The International Art Critics’ Association, an organization most
valuable for its widely accepted press pass, annually asks its
members to choose the past year’s best exhibitions. Nineteen ninety-five had many contenders in the category of “painting or sculpture
exhibit in a museum”: the retrospectives of Cézanne, Mondrian,
Brancusi, and Monet, in this country and in Europe, for starters; Goya at the Met or the Anthony Caro retrospective at the new Museum
of Modern Art in Tokyo. For sheer rarity, however, there is only one
choice: the Johannes Vermeer exhibition jointly organized by the
National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Royal Cabinet of
Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Astonishingly enough, this is the first
show ever dedicated exclusively to the acclaimed Dutch master.
In a triumph of curatorial diplomacy, this small but comprehensive
exhibition assembles almost two thirds of the authentic paintings by
the artist still extant, from all periods of his twenty-year career,
many of them on loan for the first time.

I missed the press preview of the Vermeer show in Washington, and
because of an unhappy meshing of my travel committments and the museum
closings caused by the budget wars, I didn’t get there until that
strange week between Christmas and New Year’s when private funding
came briefly to the rescue of frustrated ticket holders. The crowds
were staggering. When the museum opened at 10:00 A.M., lines to enter
already stretched almost half the length of the building. (The
National Gallery’s beleaguered press officer told