Art’s Generations

Kirsten Burke | Los Angeles Review of Books | 16th October 2026

We “hunger” over Vermeer. Why should someone who painted in the mid-1600’s now be seen as “a touchstone for the experience of modernity”? He has inspired artists, writers and filmmakers perhaps because in his paintings ”he withholds so relentlessly”.  An example of that is his luminous figures who “decline to acknowledge the viewer”. It is difficult to get inside Vermeer’s mindset because his works are “irreducible … whose every fragment seems to contain the key to his whole world”.