Framing Vermeer: The Object of Art Museum Scholarship

The Harvard University Art Museums will present the lecture Framing Vermeer: The Object of Art Museum Scholarship on Wednesday, March 26 at 6:00 p.m. in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The lecture will be presented by Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator, Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, Fogg Art Museum. It is free and open to the public.

Vermeer's art has been a source of profound fascination for the modern mind and has been used as a mirror for contemporary concerns since at least the 1860s when his work was rediscovered. In this lecture Ivan Gaskell continues this tradition of non-historical interpretation by considering one work by Vermeer which was seen in the recent Vermeer exhibition in Washington, DC and The Hague: A Lady Standing at the Virginal (National Gallery, London). "I examine this painting in relation to framing in a variety of senses," states Gaskell, " both physical and conceptual, beginning with the scholarly frame of museums, their responsibilities, and what is distinctive about museum scholarship, and ending with the pictures-within-the-pictures in the Vermeer painting under discussion, indeed with a "picture"-within-a-picture-within-a-picture. In theoretical terms, this could be described as a "'mise-en-abîme' of parergonality": however, I hope to approach the philosophical issues at stake in a readily comprehensible manner. I shall conclude with a proposal of the identity of the ultimate, absolute, art museum object-or at least its analogue!"

Professor Gaskell's interest in the theoretical ramifications of Vermeer's art is related to his concerns as joint general editor of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts. His interest is also art-historical and he has previously published on Vermeer in "The Burlington Magazine" and elsewhere. He is currently editing (with Michiel Jonker, chief curator of the Royal Cabinet of Paintings "Mauritshuis", The Hague) the proceedings of two symposia on Vermeer held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Mauritshuis, The Hague during the recent exhibition. The book will be published later this year in the National Gallery of Art series Studies in the History of Art.

Complimentary parking for the lecture is available at the Broadway Garage on Felton Street, between Cambridge Street and Broadway. For further information please call the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs office at (617) 495-4544.