Reality TV Show Where People Paint Like Vermeer Finds Fame With Flying Colors
Video screenshot via Omroep MAX
Reality mimics art in a Dutch television series where artists go head-to-head to reincarnate long-lost artworks by Johannes Vermeer.
De Nieuwe Vermeer, or The New Vermeer, premiered on February 12 to coincide with the largest Vermeer exhibition ever, currently being held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Interestingly, the six-episode show has been “an instant sensation,” the New York Times reports, with 1.3 million viewers tuning in for the first episode—for context, the nation has a population of 17 million. People seem to be fans of the mix of “highbrow culture and mass entertainment,” notes the Times’ Nina Siegal.
Here, professional, contemporary, and amateur artists unleash their inner Vermeers by recreating the Old Master’s style and reinventing six lost paintings—some of which have only been documented in texts. One of the featured works, The Concert, was stolen in 1990 during the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.
The creations are judged by Vermeer experts at the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis, which owns the all-too-familiar Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The most faithful recreations will be displayed at the Mauritshuis, while contemporary remixes are poised for showcase at the Museum Prinsenhof in Vermeer’s hometown of Delft.
Commenting on the wild popularity of the show, Pieter Roelofs, one of the curators of the momentous exhibition and a judge of the show, surmises that the international attention that the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer retrospective is getting may have to do with it. The Dutch have come to the realization that Vermeer—and therefore The New Vermeer—“is really something special.”
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[via Open Culture, Smithsonian Magazine, New York Times, images via various sources]
