, with so many images jostling for our attention, it was a relief to walk into this cathedral of silence. Despite the Rijksmuseum’s efforts to limit the flow—those efforts were one reason the show was so hard to get into, and why it didn’t have the subway-at-rush-hour feeling of other blockbusters—the galleries were nonetheless far more packed than Dutch museums usually are. But if the museum was full, Vermeer’s rooms were as quiet as ever, their silence suggesting something more than a tight-lipped riposte to the phones brandished at them. Their silence and reserve seemed to hold up some alternative possibility for our civilization, and for our own lives. Perhaps—the same paradox—that was why they were so exciting. Why there was a buzz in the air. After four centuries, this art had come to feel genuinely countercultural.
When you look at the paintings, you might see what I saw years ago, when I first came to this country. You might realize how many answers there are. Answers have flooded the market. They’re pouring in on your phone; they’re cheap. We need them, sometimes. But sometimes we need something higher. Sometimes all we want are the questions.
Benjamin Moser is the author of Sontag: Her Life and Work and Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
