The first time Gregor Weber saw a Vermeer, he fainted. Decades on from that quasi-religious experience, the sight of one of the artist’s pieces can still feel “almost like a shock”. But as the man tasked with co-curating the largest showcase of the Dutch master’s work in history, he is thankfully now able to stay conscious around the paintings.
New documentary Close to Vermeer follows Weber and his team (including co-curator Pieter Roelofs) in the lead-up to the Rijksmuseum’s historic exhibition: a landmark moment for the art world and a personal apotheosis of a life-long obsession for Weber. The film is taut and touching and gifts us with a heightened appreciation of Vermeer’s art. It also provides insight into the painstaking work behind delivering a generational event — with granular planning, close collaborations and tricky negotiations.
Vermeer himself is a uniquely slippery figure. Enigmatic and unprolific, the artist left no notes or diaries and no self-portraits among his 37 authenticated works. Even that number is a source of heated debate, with experts contesting attributions made by others. After centuries of research and scholarship, the answer to the question of what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer is still elusive.
The film’s illuminating insights are sometimes complemented by noirish tones, with the documentary doubling as a kind of detective mystery in which iconographic clues and technical MOs are sought out in forensic scans and zooms. At one point a private collector delights in having a small piece confirmed as an original, but as the camera pans to the sceptical Weber, he appears more like a detective haunted by an unconvincingly closed case than a curator.
What’s undeniable is the rare genius and beauty of the paintings. Seen here intimately handled out of their frames, they are awe-inspiring yet fragile. Close-ups luxuriate in the delicate play of light and shadow, the intricate domestic details and inscrutable expressions of subjects; the enhanced clarity only draws out more beguiling ambiguity. If the film can’t rival the experience of seeing the art first-hand, it still leaves us in no doubt as to why Vermeer makes people feel so utterly verklempt.
★★★★☆
On BBC4 at 9pm tonight and on BBC iPlayer thereafter
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