Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #4 Simon Schama's "Through a Glass Brightly"

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665)

Simon Schama is a superb describer. His brilliant New Yorker exhibition reviews of the 1990s – “True Grid” (Piet Mondrian), “California Dreamer” (David Hockney), “Dangerous Curves” (Ellsworth Kelly), to name three that come quickly to mind – abound in wonderful descriptions of paintings. Here, for example, from “True Grid,” is his memorable depiction of Mondrian’s The Sea:

In The Sea (1912), a tour de force of self-conscious painterly display, the rhythm of the waves is partly abstracted into over-lapping fish-scale forms, which are defined with dashing black curves and are folded into the marine grey-green of the scowling North Sea. As if he were moving with the tide, Mondrian mimetically performed the motion of the waves by applying the color, wet in wet, in little undulations that snake over the entire surface of the painting.

As if he were moving with the tide– how fine that is. On the strength of it, I’m tempted to make “True Grid” my #4 pick. But there’s another strong contender to consider: Schama’s splendid “Through a Glass Brightly” (The New Republic, January 8-16, 1996; included in his 2004 collection Hang-Ups), a review of the National Gallery of Art’s Johannes Vermeer (November 12, 1995 – February 11, 1996), containing, among other felicities, this exquisite description of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665):

In Vermeer’s miraculous confection, the light, originating who knows where, fills the opal face, itself an enlarged echo of the jewel, and shines from reflections standing at the edge of the hazel iris, executed by Vermeer with a single stroke of lead white continuing from the surface of the cornea to the edge of the dilated pupils. Exactly modeled through the gentlest shadowing on the right side of the forehead, nose, and jaw, this face manages to keep a perfect proportion while somehow conveying the distinct possibility that at any minute it might retreat and dissolve once more into black invisibility. 

That imagining of the “distinct possibility that at any minute” Vermeer’s turbaned girl “might retreat and dissolve once more into black invisibility” is inspired! Schama’s “Through a Glass Brightly” illustrates the power of description. It’s my #4.