Art’s double Dutch
“Tim’s Vermeer” is one of those palate-cleansing movies that needs to enter your life once in a while. There are no booms, no bangs; nobody is waving his arms in front of the camera pleading for attention or losing 60 pounds to enhance his Oscar chances. It is great fun nonetheless.
This understated little documentary follows one man’s quest to substantiate his theory of how a hallowed work of art was created 350 years ago by duplicating that very same painting in his own hand. Here’s the catch: that man, Tim Jenison, is not a painter. He is an inventor and tech geek who believes that one of the masters, Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer ― perhaps best known for “Girl With a Pearl Earring” ― likely captured scenes in such photorealistic detail because he used optics like lenses, mirrors and a camera obscura, a device that projects an image onto a flat surface. With the assistance of a camera obscura, Vermeer could painstakingly compose images through a process that ― and this will sound crude, but bear with me ― might be described today as glorified paint-by-numbers.
The mere suggestion, of course, is heresy in some circles, and Jenison takes pains to insist he’s no myth buster (British artist David Hockney and professor Philip Steadman, who meet with Jenison in the film, have already plowed that ground with Vermeer). Indeed, he is awed not only by Vermeer’s artistic brilliance but by his technical facility. If Vermeer was employing tools that allowed him to recreate the way light fills a room in a way that can’t be fully recorded by the human eye, then he was, in a manner of speaking, making the “photographs” of his day ― objective rather than subjective art.
To say that Jenison is obsessed may not do justice to the word. He researched Vermeer and his painting “The Music Lesson” for years, even finagling a private viewing of the masterpiece in Buckingham Palace. Then, incredibly, Jenison built and furnished an exact replica of the room depicted in Vermeer’s painting “The Music Lesson” in a San Antonio warehouse. He ground and mixed the pigments as Vermeer would have, and then, using a mirroring technique that would have been available to the artist, recreated the famous tableau of a teacher instructing a student in the playing of an early version of the spinet known as a virginal.
Did he ever. The level of detail Jenison managed to duplicate is utterly astounding, and the fact that he accomplished the task without losing his mind is equally impressive (replicating the spidery patterns on the virginal would seem enough to drive most people mad). The actual painting took 130 days, and Jenison, who has the even-keeled composure of an engineer, never betrayed the emotional toll of this monumental challenge ― until completion. On the 130thday, Jenison wept.
I don’t hesitate to reveal that Tim Jenison produced a miraculous copy of the Vermeer because the film is more concerned with the years-long process than it is with the outcome. (Would the movie even exist if he wasn’t successful?) The film is produced by the magic-comedy team of Penn & Teller ― Penn narrates, Teller directs ― a duo who found fame by explaining how their tricks are done. Here, they pose intriguing questions about what constitutes great art. Is it the ability of the painter to create a freehand image only? Was Vermeer “cheating” if he used a camera obscura? Is Tim Jenison an artist because he can precisely reproduce a Vermeer, or is he merely a forger?
The answer seems to exist somewhere in the mushy middle. Our capacity for rational thought drives us to appreciate and create subjective beauty and to pursue objective truth; these things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Johannes Vermeer was a genius. So is Tim Jenison.