Centennial Exhibition

To mark its centennial year, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) launched a programme it called ‘52 Surprises,’ promising visitors a weekly gift of some kind throughout 2015. The first and most prominent of those surprises was a focused loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum: Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, unveiled on 16 January 2015 and on view free of charge in the Cargill Gallery, just off the main lobby, through 3 May. The museum billed it as the first of three promised masterpiece loans to be revealed at unannounced moments during the birthday year. The other two proved to be Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks (National Gallery, London) and Van Gogh’s Irises (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).

Mia had opened in January 1915 in its neoclassical McKim, Mead and White building on Third Avenue South, and the centennial gave curators an occasion to secure loans that would not ordinarily travel. Patrick Noon, the museum’s curator of paintings, negotiated the arrangement with the Rijksmuseum. The Vermeer was presented as a single-work ‘Masterpiece in Focus’ rather than a group exhibition, inviting sustained looking at one of the roughly thirty-six paintings Vermeer is known to have completed. It was only the second Vermeer shown at the institute in six years, following a 2009 loan of The Astronomer from the Louvre.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is one of the most concentrated of Vermeer’s domestic interiors. An anonymous woman stands at a table in cool morning light, a pearl necklace set aside and her loose blue jacket suggesting the letter arrived before she had finished dressing. The painting, approximately 46 by 39 centimetres, is widely regarded as a touchstone of his mature style and one of the defining works in the Rijksmuseum’s collection. A public lecture by writer Lawrence Weschler, titled ‘Posers: Marvel, Majesty and Sovereignty among the Habsburgs and in Vermeer,’ accompanied the loan on 19 April 2015.