Perhaps you are the type of person who enjoys ruminating on the question of “what is art?” If so, you’ve maybe already enjoyed such films as F for Fake, Exit Through the Gift Shop and My Kid Could Paint That, and gnawed on what they reveal about the curious unconscious calculations we put into valuing art. What to watch next? Well, have I got a film for you.
Directed by Teller (of Penn & Teller fame), and narrated by Penn Jillette (of… oh, you get it), Tim’s Vermeer is many things at once, and none of them the sort of things that usually go together: it’s Mythbusters meets fine art. It’s a conspiracy thriller. It’s a period piece. It’s a puzzle box mystery. It’s a comedy about a truly Quixotic, Sisyphean quest… and, for a particular subset of art aficionados and critics, it is an ugly, maddening insult.
There is a point in art history in the 1600s when paintings shifted to being substantially more photorealistic. It was a massive seismic shift. And, it just so happened to coincide with the availability of optical technology and lenscrafting. You could argue (and many do) that these events are purely coincidental and unrelated. Or, like artist David Hockney or historian Philip Steadman, you could conclude that artists like Vermeer were using tools like the camera obscura and special lenses to aid them in making paintings.
The main problem with that preceding sentence is that its nonsensical. Artists like Vermeer, indeed. Ha! There are no artists like Vermeer. Not then and not now. The man was—literally—unique.
His paintings have a mastery of color and shading and detail unlike anything else outside actual photography. But let’s lean into that comparison—exactly how does his work differ from photography?
You see, in Vermeer’s paintings, objects in the foreground are out of focus. This is not how the human eye works—the eye constantly refocuses so we never notice “depth of field” in our vision, that’s a concept confined to how artificial lenses work.
Then there are the little halos of light that blur off of highlights, or the edges of brightly colored surfaces. These are artifacts you see in crude optical lenses, not human eyesight—yet Vermeer painted them.
Or, more startlingly, Vermeer painted subtle gradations of light that the human eye literally cannot see. This is a biological limit we’re talking about, a fundamental restriction on how well human eyes work. But the gradations exist in the real world, even if we cannot see them—and they can be measured using light meters. And, yup, Vermeer painted them too—light meters can confirm the accurate gradations of light across his canvas, even if human observers cannot properly appreciate them.
Not convinced yet? Should I mention that X-rays of his paintings do not show the usual sketches and underlying layout work that painters usually do to map out their work ahead of time? Or that there are no records of Vermeer ever actually being trained in painting? What about the fact that he was friends with lensmaker Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, who served as executor of Vermeer’s estate?
So here’s the weird thing: add it all up, and you don’t just get that Vermeer used optical tools, somehow (like Hockney and Steadman argue). That doesn’t quite capture the weirdness of Vermeer’s achievement. The best way to sum it up: the only difference between Vermeer’s paintings and actual photographs are that Vermeer’s are painted in oil. Two hundred years before photography was invented. So… huh.
This is where Penn and Teller enter the story. Their pal, a billionaire video engineer and geeky maker Tim Jenison became so convinced that Vermeer’s works were somehow the result of some kind of semi-photographic proto-technology, he set his mind to reverse engineering whatever thingamajig Vermeer must have used. When the magicians got wind of this crazy idea, they insisted on filming it. No reputable movie company wanted anywhere near this nonsense, so they self-financed and shot on video.
There are three key details about what Jenison then proceeded to do which need to be spelled out.
#1: Use only 17th century technology
The whatsit that Jenison built, and which he believes either is or resembles the device Vermeer built, is an elegant thing made only of materials and techniques readily available to someone like Vermeer in the middle 1600s. It’s slender enough to fit in your pocket. If it were sold in an oddities shop, hipsters and steampunks alike would drool over the thing, but probably mistake it for some kind of ancient dental tool.
That, and he ground his own pigments and made his own paint. Because, that’s what Vermeer had to do.
#2. Replicate a Vermeer
Jenison chose The Music Lesson, an absurdly intricate juxtaposition of textures, patterns, and colors. It’s gorgeous. And Jenison set out to make a copy.
But let’s be clear: the premise here is that Jenison thinks he’s worked out a way, perhaps even the way, that a 17th century untrained person could create a perfectly photorealistic painting. So, he can’t just copy Vermeer’s painting. That doesn’t prove a thing. He has to replicate what he claims is Vermeer’s process—and if that results in a copy of the painting, then that’s evidence in support of his claim.
This means he needs to replicate the original setting in which Vermeer painted his painting. He has to create a 21st century replica of the artist’s studio, his models, his props—replicas of stained glass windows, musical instruments, tiles, and rugs… all of it.
And then, having recreated the scene in 3D, set to recreating its 2D copy in oil paint.
#3. Tim Jenison is not an artist
That’s a loaded statement. There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s start with the simplest version: Tim is not a painter. He has no training and has never painted before.
Using his invention (footnote: does it count as an “invention” if all you do is reverse engineer someone else’s invention? And what about if you don’t actually know for sure if that someone else ever actually invented anything, and maybe yours is the only one? Discuss) Sorry, I’ll start that sentence over again: using his “invention,” Jenison managed to create a hand-painted picture of extraordinary beauty and detail the likes of which has not been done in over 300 years. Other artists have done extraordinary things, of course, but no matter their genius, vision, talent, or training, no other artists ever did what Vermeer did.
But this guy did.
If that doesn’t qualify Jenison as an artist—for that matter, an artist of the highest order—what does?
Except of course Jenison doesn’t claim to be an artist. Far from it. As far as he’s concerned, this gizmo and its associated technique simply turns the painter into a human machine. The only thing needed to paint with Vermeer’s technical skill is this gadget and a wellspring of limitless patience. But that’s just to achieve something of Vermeer’s technical ability. But seriously, any schmo can do that already. We call it “photography.” You don’t need a 17th century contraption to gin up a photorealistic image if that’s what you want—just pull your phone out of your pocket and snap a selfie. Done.
What makes Vermeer an artist, according to Jenison, the thing that sets him apart from any schmo snapping a selfie, is his eye for composition. It isn’t his ability to know how to paint, it’s his ability to know what to paint. Jenison the billionaire autodidact tinkerer can perfectly replicate Vermeer’s Music Lesson down to the tiniest brushstroke, but it’s only “art” because Vermeer’s original composition was such a work of beauty, elegance, and balance.
But here’s where the critics—or some of them, at least—get their undies in a bundle. To them, how to paint and what to paint are inextricable. Vermeer’s genius does lie in his singular ability to capture light on canvas in a unique way. To reduce that skill to something base and technological—to turn Vermeer from an artist into a hacker—is to call him a “cheat.” That’s an insult.
Or, to them it is. They hated David Hockney’s and Philip Steadman’s respective books, and now they can hate Tim’s Vermeer even more. Like Penn & Teller’s signature trick, it exposes the mechanics of the magic as something human and earthy. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Penn & Teller’s signature cup and ball routine is still magical and entrancing even when you can see the mechanics of it—even more so, I’d say. I’m unwilling to say that discovering Vermeer’s trick cheapens him in any way.
Far from it—it gives me a new angle by which to admire his genius. I used to think that Vermeer was someone with a supernatural technical skill I couldn’t even fathom—like a god who walked among men. But now I realize that he was a guy who recognized his own human limitations and figured a way to mechanically surpass those limitations. He worked out a way to artificially create that supernatural skill. In a way, that’s even more amazing. Who is more inspirational? Superman or Batman—the hero who was born with supernatural ability, or the one who figured out how to make it?
Think about it—for hundreds of years, literally millions of people have looked at Vermeer’s paintings. Possibly even billions. And many of them have spent lifetimes studying them. Not once in all that time did anyone manage to work out just how he did those amazing things.
That is, until Tim Jenison came along.
Who says Jenison is not an artist?