"Evacuate the room please," exclaims a security guard at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with a few minutes left before the museum closes. “Please!”, he insists with his booming voice and moving his arms forward in a cross before the understandable slowness of the public that does not want to leave the room and does want to enjoy the last glimpses of one of the exhibitions that, surely, already they will never see again. It has no name, no title. Just a last name. Vermeer.
There are only a few days left for the end of one of the great shows in the world where 28 of the 37 renowned works of the Delft painter, the author of The Milkmaid, The Girl with the Pearl Earring or The Astronomer come together in an unprecedented show, wonderfully orchestrated and set with an atmosphere of palatial seclusion and large, thick burgundy curtains.
The tickets were sold out in three days, the access of the press was more limited than in other exhibitions. It really didn't take much publicity. It was going to be filled to the brim, "but we didn't think the tickets would sell out so soon," they confess in the museum. By popular acclaim, 2,600 more tickets were put on sale. There were about 13,000 requests and the consequent raffle.
However, in the official schedule there was not room for one more needle. The one that the painter punctured in La Lechera to mark the vanishing point and that is still there. The one of the woman pouring milk into a bowl is the most famous painting in the Rijksmuseum with permission from Rembrandt's Night Watch.
But this time the one who is going to party, at least until two in the morning, is the Vermeer show that in its last days will be open until Sunday the 4th, to accommodate those privileged people who won the golden ticket.
It was worth trying because the show is a hymn to the mastery of a man we know almost nothing about (the same as Hieronymus Bosch), who barely painted two paintings a year, of whom there is no reliable image of him and who, Above all, he has portrayed the reflection of his characters, the melancholy, the emotion of receiving or writing a love letter, the waiting, the outside world reflected in illuminated rooms like no one else.
The worried faces reflected in the window. "Vermeer is a mystery and has remained so for the last 150 years, we have neither letters nor diaries, nor an image of his face, but a lot of research has been done on his social position, his family...", sums up Taco Dibbits, the director from the museum. Eleven art galleries around the world have contributed his works.
It is a privilege to walk through these rooms, to be amazed by the canvases and by the astonished faces of the visitors, because in the Rijksmuseum you can see not the possible 37, but more than half of those he painted in his entire life "among 45 and 50” according to Pieter Roelofs, head of painting and sculpture at the Amsterdam art gallery and one of the two promoters of the show.
In his final days, Vermeer will not only greet his "friend" Rembrandt, the genius of Leiden, but wink at Van Gogh in the next building on Museumsplein where the Red-Haired Fool displays the latest paintings by (this time yes) his, very well documented, life.
One of the 28 paintings that will not enjoy the final after hours of the exhibition and will not greet the nocturnal characters of Rembrandt's famous painting is The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer's other great planetary icon. Two months after being hung in Amsterdam, she returned to the Mauritshaus in The Hague, a spectacular museum, but incomplete without that painting.
The public crowds in front of the paintings, politely, and stays much longer than in any other exhibition, because there are relatively few paintings and because every detail deserves attention. It is fascinating to contemplate the concentration of the characters. Experience is like a magnetic book that knows how to end badly. There are those who look at the canvases with binoculars. Some people come from New York just to see the show.
"There are those who have cried, those who have been moved, those who have remained petrified...", say the guards in the room, who had not seen anything similar in a long time. It has never been possible to bring so many Vermeers under one roof, not even 30 years ago at the double exhibition in the United States and The Hague. It was essential that the Frick Collection in New York, which never leaves its three canvases, was undergoing renovations. There was no excuse.
Vermeer ends on June 4. A guided tour (in English) by actor Stephen Fry can be viewed here.
