Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Benjamin Binstock on Examining Vermeer

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

In this month’s bonus episode, Liza is joined by Benjamin Binstock, art historian and author of Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice, to discuss the historical examination of Vermeer’s works and the possibility that perhaps there was another hand at play. We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. While we inch ever closer to Season 2, we are continuing with our series of monthly bonus episodes in exploration of our theme. This time, we're speaking with Benjamin Binstock, art historian and author of the book Vermeer's Family Secrets, who believes that Vermeer's daughter may actually have painted a couple of the works attributed to him. Benjamin, thank you so much for being here with us. Will you do me a favor and speak to me as someone who literally knows nothing about art history? Because I'd love it if you could start for us by explaining the significance of Vermeer, the artist in the pantheon of art history, if it's not too entirely

broad and intimidating a request? No, it's really important. You can say it, try to be succinct, but it kind of goes to the crux of the matter because what my book is about is partly about why Vermeer is important. And I think part of the issue is that might not be being asked enough. It's taken for granted that he's important. But super overview was that he was probably well known that he was discovered late. That he was not that successful in his own time, not really known outside his own town. It gets disputed. He started to get a reputation in his own town and there were people who visited him, but he died owing money. He certainly wasn't

recognized by writers on art in his time as important. And that's why in the 19th century, this man, Théophile Touré, who was a French political activist, and he was exiled to Holland. And then he took up a new thing, which was writing about art and museums, right at the time that the birth of the modern discipline of art history, 1860, around there, 1859, 1860, overdetermined because they started using reproductions so they could reproduce works. That has to do with the discovery of Vermeer. They started having art historical journals. Torre, under a pseudonym, wrote these articles about the museums, and then he made this incredible discovery around the view of Delft, where the view of Delft,

a huge painting in Amsterdam, was not considered important because of its subject matter. It was just an ordinary, what we call genre or everyday life. It wasn't a term in Vermeer's time, but it was kind of an urban landscape. A genre painting means paintings of everyday life

or categories, literally in French. And those were considered low, but that started to change in the 19th century. And Torre realized, oh my God, the way this is painted is so incredible. And he started at first saying negative things about it, and he changed his mind. And then he ended up thinking,

oh, this is just one of the greatest painters ever. And he devoted his life to it. So it was this amazing thing where this man devoted his life to rediscovering Vermeer's works, to talking about who he was, he called him the Sphinx of Delft, to talking about why his works were important. And that is embedded in this bigger problem about what was the invention of art history or what were the origins of art history. It's hard to separate those things from why Vermeer is important. Because Vermeer is important because of, let's say, primarily his qualities, his artistic qualities, which wasn't a priority up until then. It had to do more about

content, subject matter. And that's very important for Vermeer because he thinks about this. I hope I'm not making it too complicated, but in a way... No, it's fascinating. I love it. Thank you. Vermeer's own thinking about his art is hard to separate, from what happened to him and one of the things that i claim in my book is that in a way he engineered his own discovery because he made that painting the view of delft deliberately he tried to make an unsurpassable work of art vermeer knew he would one day be discovered even if they didn't recognize him in his time. That's saying already quite a lot, but it puts us up until the present, which is that discovery happened in the 19th century. Well, Torre, who tried to get a lot of Vermeer's works,

half of those in his first catalog, Resonance residence called the first catalog of Vermeer's paintings, half of those were wrong. And there's no reason to assume that it's all been resolved and that we got it right. That's part of my work, which is, did we get it all right? Which paintings are Vermeer? And then there's larger questions about, did we understand his development? Do we understand why he's important? All of that's hard to separate from this original discovery in the 19th century, and then that's hard to separate in turn from maybe someone else was involved in his workshop. Well, that is the very interesting heart of this conversation. I have a quick question before we move forward into the someone else part of the discussion, which is when you say that Vermeer's ambition

was to record this sort of lasting, eternal vision of his city. How is that known? Did he have a diary? Did he write a a letter how do we know that well we recognize that the i didn't say exactly that his his um i think what i said was that he he aspired to make the greatest painting of delft we we recognized delft and there was among the very important documents that we have bermere had a kind of patron or patrons. There was a couple. And only recently, a researcher found that the wife in the couple lived next to Vermeer as a child, quite likely was a kind of friend and maybe the reason why they were patrons. That they were kids.

Maybe she was in love with him. I like to think Gordon certainly liked him. Yeah, sure. And they both married rich people or Vermeer married a Catholic who was the daughter of a rich woman. She married a rich Protestant. And they, the couple, the Protestant couple

collected Vermeer's paintings. And he had probably an agreement that they call right of first refusal, which is that when he made a painting, they had the right to buy it if they wanted to. One of the things that I've worked on since my book, I've tightened this up, which is that I actually think Vermeer deliberately

had a doubling strategy. They always made two works that were kind of the same or variations. And it seems they almost systematically always picked one. That was a way of him to develop. And it was also a way of giving these patrons a choice between two similar works. They would buy one, he would get one. I mean, that's a matter of speculation. What's clear is that they bought, it seems like, every other one, and there was a kind of a doubling strategy. And those works were listed in a 1696 auction.

So the biggest one and the most expensive one was called A View of Delft in Perspective from the Southwest. So what I say is, it's clear that it was his biggest work, with one possible exception. And what I'm saying is, what was he doing when he did it? He was trying to do something, a kind of what we call chef d'oeuvre, leading work. He was making a bid for immortality. Vermeer wasn't going to benefit during his lifetime from working so hard on a, he had a kind of ambition for immortality.

And when we say, why is Vermeer important? Well, this was recognized belatedly. It's not something that his contemporaries recognized. These works were considered valuable or investments, but genre painting wasn't recognized as important, everyday painting. Vermeer wasn't recognized as important. We've belatedly recognized what Vermeer was doing, and that's what this is all about. What was Vermeer doing when he made these incredible paintings? We've all recognized how important he is to the point of fetishization and, you know, all of the reproductions all over the place and the attention that we give him and these

exhibitions. But I think we've directed less attention to Vermeer's own development and process. What was the chronology of his works? Which works exactly were his? Are they all his? Yeah, so this is at the core of your scholarship that there was perhaps another hand involved in the creation of some of these works, right?

Yes. It was only the last chapter of my book, but I think it's the most important now. I think it's now maybe closer to people being ready to recognize that. People have responded to the book, but it hasn't, let's say, managed to make a flip or however you ever would say this, that it would make a paradigm shift in the field so and that's a that is a difficult thing to accomplish obviously right and and it's like with this the authorship question in shakespeare where there's such devotion to

certain schools of belief it's it's religious almost People get very attached to these ideas about these authors and artists they revere. And changing ideas or minds about, you know, how things really went down is incredibly tricky, right? I don't have to tell you. Well, yes, you could theorize it as there's investments, monetary and cultural investments. You could theorize it as within the field, individual scholars have their reputations or what they've said. People don't like to change their mind or say they're wrong. There's also the question of how I presented my argument. That's one of the things that's interesting for me is that I think when I wrote my book, I knew that presentation was a factor, but I think I, well, I had my own reasons for

doing it the way I did it. 15 years later, I tend to think it's about this artist. If there's a woman artist involved, it's also about Vermeer. artists. If there's a woman artist involved, it's also about Vermeer. And that if I could have presented it in a way that would make the paradigm shift easier, I should have done that. These are more complicated questions. I would want to say very quickly, I didn't get a chance. I will find the significant other's podcast about Shakespeare as woman. Oh, you know what? Just go straight to her book.

She's so, it's fantastic. It's like historical journalism. I mean, I can't promote this book enough. She's so brilliant, Elizabeth Winkler. She's a great writer. And she really covers the subject, I think, very exhaustively and has a great perspective on it. Well, what's interesting is that I haven't read her book, so I can't make a judgment. I know prior to her, some of the literature about the Dark Lady and the Earl of Oxford, and I would say

in the case of Shakespeare, there's a ton of really good scholarship on Shakespeare's own development, the order in which he wrote the plays. I challenge that aside from myself, there's not any attempt to put Vermeer's paintings in chronological order. to put Vermeer's paintings in chronological order. And there's serious problems about dealing with works that are problematic. There's works that have been doubted, that are attributed in the Vermeer corpus. And I don't, aside from Winkler, I'm just saying, I don't, I think there's many interesting questions. One is insurgent theories from outside. I think there's many interesting questions.

One is insurgent theories from outside. But another question is, does the field have sufficient, just on this very basic question, such a famous artist of Vermeer, why isn't there more looking into those, what I call, misfit paintings? And I'm the first one to group them together as a work. But a lot of people have questioned them. And something is really rubbing right in the face. So right now in the Rijksmuseum, after this big show, they have two works that are on loan up until October. It's really wonderful in their little Vermeer section in what they call the Honor Gallery in the center of the museum leading up to the night watch room.

And they have these two works, The Girl in a Red Hat from the Washington National Gallery and a painting that's in private collection, Young Girl at a Virginal's in the Kaplan collection, what he calls the Leiden collection in New York. And there's been really a lot of open doubt about that Leighton collection painting. So if there's all of this doubt, why isn't there more work done on the possibility of Vermeer having a student or on Vermeer's own chronology? And that, I say, is a real issue for Vermeer's scholarship that you could even keep separate from my claims. You could say, this guy Binstock has an insurgent claim.

But aside from his claim, why isn't there more fundamental, basic work done on Vermeer's chronology and what constitutes a canonical Vermeer work or what we would call his characteristic style or approach, that goes right to that fundamental first question you asked me, which is, why is Vermeer great? Why is Vermeer important? Girl with a Red Hat, amazing, amazing painting, masterpiece, I think. Really important, fascinating painting. But I submit it does not correspond in any way to what is characteristic of Vermeer's style and approach. What makes him a great painter also can't easily be incorporated

into a coherent account of his chronological development. Wow. So I'm just going to orient myself. Tell me if I'm in the right place. There are a number of paintings that don't seem to be in alignment with the rest of Vermeer's body of work. They are somehow misfits in terms of his production. seem to be in alignment with the rest of Vermeer's body of work. They're somehow misfits in terms of his production.

Part of what you have done is started to look more closely at those misfit paintings. And then you also have developed specific theories, right? About, I don't know about all of them or if only some of them. All of them. I'm wondering if you can just tell it. So a couple of basic factors. What was his gradual chronological development? What was he doing? What were his aims? How does that relate to his development? What were his models? How does that relate to what he was doing? And I think that's the core idea that Vermeer was self-aware. He wasn't just a painter of everyday life.

He was a kind of a modernist of Alain Lalletre that he was saying, I'm painting my own family members as models in rooms of my house. These paintings are about making beautiful paintings and reflecting on what I'm doing. I'm not trying to just give you little picturesque vignettes of everyday life that are arbitrarily pieced together and not really believable. This is so believable because I'm not lying about what I'm doing. I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm showing what I'm showing. That's kind of, you know, there's this term that Andre Gide coined, knees on a beam. term that Andre Gide coined, knees on a beam, when an artist reflects on what they're doing, that's kind of in Proust. That's kind of in Shakespeare. This is a play in a play,

and I'm showing you what I'm doing. And I'm talking about how Hamlet changes the play, which is kind of telling you about how I change a play and what I do with my play. And a lot of people have been talked about that, Freud and Joyce. And it's wonderful because it's an artist telling us what he does, a great artist telling us what he does. When a great artist tells us what he does, we should listen. We should pay attention to that. And that's kind of part of my polemic. Don't get caught up in your academic theories about these are little messages for their contemporaries or, you know, who the owners were or some moralizing message.

These are great works of art. And what's really most important is what the artist is doing and especially reflecting on it. And I think that's what makes Vermeer a great artist. He reflected on it. So that's something I developed in my book. I followed that all in all of those threads. The chronology, the seeing the family members, the seeing the rooms, all kicks in when you address the problem at the end of, wait a minute, what about these other works that don't fit because they're not of the same quality?

They don't have light-filled interiors. They don't seem to master three-dimensional bodies in space or materials, objects, costumes the same way. But they seem to show the same models in the same rooms, using Vermeer's works that were pieced together, but also sometimes showing the same models in the same room emulating a Vermeer work. In other words, they were staged after Vermeer work. When you get all of that, and if there's evidence also that he had a family member as a follower because he didn't have any official students, the only possible student he could have had would have been one of his family members who he didn't have to official students. So the only possible student he could have had would have been

one of his family members who he didn't have to list as an official student. All of those threads of evidence all come together. And if I could just, one more big point is, when I wrote my book 15 years ago, I was trying to add up all of the evidence so that people would come, would see why you had to come to this conclusion but it was apparently too much for the field too much for anybody to ever respond to within the field up until this last year because of these recent exhibition and uh because of other things that are kind of forcing them to address these issues themselves. And what I'm thinking of doing is trying to represent this all in the inverse way and kind of throw down, here's this artist, and it may be my invention, this woman artist.

But if you look at that, isn't that an interesting way to explain Vermeer? In other words, precisely the opposite, partly because of problems of the field's own incredible inertia or resistance to these kind of things that if you run an end run, then something might be of interest to you. my uh my best friend uh is a dutch art historian and but he also teaches in the united states and he had an old uh colleague who went on to go to pen um and i'm i don't have her name oh my goodness she just wrote a book on hokusai's daughter oh how funny we had looked at um our our fact check the first fact checker who we worked with had suggested that story as a

possible episode for the podcast so that that's i'm so sorry that i keep my name her name slips me and i met her and she uh but she also says the Wave, which is the most famous Hokusai work, is by her. And so she has arguments for this, but she was interviewed in a Dutch newspaper. She was in Leiden and she said, you know, I would have liked to have gone about this the way a novelist did or a journalist might, but I have to work with the facts. And that's part of what, I think it's such a fascinating, because it's such a fascinating field that you enter into, but what constitute facts, who's invested in what is a fact and why? Because the problem, I'm saying, Girl with a Red Hat or this other one that's next to it,

anybody who goes into the museum will see it. And the museum itself kind of knows that. But there's so many protocols and so many investments about the field protecting itself that extends to what it calls facts. Because I would say facts, the most important facts that we have in the case of Vermeer are the visual evidence. Didn't we put the works in order? Didn't we look carefully at those works, which are so important to try to parse which ones correspond to his or not. And I would say those facts are being ignored

because unlike Shakespeare, nobody owns the works. And scholars are free to talk about all these plays and the folios and everything. These works are objects that belong in museums. And then there's an enormous investment in, I would say, resisting the facts because their primary directive is, we call this a Vermeer. We don't want anybody tinkering with that. And that is fascinating.

But let's admit that there's a problem. And let's not say I'm right, they're wrong. Let's say, what's at stake in this debate? Do you suspect, this is pure conjecture, but, or maybe it won't be, but when you talk about the sort of inherent resistance in the establishment to any kind of theory that challenges whatever it is that everyone's already invested their, you know, themselves into, do you think that proposing not only another artist, a helper, a student, that's a difficulty in and of itself, but then do you think that proposing that that could have been a woman adds an extra layer of difficulty to acceptance? That's a crux matter that you point to that I think involves an overdetermined group of threads that come together. I love, in my book, Jacques Derrida, a guy who founded deconstruction,

but there's one of his obscure books that I don't think was translated, Tourne les mots, which means it's about film and art and there he says somewhere that the one of the objects of deconstruction is to uncover in by untangling the various threads a repressed woman's voice it's an over-declaring but i would say in response to what you say the fact that she was a woman or if she was a woman has everything to do with the fact that there's no what people would call traditional dark documentation so the the main reason for resistance would be there's no factual documentation of this artist existing now i say that's really dubious because you're you're ignoring the whole history of art history. The history of

Vermeer and how we came to attribute works to him and group them together. That's how that came. Yes, we have evidence that Vermeer existed, but there's other artists that we know that we don't know existed. You know, great anonymous artists from the Middle

Ages and other, all kinds of cases like I suspect Hokusai's daughter that there was that she had to probably uncover from studio evidence and that would be the same which is there were social reasons why a woman artist that we know have spades of evidence. We know about Judith Leister, the problems that she had to name one 70th century Dutch female artist, that there were historical reasons why women artists were not encouraged to be artists or to use an example in music. Fanny Mendelssohn,

her works were attributed to her brother, Felix. Clara Schumann, discouraged by her husband, Robert, from doing any compositions. This problem of women artists historically gets pushed into the realm where the question about facts becomes particularly fraught. It's a real issue about what constitutes a fact. And if you limit it to, we only want to recognize artists where there's some document pointing to that artist as an artist, well then, you're going against the problem of historical issues about women artists and going against all of that other evidence that we have. Indirect documentary evidence, documents about the baker. But I would say most importantly, the most important evidence and facts that we have, the works.

That's what this is all about. It's all about these paintings attributed to Vermeer. And I would say this is such an easy sell. That's what all the hoopla is about. Greatest artist ever. One of the greatest artists in history. Well, let's look at the works. Let's put them in order.

Let's worry about which ones don't belong. And what you said about woman artists, it's bound up with what's all of the resistances there. But I think it's also bound up in the solution that that's what makes it so exciting. And a lot of people have said to me over and over again, the guy in the owns the private collection, Kaplan, it would be so much more exciting if he would recognize, oh, this is a work by this fascinating woman artist, or possibly, rather than trying to hold on to,

I've got a Vermeer, even though everyone is dubious on it being a Vermeer. Oh, yeah. And so, in other words, appeal to his economic interests, appeal to his status concerns, piggyback that with, I don't know, feminist issues about everybody has their reasons, as Jean Renoir says, everybody has motives.

But if there's all of this evidence about a woman artist, let's look at it. Let's hear the case. This is a great opportunity. And we know that that's been repressed in the past. Don't get hung up on earlier protocols of what constitutes legitimate evidence or facts. Let's look at it all again, especially if you're ignoring the most important evidence and facts, which is the works themselves, something like The Girl with the Red Hat, something like Young Woman and the Virginals,

those two works that are right there to see in the Rijksmuseum. And I say prima facie, the visual evidence shows that those are not the same artists. I so wish we could be standing in front of these paintings having this conversation. We'd be learning even more. This has been incredible. I don't want to take up any more of your time, even though I have 5,000 more questions. I do hope that this is not the last any of us is hearing on the subject from you. I think it's such a worthy conversation. And I love that you're challenging the establishment to not cling so tightly to whatever. It's such a circular logic as you talk about it. The world is laid out completely unevenly, and then we refer back to that as if it were solid ground, you know, and yet humans are the ones who set up the circumstances that, you know, are completely,

and then we refer back to it as if it's evidence of something. It's only evidence of how humans set it up, right? Absolutely. The field of art history, we've got a lot of wonderful contributions that were made including the discovery of ramir and all the work that's been done but it's only as good as re-examining it and opening it up looking if there might be something more we can do or get make something make you know it's great what we have but that doesn't mean inviolable and not to be questioned. Questioning is a wealthy process. Absolutely. I think that's a fantastic note to end on.

Benjamin, thank you so much. This is really, I feel like my brain has just been very, very fed this morning. Just my favorite thing. Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. We'll be releasing bonus episodes right up until season two comes out, so do be sure to hit the subscribe button. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can email us at significantpod at gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening.