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We read Martin Gladwell’s Blink for my museum studies seminar — a bestseller that focuses on the importance of those inexplicable moments of intinct. In the first chapter, he talks about the Getty Kouros controversy. Curators at the Getty, looking over the Greek statue for months, became convinced of its authenticity and purchased it at great price; yet others, such as Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan, saw it at first glance and simply knew it could not be real. Whether or not the Kouros is a forgery or not remains unknown, but Gladwell argues that those first glace, gut-instinct moments should not be ignored.
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| Attributed to Vermeer, A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Click image for larger view) |
I had a “blink” moment in front of the controversial Vermeer now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I wrote about a few months ago. As I walked through the Italian Renaissance rooms to the Dutch Golden Age galleries, I was completely ready to dismiss the Vermeer as a fake. After all, in reproductions we’d viewed in my seminar, it looked so preposterous: a huge yellow shawl, blank walls, ringlets in her hair and those hands (click the image to the right to view it closeup, and you’ll understand what I mean). But when I walked in to the room, turned the corner, and marched straight up to the little painting, the first thought that popped into my mind was: Wow, it really is a Vermeer.
It took me a good twenty minutes or more in the room — happily, surrounded by almost all of the Met’s authenticated Vermeers for comparison — to put my fingers on exactly why my gut instinct was so positive. The second thought in my mind was when I looked at the ribbons in the figure’s hair. They are painted with such care but at the same time such simplicity — a single pulling of bright red paint, a few daubs of white — that immediately made me think of a very similar detail in the Louvre’s Lacemaker (see gallery below): the red and white threads pooling over the pincushion are painted with just as much care. Interestingly, the ringlet hairstyle I’d originally considered so odd appears in that very painting, too. Moreover, the Lacemaker is about the same size as this intimate, small painting.
