Hello there, DU! Ready for today’s art quiz? It’s “Another Back Story Challenge!”

[CTyankee]

82. Is Rockwell condemning Vermeer or his own American iconography?

Interesting question.

Have you ever read "Vermeer in Bosnia"? The author of this essay is making a different point. Here is a longish pdf of a thinkpiece on it and other interesting questions: http://www.nyu.edu/cas/ewp/bellottostand07.pdf

What I can say is that I feel a sense of peace and order in the mundane nature of Vermeer's street. Not the same with Vermeer's only other outdoor work, View of Delft, which brought Salvador Dali to his knees when he saw it at the Mauritshuis in the Hague (damn near had the same effect on me and later I read that he achieved that effect by mixing sand, and thus tiny granules of glass, in his paint to reflect the ambient light in which the viewer sees it! Charlatan!).

I think an historian would point to the changes in society, the invention of capitalism and the rising middle class, religious tolerance in the Netherlands all gave rise to the genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age of art. My visit to the Netherlands on a barge, docking in the small towns where these artists painted, was a transformative experience and I came as near to a meltdown as I ever had in front of one of Van Gogh's wheat fields with crows in Amsterdam. The culmination of all of the art and the whole ambience of the trip on the little barge was as good as any religious experience...Rockwell can't achieve that but he does express his era in his "dailyness" and (subjectively) his expression of American cultural hegemony in the late 40s and 50s....