“He talks but he has nothing to sell.” – Edwin Denby, “Dance Criticism,” 1949

Early last Thursday, we received the regrettable news that the poet, teacher, and art critic Bill Berkson had suddenly passed away. Having miraculously recovered from a few serious health setbacks over the past decade, including a double lung transplant, Berkson succumbed to a heart attack. Over the weekend, talking with just a few of his close friends, so many were impressed by his resilience and youthful spirit specifically during this comeback. He would often look very well again, gaining back some of the weight he’d lost, and in general still as sharp and as uniquely vivacious as ever. As painter and friend Tom Burckhardt shared in an email message, “it was wonderful to see his great second act after almost dying from emphysema about 10 years ago.” Over the past few days, many artists and writers have been mourning his death and celebrating his life. A born New Yorker and long-time California resident, there will doubtlessly be celebrations on both coasts in the coming months.

As Bill’s contemporary and close friend the poet and art critic John Ashbery has pointed out, “like his friend Frank O’Hara, Bill Berkson writes about his friends.” This is also absolutely true of both his poetry and a lot of his critical prose. Berkson contributed to and was a corresponding editor for Art in America, was a contributor and poetry editor for artcritical, a contributor to Artnews, Modern Painters, and many other publications. Since his early twenties, Berkson had surrounded himself with visual artists and poets, often collaborating with both. In his lifetime he wrote about a dozen books in collaboration with visual artists and poets, many of which remain in print. His most recent publication, Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016) is a book of his travels through Russia collected in an Apica model notebook. An entirely Berkson-dedicated publication, For Bill, ANYTHING: Images and Text for Bill Berkson was recently published by Pressed Wafer, chalk-full of writing and visual works from 75 contributors, musing on Berkson’s work and life, including collaborations with some of his friends like Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Bernadette Mayer, and many others.

Berkson was always surrounded by and making new friends. It didn’t matter how young or old you were: with him status went out the window. Burckhardt, who is the son of Berkson’s close friend and collaborator, the filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, remembers that Berkson’s “depth of friendship with artists and writers was amazing. Despite this he never came off as egotistical or self important. I had had some passing conversation with him regarding David Park. A few months later he was writing an article for Art in America on Park and asked me for a quote on my observation on how Park used a very specific (and “incorrect “) color for the eye area of a figure but delivered with a loose ham-fisted panache and how it still convinced. I was thrilled to end up quoted in the article as a barely 20-something artist.”

At a reading in San Francisco’s Alley Cat Books art gallery this past weekend, the poet Norma Cole, a close friend of Berkson’s, gave a reading and a dedication, urging Berkson via one of her lovely closing poems: “So keep on/ Proposing paradise”. Cole also gave fond remembrances, particularly of Berkson’s liveliness and joviality just one night before his passing. Wednesday night at the release party for his wife the curator Constance Lewallen’s new catalogue on conceptual artist David Ireland titled 500 Capp Street, Berkson shared a delightful exchange he had with the young children he taught poetry, wherein one of the kids reported, after the group was asked “what are letters made of?”, so imaginatively shouted out “microbes!” The answer of course, in keeping with Berkson’s siding with clarity, his base of practicality which enabled further wild imaginings, “sound,” — going always for an understanding of how and why this or that works.

Another friend of Berkson’s was at the Cole reading — artist Léonie Guyer, who collaborated with Berkson for the book Not an Exit, (2011) went out of her way to share an anecdote with me from Lewallen’s book release party, when he was in cheerful form, talking excitedly about poetry, jazz, and visual art. Said Guyer, “I was reluctant to come out for the reading, knowing it would be so strange and terribly sad to be amongst the poets without Bill. But I was grateful to be there, to be there for Norma, whose reading moved me so deeply. It’s incredible to think just one week before, I was at Bill’s reading — never dreaming it would be the last one he gave.” Guyer shared perhaps one of the last of Berkson’s enchanting remarks about his favorite artists and the phenomena that caused him to write about them with the charm that he did. Berkson commented that “it was De Kooning who said (in a dialogue with Harold Rosenberg) of Mondrian: Where the lines cross they make a little light.” Guyer concluded by saying, “Every time I was with Bill I learned something special. Every moment luminous.”

As a dedicated reader of Berkson’s writings, the unmistakable trait of both his prose and his poetry is his sense of clarity and his use of surprise — a rare and incredibly satisfying combination when it comes to any expressive medium. You can never predict where his writing is going to take you; his is always insightful, relatable, with hints of spontaneity that never went for weird. An unquestionably unique poet, Berkson’s writing bears characteristics of a world traveler with a breadth of affinity and knowledge. As his friend Aaron Simon, a poet from the younger generation of his poet friends tells it, “Bill had such diverse taste. He liked everything from Beethoven to Miles Davis to Cat Power, and he liked poets as seemingly antithetical as Auden and Amiri Baraka.” One is also hard pressed to compare him to any other writers. Berkson had a vast frame of reference and understanding with which he could passionately and humorously ruminate, or incisively lecture, depending on the assignment. His work is the record of a rare sensibility that blends the intellect of a scholar, the imagination of an artist, the experience of a traveler, the gusto of the impresario, and the heart of a hero.

Berkson saw himself as more or less “unprincipled” in terms of remaining as unconventional as possible — to arrive, as it were, to any object or situation “as fresh as possible,” as he remarked to Charles Bernstein in 2014. It was this fresh approach that gave Berkson the kind of attentive eye to bring unique and memorable things to his criticism, and the power of his intellectual mind that could render his tellings in such varied and effective ways. Communicating what’s being perceived was job #1 for Berkson. And it wasn’t all about what he likes. “I am an amateur” he told a California College of Arts class in 2009, “in the sense of a lover of art when it is lovable.”

Berkson has commented on his being aware of the ethics of a writer, and the humaneness in his writing comes from his distinctive tone and the fact that you can trust what he is telling you. Like a confidante, his writing can be friendly but also will tell you the tough thing you might need to hear which others might not say. He asked for “more life” out of art, and he inspired more life in people by virtue of who he was. Bill lived, as his good friend Frank O’Hara asked of himself as well, “as variously as possible” in his writing and in the world.

The post Living As Variously As Possible: Bill Berkson, 1939-2016 appeared first on artcritical.

PAUL MAZIAR: Take us back to Buffalo in 2001 when Cuneiform Press began. As I understand it Robert Creeley, a key influence on your work, was there.

KYLE SCHLESINGER: Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Bob was and continues to be a huge influence on me on so many levels: the art of collaboration, poetry, poetics, grace, generosity, and a general ease of movement and insistent curiosity towards the world that is absolutely singular. He was the busiest guy in town, but when you sat down to talk he didn’t miss a beat, remembered everything, which taught me a lot about presence, giving your attention to whatever’s happening on a particular occasion.

Just before I left for Buffalo I had a stint teaching high school English in a mill town in northern Rhode Island. I was fine with the work, but a terrible disciplinarian; he suggested that I come up to Buffalo, get an advanced degree, and try teaching college, which is exactly what I’m doing now, 15 years later and a little bit grayer.

I started Cuneiform with the intention of publishing experimental work by emerging poets — very simple chapbooks by people like Patrick Durgin, whose Color Music (2002) has, to my mind, totally held up over the years. His wife’s brother made some punk collages on a photocopier and we printed the images on a Print Gocco, a little silkscreen kit that was briefly big in Japan. I’d throw a proof in Patrick’s mailbox at night, he’d make any corrections after dinner, then I’d go back to the press, make changes, and repeat for the next page.

I love the low-fi action that comes out of your printshop. The punk show posters you recently did look great. I’ve also seen Cuneiform’s phenomenal book by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, your call for musicians’ manuscripts for Cuneiform, and heard that you’re moving into a camper on a California beach, to surf and write a book about Bill Callahan.

The Sheff book is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done with Cuneiform. I emailed him, saying that I think his essays on music are the best since Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and that I’d like to collect them as a book.

He was very busy, but it occurred to me that books don’t always have to be published in large editions, that, as with book artists, sometimes just a copy or two can do the trick, that sometimes you make a book just because you want it to exist. So I tracked down every essay I could find, started copy-editing and fact-checking just like I would any other Cuneiform book, designed it, got it printed and bound by hand, the whole nine yards, sent him a copy and kept one for myself. Took about a year, a ridiculous amount of work, but it turned out perfect since many Okkervil River songs are about keeping it real, and the virtues of failing in a world with a conservative notion of success. That’s the first in this music series and others will follow, though they’ll be printed in standard editions, distributed properly, etc.

This failure virtue is part of what charms me about poets like Alfred Starr Hamilton. It seems to be something that we don’t find so often these days, do you agree? For instance, you took me to that Katherine Bradford exhibition in Portland, at Adams and Ollman; we were both pretty tickled by the show.

Every artist I talk to is in the same boat: how to make a living and make the art they want to make. Not just in the United States, but Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and so on. Everyone’s wondering, maybe even a little nervous, how life can be more meaningful, but no one can say why… Or can they? The MFA and the National Endowment for the Arts killed art in America, which is why I can say that I feel a strong sense of connection to various artists of the last 40 years or so.

Lou Reed said something like, “There’s a door, and behind that door, is everyone you’ve ever wanted to meet. Then the door opens, and you stand there wondering, knowing that once the door closes, you can’t get out again.” And that’s the danger of monetary success, to my mind. Once you write a “Paul Maziar poem” you can’t write that poem again. Goodbye, Paul. The surplus of art versus the demand for art is at an all-time low, which leads us to an interesting question: Why do you want to do what you do when there’s really no social need or viable economic gain to be had? Is it personal happiness? I’m on board with that; I want everyone to do exactly what they want to do every day, all the time, but I also think that’s the real question we all must ask of ourselves, not specifically related to the day-in/day-out fact of our lives, but taking ourselves, as such, out of the equation.

I know that could sound pessimistic or jaded, but I don’t mean it to come across that way at all; it’s actually quite the opposite. The artist George Herms said, in a recent lecture I attended, “The single most important fact of my existence is that the population of the Earth has doubled since my birth.” I take the sentiment seriously, or as William Carlos Williams once remarked, “An empty space is the sign of a poor economy.” We’ve got a revolution going on, one with more talent and underutilized artistic resources than ever before. So let’s storm the fucking gates and build a world we want to live in, with history close to the heart.

I was charmed by that Creeley anecdote in The Art of Collaboration (Cuneiform, 2015), where he, having seen your letterpress printshop digs, asks why you haven’t gone all-digital, adding “If we had the internet in the fifties when we were editing the Black Mountain Review, we would never have done things this way.” It’s worth pointing out that you’re no extreme model-acolyte (you didn’t follow his line of thinking comme ça). Do you view art online or strictly in museums and galleries?

I keep a foot in both worlds. I teach classes on New Media Theory for a living, so I’m always reading up on the latest advances in technology. I think it’s something artists need to be aware of on multiple levels, but in terms of my personal practice, the more unplugged I am, the happier I am. It would never occur to me to look at art that has been reproduced digitally, nor am I partial to computer-generated art. On a recent trip to New York, I was happy to see a return to painting in the galleries I visited; no more projectors and flat-screen installations, and that’s something of a relief to me. I feel fortunate to have grown up with a typewriter and records, moved to CDs and word processors, and now I have a computer I use as strategically as possible. Mostly you’ll find me reading books, listening to records, and visiting as many artists in their studios and galleries as possible. The all-consuming pendulum of the digital age has hit its apex, at least in the art world, and for people younger than myself in particular: The tangible, sensual, real-time experience of creation is making a major comeback. The desire to get one’s hands dirty is an inexplicable fact of being.

How does your digital music listening experience stack up to your vinyl collection?

Being very much aware of the havoc corporations like Spotify have inflicted on the music industry, I’m adamant about the listener’s responsibility to support musicians because their livelihood is at risk. Needless to say, were so many musicians any less committed to their practice, we would live in a world of silence, barring only the most mainstream pop celebrities.

That said, I have a Spotify account and use it regularly to hear sounds I’ve never heard before; in that sense, it’s a practical tool to have. But if I like something, I’ll buy a ticket to the show, a record or two at my local shop or directly from the musician. It’s actually rather shocking, and saddening, to realize how popular one has to be to make a sustainable wage as a musician. If everyone at a concert threw in $10 into a tip jar, then that musician who just entertained you for a few hours might not have to get up the next morning to mow someone’s lawn or mop the floor of a brewery.

In 2006, Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer published What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985. What’s your idea of a good time?

Exactly.

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The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

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the review panel march 2012

Bill Berkson, Will Heinrich and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to discuss the Whitney Biennial 2012.

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Along with Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara (who was his great friend) and John Ashbery, Bill Berkson is a poet who writes art criticism. He writes about his painter friends, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, and also about Chardin, Cézanne, Piero della Francesca, Hans Hofmann, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers and Vermeer. And about the writings of W. H. Auden, Walter Benjamin, Ted Berrigan, Tim Clark, Dante, Edwin Denby, Kenneth Koch, Carter Ratcliff, James Schuyler, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. Berkson is a good list-maker:”Frank O’Hara was born in 1926, a good year for births, it turns out: Marilyn Monroe, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Wallace Berman, Joan Mitchell, Fidel Castro, Tony Bennett, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Michel Foucault, Morton Feldman . . . Pretty good for openers, no? Doubtless, there are more.” (p. 77)

This marvelous Baktinian exercise in dialogic exchange, which includes generous excerpts from Berkson’s own poetry, and art writing, is compulsively quotable. “Artists you know as friends and heroes and teachers die, you miss their company, and what compensation there is, larger enough to matter, arrives in the form of a wider, deeper—larger than life, one would almost venture to say—sense of their work, what it amounts to, where they took it, and how increasingly distinct as well as necessary it feels to be.” (p.109)

Who is being addressed? You, the reader? But what then is sudden about this so carefully crafted address?

Lecture two, “Travels with Guston” is close up commentary, a series of word paintings, a prelude to a gallery walk-through, about one of his favorite artists. If this be not I/The Studio shows that “Guston didn’t switch styles, there isn’t that much style to go around.” (p.26) Attar “has been famous for its beauty for so long. And you know how that can sort of put things out to pasture” (27). The painting, he adds shows why “Guston has nothing to do with Monet, but maybe more to do with Turner. But he preferred to speak of Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt . . .” (p.27) And of Shoe (Cellar) Berkson writes: “You have those crazy shoes that have been everywhere else, clomping around. Now they’ve arrived sole-first, here” (28). Because the book contains no illustrations, inevitably one needs to ponder his phrases, whose relation to the paintings feels both oddly elliptical and very precise.  “You can ponder these Gustons, or you can recognize how true, see the humor, and let them pass. But not dispose of. Curiosity isn’t really ponderous. These pictures are not the kind to let your mind go off on tangents. They really want you to stay and talk.” (p.33)

Emphatically not art history, this certainly isn’t normal art criticism. No one else, except maybe Adrian Stokes, whom Berkson loves to quote, writes even a little like this.

Art writing is a strange sort of creative literature. Within the commercial art world, it is a comically marginal activity. But doing it well is oddly difficult, as every editor knows.  And so it is surprising that there are very few really good art writers. When we praise Diderot, Pater, Adrian Stokes, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto, we acknowledge that whatever our disagreements with their tastes, they are grand writers. Berkson belongs in their company. Do you think I exaggerate? Well!, we art writers are much given to hyperbole. And so read for yourself and tell me if I am correct.  Koch’s conception of poetry, Berkson writes, “made me see not just poetry but the world in and outside poetry differently.” (p.94-5)

Sudden Address will, I think, do the same for you. Tell me if I am wrong.

Bill Berkson, Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006. New York: Cuneiform Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-9827926-0-5. 109 pages. $14.95

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Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid
September 10 to November 29, 2009
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window  (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures.

Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties. *

Leaning gently into her task, this astonishing barrel of a woman shifts her weight away from the splendid, though nowise pristine, white wall, lips slightly parted in a smile as the earthenware pitcher releases a white skein from its rim. That smile holds its secret, murmuring, at one with the abundant presence it seems key to. Liedtke says the woman’s brawn and the vertically fluted folds of her skirt render her “like a caryatid,” although caryatids don’t bend or lean — but it’s true that, in terms of construction, the maid keeps Vermeer’s pictorial architecture aloft. The whole scene centers, subtly teetering, on her waist, and radiates. Hers is a type of big, blunt form we know in different guises and moods from the peasant women of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Piero della Francesca’sSinigallia Madonna and Mary Magdalen to Manet’s barmaid at the Folies-Bergère and de Kooning’sWoman I. No doubt encouraged by Northern-realist modes extending from Vermeer’s great precursor Jan van Eyck, Piero’s Sinigallia panel bears a special relation, with its slice of sun on bare wall and, in the forward chamber, (Piero’s only domestic scene) the hugely commanding frontal mass of mother and child.

Vermeer’s maid appears in the middle distance in the guise of some sort of lunar blessing. She is strength and help, appetite and caution, warmth and removal, modesty and intercession, decorum, daydream and delight, calm and a subtle shade of perturbation. (In no way is she about careless sex – no matter how many corollaries to that effect women of her station may have in the iconography of her time.)  It isn’t much of a stretch to align her activity as a mirror to the painter’s own, as he deposits colors onto a surface that then erupts with otherworldly incandescence.

It’s fascinating how at ease with one another, formally and then some, the maid and the little kitchen, with all its material life, can be, and at the same time how much implied motion the painting holds. Varieties of shape — domes, globs, granules, cylinders, perpendiculars and slots — refract one another, all of them spread at levels on or above a simple reddish brown floor. The hanging basket takes its angle from the maid, the pail from her pitcher; the two geometric flats of window and picture frame are elaborated in the foot warmer’s perforated box and the tabletop’s odd rhomboid.  There sly Mozartean touches, tricks like trompe-l’oeil nails and vacant nail holes, the popcorn-like pointillé breadcrumbs, the vaguely messy floor, and the incongruity of the line of tiles that forms a kind of predella – Cupid and bow, a traveler with his staff and two others less legible, like animation figures. The milk pour and a rectangular bit of unfiltered glare where a segment of window glass is missing — equivalents in plain whiteness — sustain and refresh. A third major white makes the sunlit sections of the linen cap, veering back in the air like a prow, while the far wall blushes with shadows, variegated. White calls out the song, and other brightnesses  respond in the artist’s preferred lead-tin yellow range. As ever, Vermeer’s infusion of sunlight galvanizes an atmosphere charged with implied, recombinant meanings. (“Deeds of light” said Goethe, perhaps with Vermeer in mind; and Liedtke himself ventures the thought that, beyond the visible fact, it is “as if meaning not milk were being poured from one vessel to another.”)

Most Vermeers have some forward, liminal impedence, a bulwark like a table, curtain or chair, to keep us at some remove, discretely parallel to the world his people occupy. Here, to preserve the discretion of the figure’s placement, it is the lead edge of the table, its coverings piled with still-life elements, leaving, in this instance, the whole of the woman’s frame still half open to view. As usual, too, in this pageant of particulars, the paint inspected up close is gruesome. The maid’s head looks uncomfortably mottled, the plumb line of milk a gloppy paste. At only a little distance, though, such details resolve: the head resumes its formal dignity and the milk streams (viz., James Schuyler’s line “Trembling, milk is coming into its own”) like the average sacrament it is assumed to be.

As she tends to these things, the maid and her effects are revealed as elements in the mythology Vermeer contrived for himself, out of what urgency we haven’t a clue. (The seventeenth century produced flurries of such wanton mythmaking – Poussin’s landscape allegories, among them.) So many details and their gists are left meaningfully uncertain. Does the maid, as old songs go, wear her apron high?  (Probably not.) What is that winged reflection in the shiny pail? (It’s hard not to see it as a sampling of Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch, itself long taken as a prime source for Vermeer’s technique.) For his part, Liedtke, who also wrote the most recent monograph on Vermeer, means to keep our understanding of Vermeer’s genius (he concedes it is such) and its topicalities well within what he calls “the Dutch field.” Understanding Vermeer means primarily understanding how he developed his mode of precision painting amidst the givens of art and life in the southern Netherlands of his time. Set on rescuing Vermeer from a century and half of esthetic flightiness of the sort generated by interloping enthusiasts, most of them writers from outside Holland, Liedtke wants him safely back in the professional culture that great Vermeers leave far behind. This is fine as long as it doesn’t exclude other, perhaps less demonstrable but no less real, forces at work in the pictures.

Liedtke limits his account of Vermeer’s milieu to that of the painters: no changeable Dutch microclimates (from whence the unreliable, by turns clouded-over, then suddenly amazing effects of the sun); no literature beside the lewd tavern rhymes (meaning no Descartes, whose “natural light of the mind” seems ever applicable, or Spinoza, who once remarked on the monstrous look of a woman’s beautiful hand when viewed under a lens); no furtive Catholic liturgy or Neo-Platonist whispers. Of course Vermeer was well grounded, and so are his pictures, which is literally the basis of their sublimities. And yes, anything one says in trying to account for the ultimate Vermeer experience is likely to be too much, but not to try is just as vain, because ultimately it is the only thing worth saying. The Met’s wall texts would have us see each of The Milkmaid’s attributes as a sign limited to one intensely local connotation, a Dutch in-joke projected by the doggerel, riddles and other oddments for which, everything else about him insists, Vermeer would have had little patience except that he saw how to transmute them, as his elevated patronage may have demanded, into the idiom of the spheres.

Vermeer was something of a visitor. It could be said that, sincerely devout as he may well have been, he envisioned humankind as specially designed to enter heaven, and made a kind of heaven analogous to that insight within the method of his art. How he raised the stakes of the painting culture he was given to work with can be explained, as Liedtke is wont to do, by itemizing his modifications of the various motifs and technical devices of other artists around him. But accounting for the impact of what he did is something else. He surmounted the low-style specificity of genre painting and Northern realism’s tendency to over-describe and stop the flow of paint and pictorial fluency altogether. Vermeer styled his interior views as purposefully as Rembrandt, but without the stagey folderol, inclined as he was (and Rembrandt wasn’t) toward an extra dose of idealization. Virtuosity is the least of him. Together with memory and invention (and with or without mechanical aids), direct observation of models arranged in a room went into sketching out a rudimentary image. This is realism based on immersion in the contemporary world but heightened beyond the burghers’ commonplace envisioning. More importantly, the pictures argue for an understanding of the sacred and profane as facing terms, converging, as one looks, with such intensity that each becomes more fully illuminated.

* Aside from wall texts accompanying the exhibition, Watler Liedtke’s recent writings on Vermeer include The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009, and Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, Ludion, 2008

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Bill Berkson, Bridget Goodbody and Robert C Morgan joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Vincent Fecteau, Alex Katz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Yigal Ozeri.

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