georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

The Detail and the Pan 257Museum) presents—exactly below the word ‘‘description’’—an archipelagoof spaced carmine strokes whose precise mimetic function itwould be difficult to specify. 47Often in Vermeer, zones of folds, gatherings, and crinkles occasionintense representational vacuities of this kind: details of fabric areclouded, metamorphosed—a quasi state—to the point of becoming‘‘de-perspectivized,’’ of existing only in the flatness of their functionas pure color. For example the red stockings, scarcely modulated,worn by the artist in The Art of Painting; or the folds of the robes inChrist in the House of Mary and Martha. In other paintings, gowns withermine trim part to reveal, discreetly, the bellies of pregnant women(as in Woman with a Balance in Washington); and at the precise pointwhere the material is gathered a veritable ‘‘channel’’ of red paintspreads, applied in all its liquidity, as if never meant to dry; this effectis particularly fascinating on the young woman in the Frick Collection;and no less intense, in its very flow, than the meander of bloodsnaking across the veined marble floor in the Allegory of Faith. 48 Finally,in the same order of association between fold and liquidity, wecannot resist thinking of the lips in Vermeer, all those lips that are somany reddish auras, that dilute and literally imbibe the contours oftheir cavities; the Girl with a Red Hat, the Girl with a Flute, both inWashington, and, especially, the Girl with a Pearl Earring in the Mauritshuis.49In a general way, moreover, Vermeer’s treatment of what the Italianscall panni, stuffs, occasions fulgurating self-presentations of paintitself (with a single exception, all of Vermeer’s works are painted oncanvas). Still limiting ourselves to the color red, we remember all ofthe gowns, for example those in The Procuress, in The Glass of Wine,and in The Music Lesson in Buckingham Palace; we remember the largemass of red, in the Frick Young Woman Interrupted at Music, oppositethe glass of wine. 50 As well as all of the tablecloths, carpets, and drapesin the Dresden pictures, and above all in the extraordinary Maid Asleepin New York, where the opacity and the mass of the reds again tendto ‘‘move forward,’’ to tyrannize the represented space. 51Doubtless it is in Girl with a Red Hat (Fig. 18) that the expansiveforce of the local in the global produces the most remarkable effects: