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A Magical Tour of 'Vermeer' Mystery


"Tim's Vermeer," a fascinating documentary by the comic magicians Penn & Teller, has a way of arousing passionate feelings while provoking fresh ideas about the porous border between technology and art.

The film was produced by Penn Jillette and directed by Teller in his feature debut. It's serious in purpose, an inquiry into how the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was able to achieve his mysteriously dense, almost photorealistic detail—seemingly suffused with an inner glow—long before the invention of photography. But the scholarship is enlivened, sometimes hilariously, by showmanship. At certain points the inquiry takes on the trappings of an elaborate magic trick performed by the movie's guru and genial star, a computer-graphics virtuoso, video-software inventor and multimillionaire tinkerer named Tim Jenison.

With nothing up his sleeves ("I'm not a painter," he keeps telling us), Mr. Jenison demonstrates how the 17th-century Dutch master might have gone about creating his singular scenes (with mirrors, as befits a magician of any century, plus lenses that were widely available in the Holland of that time). He does so by using elegantly simple technology that Vermeer might have used—the key word is might—to paint his own version of "The Music Lesson," a beloved masterpiece by one of the most revered figures in the pantheon of Western culture. No connoisseur would mistake Mr. Jenison's Vermeer for the real thing, but his handiwork makes a strong case for the ingenious speculations that informed his amateur effort.

This isn't the first time someone has suggested that Vermeer employed optical tools along with his brushes, pigments and canvas. More than a decade ago the contemporary painter and photographer David Hockney, among others, proposed that many of the Old Masters, including Vermeer, used a camera obscura—essentially a big pinhole camera—fitted with a lens to focus images of their subjects on canvas, then traced the outlines before filling in the details. But Mr. Jenison carries the proposition much further. His method involves a 45-degree-angle mirror, not much larger than the kind used by dentists, on a movable stand. Positioned between projected image and canvas, the comparator mirror, as he calls it, allows him to duplicate colors, as well as outlines and details, in one small area after another. This is bound to sound abstruse in the telling, but it's perfectly clear in the showing, and only the beginning of a process that qualifies Mr. Jenison as a New Master of obsessive-compulsive devotion.

That's because of the lengths he eventually goes to during eight years of study, preparation and execution. He doesn't copy from the original, with its daylight-bright room in which a young woman stands at a harpsichord, her male teacher alongside her. That would have been impossible in any case, since Queen Elizabeth II has "The Music Lesson" under protective custody in Buckingham Palace. Instead, he spends 213 days building a full-scale replica of that venerable room, and its contents, in his warehouse in San Antonio. (The process is considerably compressed in a film that runs 80 minutes.)

At the same time, he learns to mix pigments as the artist would have done, and makes his own lenses. Then, with the help of his trusty mirror, he spends another 130 days reproducing projected images of the replica on canvas, area by area, detail by painstaking detail. "It's possible," Mr. Jenison says, that Vermeer "was more of an experimenter, more of a tinkerer and more of a geek, and in that way I feel a kinship with him. Because I'm a computer-graphics guy, and we use technology to make beautiful images."

The experiment is spellbinding, though some of the commentary is opaque, or at least incomplete. We are told, for example, that the human retina's limited bandwidth would have made it impossible for Vermeer to capture the gradations of certain areas of his canvas without optical aids. How come? The areas in question don't look unusual, and fine artists capture extraordinary nuance as a matter of course. There's an odd, though perhaps inadvertent, omission in a key scene when the computer-graphics-guy-turned-painter shows Mr. Hockney his finished faux-Vermeer, and the equipment he used to paint it. Mr. Hockney is greatly impressed by the accomplishment: "I think it might disturb quite a lot of people," he says with wry pleasure. But we never see Mr. Hockney being told about, let alone reacting to, the crucial role of the angled mirror. And the film could have done without Mr. Jillette's enthusiastic overstatement—showmanship eclipsing scholarship—that "my friend Tim painted a Vermeer in a warehouse in San Antonio. He painted a Vermeer."

No, he didn't. He painted a painting that demonstrated a kind of proprietary hardware Vermeer might have used. Still, the enterprise was disturbing enough for friends I took to the screening—a prominent architect and educator, and his equally sophisticated wife. They were furious at what they saw as a debunking of the Vermeeer mystique, and they insisted, at least for a while, that the whole thing was bogus, or that someone with a more practiced hand than Mr. Jenison's was wielding the brush that, with the help of lenses and mirrors, produced a Vermeerish minorpiece.

But "Tim's Vermeer" isn't debunkery, and the value of the process it documents doesn't depend on the quality of Mr. Jenison's final product, even though his painting looks impressive to my limited-bandwidth eyes. His experiment should be seen as an attempted—and impressive—proof of concept, while the film proves, yet again, the vitality of the documentary form. The most intriguing question it raises is whether our feelings about Vermeer may be changed by the likelihood of him having used optics of one sort or another. The answer is yes, unavoidably, but not necessarily for the worse. Living in this era of explosive growth in science and technology, it's easy to feel a kinship with an artist who used every tool at his command in the service of beauty.

Watch a clip from the film "Labor Day." Depressed single mom Adele and her son Henry offer a wounded, fearsome man a ride. As police search town for the escaped convict, the mother and son gradually learn his true story. (Photo/Video: Paramount)

'Labor Day'

It's hardly a good sign when a movie's best moment turns on a peach pie—not the eating of one but the making of one, which, in this case, makes for a sequence with real buoyancy and style. The setting is small-town New England on a Labor Day weekend in the late 1980s. The pastry impresario, Frank (Josh Brolin) is an escaped convict. He has forced himself into the home of a depressed single mother, Adele, and her 13-year-old son, Henry; they're played by Kate Winslet and Gattlin Griffith. By the time he bakes the pie, it's clear that this fugitive from the law is not just a good man, but, ironically under the fraught circumstances, the right man for Adele, and a fine surrogate father for Henry. "Labor Day," adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard, is the kind of movie that turns clarity into stultification; everything is perfectly clear and almost everything—pie-making excepted—is perfectly lifeless.

That's not for lack of trying, or talent, on the part of the adult co-stars. How much more the teenage actor might have contributed is unknown, since the director, Jason Reitman, seems to have settled for Henry's single expression of wide-eyed longing (or is that pained expectation?). My own expression must have been pained as I watched these inexpressive people in this turgid movie, because the director, working from his own screenplay, is the same Jason Reitman who, with his actors, found so much fun and spontaneity in "Juno" and "Up in the Air." This new film might better be called "Labored Day." The story moves at a sluggish pace, while the emotion ration for each character is one per scene. And just when you think there's no hope for a happy outcome, a shameless contrivance looms on a distant horizon. It's a whopper in a weeper.


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'Girl With a Pearl Earring' (2003 )

Exquisitely visualized (with cinematography by Eduardo Serra), deliberately underdramatized and snorefully paced, Peter Webber's film version of a bestselling literary fiction stars Scarlett Johansson as Griet, a comely young housemaid who, in 17th-century Delft, becomes the model for one of Vermeer's best-loved paintings. Colin Firth plays the painter with suppressed passion, but the main fun is watching Tom Wilkinson's quick-eyed wickedness as the patron, Pieter van Ruijven. During his lifetime the Dutch master made relatively few paintings, but Mr. Serra outdoes him. No matter where he points his camera there's another Vermeer.

'The Picasso Mystery' (1956)

Another master painter's technique comes to life in Henri-Georges Clouzot's documentary, a magical, indispensable study of Pablo Picasso in the throes of creation. As he sits shirtless and barrel-chested, sketching or painting behind a paper screen, his inks and colors bleed through and appear, in time-lapse or, more often, real time, on our screen. The effect is thrilling. (The cinematographer was Claude Renoir, whose grandfather was no slouch as a painter either.) The 20 works Picasso created for this film were destroyed when production ended. The DVD version includes Alain Resnais's somber black-and-white documentary "Guernica."

'Young Adult' (2011)

Jason Reitman directed this cockeyed comic triumph from an original screenplay by Diablo Cody. Charlize Theron is Mavis Gary, a slatternly, wondrously nasty writer of young-adult novels who is delusional in her determination to reconnect with a high-school sweetheart and rescue him from a marriage she imagines to be unhappy. What makes the movie so enjoyable is the same combination that the filmmaker and writer brought to "Juno"—unerringly subtle yet precise direction plus a literate script with dramatic energy and a delicate tone. The cast includes Patrick Wilson and Patton Oswalt.

Corrections & Amplifications
A caption in a previous version of this article described a scene in which Tim Jenison examined Vermeer's original painting of "The Music Lesson." The painting was a reproduction. Also, an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the actor Josh Brolin as James Brolin.

Eric M. Van
Eric M. Van

Of course Jenison (in a much earlier scene) explained the angled mirror to Hockney, whose delighted reaction may have been the best scene in the movie.

dean oestreich
dean oestreich user

The assumption that Vermeer did not use technology like a Camera Obscura or Mirrors seems a bit naive. And I guess that Degass never used a camera for his paintings, Regardless, they still had to paint the picture

Current portrait artists can use a projector and literally project the portrait image onto their canvas and circumvent that testy drawing process. Painters can also directly copy a color photo onto their canvas which then can be painted over matching line by line, color by color.

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