'Tim's Vermeer': How did Vermeer become such a damn good painter?
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B+] Vermeer you know, but the Tim in Tim's Vermeer you may not, unless you're intimately involved with the history of video-production software. What matters for the documentary by Teller, of (silent) Penn & Teller fame, is that Tim Jenison is a self-made man.
City Paper grade: B+
Vermeer you know, but the Tim in Tim’s Vermeer you may not, unless you’re intimately involved with the history of video-production software. What matters for the documentary by Teller, of (silent) Penn & Teller fame, is that Tim Jenison is a self-made man, a dogged obsessive and something of a genius. So when he becomes convinced that the Dutch master painter Johannes Vermeer must have used some sort of mechanical aid to create his unprecedented, and still unmatched, studies in light and color, he doesn’t do it halfway. He builds an exact replica of the room depicted in Vermeer’s 1662 canvas, “The Music Lesson,” teaching himself woodworking and decoupage along the way, and sets to work, brushstroke by agonizing brushstroke. Have I mentioned that Jenison is not a painter? It’s a common trap, especially among novice documentarians, to fall in love with obsessives regardless of the quality of their obsession. Teller — and Penn, who appears as an on-camera narrator — aren’t nearly skeptical enough about whether Jenison’s ideas have any basis in history; at most, they show that Vermeer could have painted this way, not that he did. But the results are strong and surprising enough that they help to deepen our appreciation of Vermeer rather than turn him from an artistic genius into a mechanical one.
