UTOPIA OF CALM.

VERMEER'S WAGER: SPECULATIONS ON ART HISTORY, THEORY AND ART MUSEUMS

By Ivan Gaskell. London: Reaktion Books. 2000.

[pound]16.95

The book takes a single picture of Johannes Vermeer, Woman Standing at a Virginal, of about 1672, and weaves a series of fascinating and scholarly discussions around the painting and the issues it raises. Gaskell makes the painting, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London, 'the deputy of the world', borrowing a phrase from Emerson. This opens up a multitude of trails which he pursues, occasionally doggedly but always bringing out some illuminating fact or assumption. In his discussion of the after-life of the painting in etchings and, later, photography for instance, he notes that an etching of 1866 alters the woman's eyes from looking directly at the viewer to looking sideways, thus avoiding eye contact. Gaskell suggests that mid-Victorian codes of perception and decorum held that only courtesans met the viewer's gaze directly.

All of Vermeer's paintings are now in institutions; they are very unlikely ever to come on the market. The role of museums, their curators, donors, trustees and visitors are therefore significant in creating the environment in which paintings are viewed. The latter part of the book is devoted to these themes and in particular to the dangerous effect donors and commercialization may bring about in museums, universities and similar bodies which need to treasure a dispassionate stance. Does it matter that a gallery of French paintings at the National Gallery in London is named the 'Yves Saint Laurent Room' or is this the limit to which a commercial label should be allowed to intrude? There are no rules; historically of course many of the great museums of the world carry the name of their benefactor: Tate, Guggenheim, Frick, Getty, Gulbenkian ...

The book is very much what its subtitle states: a set of intellectual speculations on art history, theory and museums. There is - probably deliberately - very little if anything about the painting as an object of sensory stimulation or as a canvas with brush marks. Even the penultimate chapter labelled 'Therapeutics', which compares museums to hospitals as institutions of healing, deals only cursorily with the idea of visual pleasure; it is almost as if paintings could be part of a pharmacopoeia. If words are necessary -- and they are always difficult in relation to art -- I find those spoken by Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, and published in the Radio Times, the more telling: 'At the end of the day I go round the gallery once again, just before the doors close at six. It's a quiet time, and this is when I just enjoy the pictures. If it's been a particularly chaotic day I'll head for the Vermeers. I seem to spend all my time moving very fast in a losing struggle to impose order on chaos, a nd it's wonderfully encouraging to look at the calmness of Vermeer, even if you know you can never achieve it'.