Stuck? Yes, you could say that.
I still vividly remember seeing Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat, which I first encountered at the National Gallery of Art, a few days after arriving at our new home on the outskirts of Washington, DC. It was on an impromptu visit to the museum with my mother—mostly, I think, just to kill time before picking up my father from his temporary government workplace, a group of Quonset huts left over from World War II, plopped down on an open space near the Lincoln Memorial and just across Memorial Bridge from our small rental house in Rosslyn, VA. I did not bother at first to read the minimal label identifying artist, title, date. I knew almost nothing about art or museums and, certainly, nothing about Vermeer. I did not know that Vermeer only painted a few dozen pictures, with this painting among his smallest, and that experts (then) were not even sure he painted it. I later learned of Vermeer’s other ravishing, gem-like interiors with figures, but the intimacy of the painting’s small size and the startling intensity of the Girl with the Red Hat remains unique in the history of art, or so I would argue then and now. Who was this mysterious young lady? Where and when did she come from? What was she about to tell me?
Vermeer’s “lady” looked into my forlorn soul. With those light-flecked, thinly parted red lips and with her liquid eyes locked into my startled gaze, she whispered, “hello.” I have no means to express what was then a heart-pounding sense of overwhelming recognition; it has stayed with me ever since. How moved and smitten I was in that moment and so remain even now. Sure, I have had countless “affairs” with other fondly remembered artworks, but this was my first love and she remains my favorite work of art in any medium that I have since encountered, whether in great museums, or blue-chip commercial galleries, acclaimed private collections, or even those lecture halls where slides illuminated by the dark, curator princes of art history spoke of their own favorite artworks.
We had newly arrived in Washington and I was about to begin high school in Virginia. In my fragile adolescent sense of physical and psychological uprooting—a young, wide-eyed stranger in this strange new white city of stone buildings and marble monuments—it may have come down to needing a friend, any friend, but especially a girl—silent or not, near or far, real or imaginary—to notice me; a mere glance would suffice. Summer that year had begun with my sudden departure from junior high school friends in a small-town rural suburb of Kansas City, cut short by an extended stay in my uncle’s Santa Clara, California, garage, while my mother visited her dying mother. A neighbor’s stray cat wandered that first night onto my makeshift bed in the garage and, by morning, decided to die—a late night, black and white Boris Karloff horror movie in the making (movies I absolutely adored every Saturday night where local emcee, “Gregory Graves” presided during my pre-teen years in Overland Park, KS). And, after a month or so fending off my cousins’ menagerie of dogs, guinea pigs, and an especially menacing box turtle, and to free up space for other arriving relatives, I was shipped off to my grandparents’ house in Florida where cleaning their elderly neighbor’s swimming pool was my new, unpaid summer job (the neighbors let me swim, when I finished cleaning). I knew no one my own age (just turned fifteen) that summer and was not really certain where my parents had disappeared to after leaving California when they met me at National Airport that hot August day in DC.
In my now sixty-plus years of looking closely at works of art, this young “lady”—with her alluring, surprised, about to say something mouth, has not aged a day. She remains impossibly remote and stunningly enigmatic—beguiling, she was my new best “friend” whom I imagined also to be from some foreign, distant place; we weren’t, for sure, in Kansas, anymore. She already knew about the coursing emotions of displacement, isolation, and loneliness we shared.
Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat is not conventionally beautiful. Flat cheekbones, they say. It was the tender, sweet way she was painted—the liquid eyes, moist lips, the varied textures, especially the softness of her feathered red hat that seems to dissolve into the dusky tapestry behind her. It was the life within the flesh-flecked red of her cheeks and the quietly rustling blue silk wrap—the deep and varied reds of her hat, the shifting tones and ridges of her drapery, and that flash of a white cravat igniting and releasing her face from shadowy aloofness—above all, it was the slight turn of her head to glance at me. At me? Youth and reserve, sensual tenderness and timeless seduction. Irresistible. Teenage hormones, I am certain, had much to do with it. And, then, there has always been this lingering consciousness of her telling me that “practical” studies in school, or any other interest in studying or training for the real world would be utterly pointless, a fatal distraction—her fatal attraction—was what really mattered. An adolescent’s first travels from childhood—second star on the left, straight on ‘til morning—to worlds inhabited by only this lady and me. She is not the “other” woman; she is the woman, still and always with me. Stuck? She moved me more than any object before or since in my peripatetic, wandering way with art; she un-stuck me. She was the sole occupant in my first museum, my first encounter with the wonder of the human heart, head and hand conspiring to make such an impossibly special, perfect thing.
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat, oil on panel, 9 x 7 1/16 in., c.1669, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.