arts, literature

Jan Wester: Flesh-Coloured Empty Space, Bottom Left

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors drew inspiration from the collection held by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. They looked at seventeenth-century paintings through the lens of an alternative history which they then brought to life in short but powerful texts. Jan Wester was inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft from 1660-1661. ‘The two posts on the quay are a harbinger, the seedling of the rules and regulations that have grown rampant.’

Flesh-Coloured Empty Space, Bottom Left

As you may have read in room eight, Johan Maurits wasn’t so much a child, but a father of his time, and in particular of slavery. It was the first thing I was told when I was tasked with writing a text to accompany a painting in his former house.

So, here I am. Couldn’t be easier, right? But something’s bothering me. What’s the purpose of this? Education? Social-historical awareness? But for whose benefit? We won’t change the business model of looking-at-world-famous-paintings, and I doubt that the Mauritshuis in its current form will play a significant part in any kind of social revolution.

I mount the stairs, in search of a still life or a landscape, intent on crafting the most non-political, meaningless museum text I can think of. I halt before Vermeer’s View of Delft. Perhaps I can write something about the incidence of light or the use of colour. I lean forward. I’m immediately reprimanded by the attendant. He points to the golden line on the floor.

On my way home, a man jumps in front of the train. I get stranded at Amsterdam Sloterdijk Station. I take another look at the painting on my phone. The two women in the foreground don’t quite face each other. A man asks something of another man. The mother and child stand apart. They’re waiting for the barge, the train of its time. I zoom in. I see more people across the water, small, scattered, lost, isolated, in sharp contrast with the perfidious complacency or the posturing in most other works from that era.

Leaning against a bare, concrete pillar I lower myself into the flesh-coloured empty space, bottom left. There was no highway code or spatial planning in the seventeenth century. Ground was simply ground and people stood where they stood. Delft was one of the first cities with laws on who could enter the harbour when and where. That’s no surprise, with all those ships full of sugar. The two posts on the quay are a harbinger, the seedling of the rules and regulations that have grown rampant.

I’m a child of this time, of this place. Yet the surroundings of Sloterdijk Station, which is dominated by lines, planes, angles and borders, feel more foreign to me than Vermeer’s gates, church spires and red-brick houses. The other travellers are staring straight ahead as if, like me, they don’t belong here, as if nobody belongs here, as if it’s impossible to belong here.

This painting depicts Delft with one leg still in the local economy of the Middle Ages, which in subsequent years would be changed beyond recognition by international, colonial trade. Vermeer painted the point at which we got lost, the beginning of the alienation that would manifest itself fully in the work of Edward Hopper three centuries later. As if he foresaw that a country that grabs everything that’s up for grabs can only lose itself.

• deBuren
• Mauritshuis
• Vermeer