Two documentaries about two museums, two Amsterdam museums. One aired on Monday, one on Tuesday. You can walk from one building to the other in two minutes, but there are a few centuries between them and a world of difference. documentary two, White Balls on Walls by Sarah Vos starts like this: in a modern white office the white blinds are folded up by a white man, through the window we see the neo-Gothic towers of the Rijksmuseum, where the other documentary Close to Vermeer takes place.
Rein Wolfs has just become director of the Stedelijk Museum, and Touria Meliani, alderman for art and culture, is sitting in his white office telling him that every cultural institution that wants a subsidy must relate to all the people in the city. Four percent of the works in the collection are made by a female artist. Number of works by artists of color: zero. Wolfs understands what he has to do: the employees, the artists, the arts, it must be more diverse, more inclusive and with a better gender balance. Wolfs wants to get rid of “male, white dominance”, not because “the political and cultural situation” forces him to do so, no, he wants it himself. The treasure.
What follows is an hour of fiddling with language and terminology, and with each other. Winti ritual at the opening of an exhibition of art from the Surinamese school or not? The colossal letters ‘Meet the icons’ on the facade of the museum must be removed. Because who are they icons then, and who determines that? Words like native, gypsy and the n-word are being scrapped from the catalogues, but what about ‘prostitute’? And the only man of color in the group finds that “a difficult one”, because why is that not allowed? Meanwhile, the building’s security guard shows off the new prayer room in the bicycle shed, and the toilets, he says, have all recently been “transgender.” The confusion, the discomfort, the unfamiliarity is reflected in the faces of two academic staff – male, white, middle-aged. They try so hard with their best. But do they understand…
The biggest problem, certainly for a museum: what should we do with the art from the time when artists looked at the other with ‘an anthropological view’ – woman, black man, non-Western art. If you say: that look, that is really no longer possible, then you can close the museum. Almost every work of art in the collection started with a man’s gaze.
Vermeer as a feminist
In Close to Vermeer curator Gregor Weber remembers the first time he saw a painting by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) in real life. It was in London, he was a student, and those two hours in that museum, he says emotionally, defined his life and changed his view of the world. In Suzanne Raes’ documentary, we see him scraping together Vermeers at home and abroad for the largest Vermeer exhibition ever.
What makes a Vermeer a Vermeer is an underlying theme in the film. The green earth he used to paint white skin? No one else did that in the seventeenth century. His play of light and shadow? The miniature world he conjured up, one, two, at most three figures in a corner of a room. Often women. Almost always women.
Vermeer, says Weber, has been anything in the eyes of others. The left-wing artist, because he painted ordinary people. The abstract painter, who focused on color and form, or just storyteller, iconographer. Today, he says, Vermeer is a feminist. The woman painter who stood close to his models and managed to capture their souls.
Don’t let them hear that a few hundred yards away.
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