1999年から2006年まで、仕事で海外（欧州、アメリカ）によく出かけた折に、Vermeerの絵を観るために、美術館を巡った。30数点といわれる作品の8割位は、実物を鑑賞したが、ドレスデンだったかの美術館の片隅の目に付かない場所に展示されて、”おやっ”と思ったこともあった。
そして、真珠飾りの少女は、京都の美術館まで、新幹線でいったものだが、充分に価値のある、美術鑑賞旅行だった。
Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (1632 ? December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. As Koning points out: "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women".
Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries.In the 19th century Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, although only thirty-four paintings are universally attributed to him today.Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
ニューヨークに出張した折だと思うが、Edward Hopper「ナイトホーク」の絵が好きになり、彼の作品を探して、歩いた記憶がある。好きな画家である。
Hopper, Edward (1882-1967). American painter, active mainly in New York.
He trained under Robert Henri, 1900-06, and between 1906 and 1910 made three trips to Europe, though these had little influence on his style. Hopper exhibited at the Armoury Show in 1913, but from then until 1923 he abandoned painting, earning his living by commercial illustration. Thereafter, however, he gained widespread recognition as a central exponent of American Scene painting, expressing the loneliness, vacuity, and stagnation of town life. Yet Hopper remained always an individualist: `I don't think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I'm trying to paint myself.'
Paintings such as Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942) convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by the presence of anonymous, non-communicating figures. But of this picture Hopper said: `I didn't see it as particularly lonely... Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.' Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings Hopper often exerts a powerful psychological impact -- distantly akin to that made by the Metaphysical painter de Chirico; but while de Chirico's effect was obtained by making the unreal seem real, Hopper's was rooted in the presentation of the familiar and concrete.
Self-Portrait
1925-30 (110 Kb); Oil on canvas, 25 1/16 x 20 3/8 in; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
American scene painting
Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling, alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a Hopper picture appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art, perhaps an expression of the sense of human hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Edward Hopper has something of the lonely gravity peculiar to Thomas Eakins, a courageous fidelity to life as he feels it to be. He also shares Winslow Homer's power to recall the feel of things. For Hopper, this feel is insistently low-key and ruminative. He shows the modern world unflinchingly; even its gaieties are gently mournful, echoing the disillusionment that swept across the country after the start of the Great Depression in 1929. Cape Cod Evening (1939; 77 x 102 cm (30 1/4 x 40 in)) should be idyllic, and in a way it is. The couple enjoy the evening sunshine outside their home, yet they are a couple only technically and the enjoyment is wholly passive as both are isolated and introspective in their reveries. Their house is closed to intimacy, the door firmly shut and the windows covered. The dog is the only alert creature, but even it turns away from the house. The thick, sinister trees tap on the window panes, but there will be no answer.
われわれはどこから来たのか。われわれは何であるのか。われわれはどこへ行くのか。
ゴーギャン(1848~1903）の絵を思い出すまでもなく、「過去、現在、未来」という時間はなんであるか、どうとらえるか、どう考えるのか、ということであるが。。。
不十分ながらも（その意味は、3から6編は抄訳版にたよった）、なんとしても読んでみたかった、読まなければならなかったプルースト(1871~1922)の「失われた時を求めて」(1913~1927)を読んでみて、「時間」「時」は何であるかを、思わざるを得ない。
時間は、過去から未来に流れているのか、もしそうであっても、過去はすぎさってしまい、手のつけようもない事実として残るものなのか、そうではなく私の、私たちの意識の中に過去が存在して、その中で変化をする、過去は変えられるものだ、つねに変化をしていて、「歴史」とも関連するがけっして決まったもの、ことではないこと、ともいえるし、そうなんだろう。今があるから、過去がある、いわゆる「いま、ここに」の考え、意識、感覚が過去をつないでいる、「いま」と融合して、はじめて「過去」が生きる、生きている、「今」の意識がなければ、「過去」の事実は存在しないのだから。。。
ベルグソン(1895~1941）の時間の哲学、ハイデッカー(1889～1976)の「存在と時間」、そしてホワイトヘッド(1861~1947)の「過程と実在」をこれから読んでいくことになるが、このブログに流れる「時間」がある意味では私の「回答・定義」であることを記して、今日はおしまいとする。。。次に続く。。。