CLOSE TO VERMEER

Go behind the scenes of the largest Vermeer exhibition ever mounted, now on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Capturing the imagination of the art world – with glowing reviews, global publicity, and tickets sold out through the entirety of its run – the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer retrospective is nothing short of an historic event. Suzanne Raes’s film follows curators, conservators, collectors, and experts in their joint mission to shine a new light on the elusive Dutch Master. This fascinating documentary reveals everything from the quiet diplomacy required to get the Vermeers to the Netherlands and the new technical knowledge gained by scanning the paintings layer by layer, to the shocking news that one work may not be by Vermeer after all. In the process, we discover how Vermeer was able to depict reality so differently from his contemporaries. But above all, Close to Vermeer shows the infectious love Vermeer’s art inspires. As one curator lovingly puts it: “A good exhibition should change your view of the world. Vermeer can really do that.”

Tickets can be purchased at: https://quadcinema.com/film/close-to-vermeer/

Manhattan Masters

Rembrandt and Friends from the Frick NYC

To celebrate the 200 yr anniversary of the Mauritshuis a delegation of the American Friends of the Mauritshuis paid a unique visit to the Netherlands in early October.
 
One of the highlights was the group’s visit to the very special ‘Manhattan Masters’ exhibition at the Mauritshuis, featuring ten paintings by Dutch masters from The Frick Collection in New York. This is a one-time opportunity to view this selection of paintings in Europe, which (with one exception) left the continent more than a hundred years ago and have been in the United States ever since. One of the paintings that has temporarily exchanged New York for The Hague is Rembrandt’s acclaimed Self-portrait of 1658. Rembrandt painted many self-portraits, but this one is acknowledged by experts to be one of the most impressive of all.
 
The American Friends of the Mauritshuis is very proud to be one of the exhibition partners. The Manhattan Masters exhibition runs until 15 January 2023; if you are in the Netherlands, don’t miss out on this unique opportunity.  

Girls with Pearls Travel to New York City

The American Friends of the Mauritshuis is proud to sponsor a special event in honor of the Museum’s 200th Anniversary this year. Caroline Sikkenk, a Dutch artist-photographer has created a series of contemporary photographs inspired by Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring.

The work will be on display May 15-21, 2022 as part of the AD ART SHOW 2022 at Westfield World Trade Center inside the Oculus, at the World Trade Center, New York City.

For a peak at some of the images that will be used in this exhibition:

For more about Caroline Sikkenk and her work:

https://www.photoline.nl/engels/about-me/

200 Years of Inspiration

In 2022, it will be two hundred years since the Mauritshuis first opened its doors to the public. The museum will be celebrating its bicentenary with special exhibitions and events throughout the year. The exhibition In Full Bloom opens on 16 February with the finest flower still lifes from the period 1600-1725. To coincide with the opening, the façade of the Mauritshuis will also be adorned with an ‘impossible bouquet’ of flowers. During the summer, photographers – both established names and new talent – will be taking inspiration from the Mauritshuis collection and building.

The summer months will also see the first outdoor Street Art museum, with large murals based on the collection in various locations around The Hague. And no fewer than 200 writers have also been inspired, each contributing a piece based on a work of art in the Mauritshuis to the book Pen Meets Paint. The year concludes with an exhibition of Dutch masters from the 17th century in collaboration with The Frick Collection in New York.

2022 celebrates the inspiration that for the past 200 years the world-famous collection at the Mauritshuis has provided for countless art lovers, visitors and artists around the world.

See or Be The Girl with the Pearl Earring

Google Arts and Culture continues to roll out creative apps, focused on world cultural treasures, including the Mauritshuis’ own Girl with the Pearl Earring. New high resolution pictures have now been made available on its website. The accompanying materials are good for art lovers of all ages and a great way to introduce younger lovers to the arts of the Dutch Golden Age and other periods too.

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/girl-with-a-pearl-earring/bgICYYizzwQHKQ

For those who download their phone app, there is a particularly fun artificial intelligence-powered filter that allows you or someone special in your life to be the Girl with the Pearl Earring. For a demonstration of this functionality have a look art the video below.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl6RsFJsAmc


A bit of fun for the new year!

This tiny reproduction of Girl With a Pearl Earring is “painted” with light

Scientists have fabricated tiny “nanopillars” capable of transmitting specific colors of light, at specific intensities, which hold promise for improved optical communication and anti-counterfeit measures for currency. For proof of concept, they decided to digitally reproduce Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting Girl With a Pearl Earring—just painted in light instead of pigment. They discussed their work in a recent paper published in the journal Optica.

“The quality of the reproduction, capturing the subtle color gradations and shadow details, is simply remarkable,” said co-author Amit Agrawal, a researcher with the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST). “This work quite elegantly bridges the fields of art and nanotechnology.”

Nature abounds with examples of structural color. The bright colors in butterfly wings don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured, for instance. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism 

Scientists have sought to mimic nature with nanofabrication techniques capable of generating structural colors, just by tweaking the dimensions of nanostructures. However, the brightness of the colors such “metasurfaces” generate is fixed; they don’t allow for tuning the brightness to achieve the complex interplay of light and shadow known in the art world as “chiaroscuro.”

Nanopillars are a type of nanostructure with a unique shape, tapering from a bottom pillar into a pointed top. Group them into arrays and they are an excellent means of capturing light (up to 99 percent) with less material—making them a promising alternative for manufacturing solar panels. They can also be used to create antibacterial surfaces, much like the tiny, similarly shaped rods in a cicada’s wings can kill bacteria by rupturing their cell membranes.

Nanopillars can also be used to generate structural colors. For instance, scientists have previously illuminated nanopillar arrays with white light to produce specific colors (red, blue, and green light), simply by varying the sizes (widths) of the nanopillars. However, the authors note that while those arrays can produce vibrant colors, the brightness (or intensity) of the generated colors is fixed and cannot be “tuned.” Shifting levels of brightness are key to reproducing the chiaroscuro of an image. “By tuning the brightness of a color, the generated shadow rendering effect can make an image appear with a stronger space and stereo perception,” the authors wrote.

It’s possible to add liquid crystals and electrochromic polymers to metasurface arrays to control that brightness, but that control does not extend across the full visible spectral range. And the complicated electronic architectures required make it difficult to adapt such metasurfaces for practical applications.

The NIST team’s nanopillars address many of those issues, most notably the question of tunability. The team fabricated titanium dioxide nanopillars on glass slides, using an elliptical cross-section rather than a circular one so that the diameter wasn’t uniform but had a longer axis and shorter axis. By changing the alignment of the long axis with the polarization of incoming white light and pairing that with a special polarizing filter on the back of the glass slide, the team was able to tailor the intensity of the light transmitted by the nanopillars.

In principle, it works in much the same way as polarized sunglasses. The greater the rotation angle of the polarization, the greater the intensity of the transmitted light. By this means, the scientists were able to control both color and brightness across the visible spectrum of color.

Vermeer is a noted master of light and shadow, and his paintings are rich in chiaroscuro. So Girl With a Pearl Earring was a natural choice when the NIST team sought a good test candidate to see if their technique could digitally reproduce the painting with light. First, they made a digital copy of the painting, just 1 millimeter in length, and then used that information to design a matrix made up of millions of nanopillars. Groups of five nanopillars (one red, two green, two blue), oriented at the desired angles, formed pixels of the Vermeer. Finally, they shined white light through the matrix to produce a millimeter-sized reproduction of the original.

The results proved quite impressive, even capturing some of the texture of oil on canvas. “It can be observed that the girl wears a blue turban and gold jacket with a white collar underneath, which presents ultra-smooth brightness transitions, and the darker peripheral sides blend seamlessly with the black background,” the authors wrote. “The smooth color hue and brightness transitions allow the image to present an oil painting-like texture, elegantly bridging the gap between scientific results and art.”

These nanopillar metasurfaces could be used to add specific wavelengths of light in an optical fiber, the better to control the amount of information that fiber can carry. It could also be possible to use the technique to paint paper currency with complex colors that would be difficult to forge.

DOI: Optica, 2020. 


Special Viewings of Dutch and Flemish Drawings at the Cooper-Hewitt

On January 30th, the American Friends of the Mauritshuis were warmly welcomed by the Prints and Drawings Department of the Cooper-Hewitt for a tour of their rarely viewed collection of Dutch and Flemish Drawings.

Curator Julia Siemon hosted fifteen Friends through a tour of some of the highlights of the collection started by the Hewitt sisters in the 1890’s and added to through donor gifts over the past century. While the Drawings Collection is perhaps most well-known for French and Italian drawings, there are outstanding examples of Netherlandish drawings by such figures as Abraham Blomaert, Isaac de Moucheron, Bartholomeus Breenburgh, Jacob Jordaens, Marten de Vos, and Jacob Backer among others.

We plan for more special viewings of both public and private collections in the future. To be sure to be included on these invitations lists, please be sure to renew your American Friends of the Mauritshuis membership.

For those Members interested in finding out more about the Cooper-Hewitt collections, we encourage you to contact the Drue Heinz Study Center to find out more.

Announcing Important Changes

Dear Friends,

It is only June, but a lot has been happening this summer, and I am writing on behalf of the Board of the American Friends of the Mauritshuis (AFMh) to keep you informed of a few important changes.

First, there are a couple of moves within the Board that have been in the works for some time. After serving as President for the past four years, Mona Sadler is stepping down. She has achieved a great deal and we are deeply grateful to her for her graceful leadership. Mona will remain a very active member of our Board. I am sure that you will all wish to join me in thanking her for her outstanding service to our organization.

We are all delighted that Stein Berre has offered to take over as President as of June 13th. Stein is a Senior Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and is a collector of paintings and drawings of the Dutch Golden Age. He has held Board memberships at the Royal Oak Foundation and as a Trustee for the Murray Hill Historic District in NYC as well as at the AFMh.

We are also very pleased to announce that Alison Dichter will be joining us as the AFMh Administrative Director. Alison brings energy and entrepreneurship to this new role. In addition to running her own casting agency in New York City, Alison also helps support the Boards of the American Friends of the Louvre and the Royal Oak Foundation on events, membership and development. I hope you’ll all have a chance to meet her at a future event.

Our mailing address is changing, so please update your address books. Going forward, please send all correspondence to:

American Friends of the Mauritshuis
114 East 36th Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10016

For those of you we may have missed with the Summer appeal email, we encourage you to donate to help secure funding for an exciting new exhibition about conservation at the Mauritshuis, which will feature projects taken on by AFMh Interns. We also hope that you will help ensure the future of our AFMh-Fulbright Internship. If you plan to send a check, please use the new address. If you have already sent a donation to the old address, don’t worry, it will still get to us.

Lastly, we are working on an exciting Fall event for the AFMh in New York City. Please keep your calendars free on the evening of October 30th. I look forward to seeing you there!

All best wishes from The Hague,

Emilie