A poem about art- a Vermeer—
But plez indulge me first by going to Caltech’s site of Vemeer’s works-
An expandable collage of his paintings–
cacr.caltech.edu
and notice many of his paintings were of sittings in
rooms of a grand house with basically the same subjects
even painted with the same attire (yellow dress)
and especially these two paintings:
'The Concert'
cacr.caltech.edu
And
'The Lady Writing a Letter'
cacr.caltech.edu
Thank you,
please try combining these two particular pictures
As if they were one or moments of life of the same woman:
NOW the poem:
================================================
Girl Writing A Letter
~William Carpenter
A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says "Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow".
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
"I haven't got all evening", he says, "I need some art".
"Art is for pleasure", the guard says,"not possession, you can't something"..........
and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
" Don't worry", the thief says," we're both on the same side".
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D.
He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late.
He's
in the picture.
He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heartbeat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her,
for her alone,
there's no one
else alive in the museum.
The man she was writing to is dead-time to
stop thinking about him-
the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself,
only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes,
but it's true, it feels like her whole life.
So when the thief
hands her the knife and says "you" slice the paintings out
of their frames, "you" roll them up, she does it; when he says
"you" put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, "drive, baby,
the night is ours", it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive,
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road,
she's real and
she's in love.
========================================================
Why-do you ask combining those two paintings?
Because 'The Girl Writing the Letter' (well not a ‘girl’ but a Lady) was not the one stolen from the
Gardner Museum in 1990- It was 'The Concert'—
Sunday May 27, 2001
The Observer observer.co.uk
A little after one o'clock in the morning, on St Patrick's Day 1990, two men posing as cops talked their way into the Gardner Museum in Boston. They took the night guards to the basement, left them bound and gagged and then moved swiftly through the shadows to commit one of the biggest heists in the history of art. Eleven paintings were stolen, along with a Chinese beaker and the finial from a Napoleonic flag.
Among the paintings was a Dutch interior showing two women playing music to a man, a picture that had captivated many thousands of visitors to the Gardner Museum - The Concert by Johannes Vermeer.
The beaker and the finial weren't too hard to value. Neither were the Rembrandt or the Manet, since paintings by both of these artists were still coming for auction. But it was so long since a Vermeer had changed hands that the value of The Concert could only be an expert guess. This fragile masterpiece, painted more than three centuries before, was now priceless in every respect.
and there’s a cool million dollar re-ward for it still—she’s out there sipping on Old Milwaukee
worth 200-300 mill pretending to be The Girl (Lady) Writing the Letter (she’s hanging around the Nation Gallery in DC) when now you know
who she really is......
While you are looking out for her plez be on the lookout for this one too:
"EILEEN IS GONE..."
ART THEFT AT THE MUSEUM OF BAD ART
"Art too bad to be ignored"
aabc.com
the reward is now 31 bucks…… |
