Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland, Denver, MacMurray and Beck, 1999; 242 pages, $17.50 hardcover. - Review - book review

Art in America, March, 2001 by Gary Schwartz

The errors are not all matters of detail. The writers' shallow knowledge leads them to distort entire realms of Dutch life. In Vreeland's Dutch Republic, one person could muse about another who "sits in an empty church like some Catholic," unaware that Catholics always remained the single largest religious group in the country, with house churches that were never big enough to contain the worshipers. Chevalier's Griet worries in chapter after chapter about the tension between the Catholicism of Vermeer's family and her own "Protestantism." The latter term however did not connote a church, and provided no one in Holland with a religious identity. Griet would have belonged to a congregation that called itself "Christian" and that distinguished itself from other Protestant churches even more emphatically than from the Catholics. One of these subscribed to Remonstrantism, the doctrine professed by Vermeer's patron Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven, who plays a supporting role in Girl with a Pearl Earring. In anxious soliloquies about religious affiliation of a real Dutch Griet, this would certainly have come up.

Indeed, many other issues would have come up that are lacking in the three books. The writers' lack of interest in religious denominations is exceeded by their indifference to two other universal Dutch passions: politics and war. The Eighty Years War (1568-1648) and the French invasion of Holland (1672) do not concern any of their characters, nor do they take sides in the issues that divided the country. Supporters of the Prince of Orange and those of the States-General flew at each other's throats during these years, but not in these books. The Holland of Moggach, Vreeland and Chevalier has a nightmarish quality, with obsessive attention to certain conventional concerns (the price of tulip bulbs is irresistible) and an unreal absence of others.

Writing to Vermeer, a 1999 opera by Louis Andriessen, with a libretto by Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke, is a nightmare of another kind. The production, which I saw in its first run at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, overwhelmed the audience with images, historical references, texts and scenic effects. At each performance, I was told, 5,300 gallons of water were poured out on the singers, running off into a pool surrounding the raised stage. Women and children in baggy-sleeved historical costume were constantly falling into the pool and getting soaked to the skin. I have the feeling that Greenaway was captivated by the opening chapter of Simon Schama's Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987). The director apparently decided that the watery "moral geography" of Holland is what the country is all about. Competing with the water for your attention were the texts of letters projected in long lines across the floor and up a vast screen behind the stage, rolling at a rate that kept you reading in order to follow it; images of paintings by Vermeer that appeared and disappeared on screens above the stage; video sequences of the actors onstage taken from different angles (not live, and different from what they were doing at that moment, inviting critical comparison that you had no time to perform); disaster images of war or fire or flood on the back screen, accompanied by explosions and other not-to-be-ignored sounds; a vast translucent screen that would drop in front of the stage, picking up the projected image of one of the singers or of a detail of action, while the rest of the scene continued behind. Andriessen's music, fraught as it is, never had a chance.