Close to Vermeer: The Next Best Thing to Being There

By Liz Braun

Rating: A

An important exhibit of 28 works by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer opened at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in February and sold out immediately — all 450,000 available tickets.

What it took to put together one of the most highly acclaimed exhibits ever on the art world calendar is captured in Close to Vermeer, a documentary brimming with passion, intrigue, history and beauty from director Suzanne Raes.

Close to Vermeer involves art historians from all over the planet, but keeps as its main focus Dr. Gregor Weber, the Vermeer expert who co-curated the Rijksmuseum exhibit (with Pieter Roelofs) and through whose eyes we see the show take shape.

Weber says early in the film that he was a schoolboy in London when he first saw a painting by Vermeer, an experience that made him faint. More than once in Close to Vermeer, Weber attempts to talk about the paintings and his own personal involvement with the work but is overcome by emotion and rendered speechless.

Later in the film, another expert weeps when he remembers the first time he laid eyes on a Vermeer in Berlin. These responses make perfect sense to anyone lucky enough to have had the dumbfounding experience of being in the same room as a Vermeer.

Various researchers, curators and academics appear in Close to Vermeer to talk about everything from light and shade to the history of the painter himself and the various ways differing generations interpret his work.

Very little is actually known about the so-called Sphinx of Delft. Vermeer died at 43 and left zero images of himself, unlike his contemporary Rembrandt, who painted some 80 self-portraits. No one knows how or where Vermeer learned to paint, or with whom, or if he taught others, questions that come up as the fate of a couple of contested paintings is decided.

Watching American and European academics duke it out as to whether or not Girl with A Flute or Young Woman Seated at a Virginal were painted by Vermeer constitute some of the best moments in the documentary. The scholarship is amazing.

The competitiveness and infighting are politely dressed and comical to watch; the skirmish over Girl With A Flute — the Dutch say it’s a Vermeer, the Americans say it is not — probably won more press for the exhibit than anything else that was written about it.

Close to Vermeer. Directed by Suzanne Raes. Featuring Dr. Gregor Weber, Jonathan Janson, and Abbie Vandivere. Playing at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema June 2; home video July 11.