Escape to/from Home: Nostalgia and Domesticity in Works by Vermeer and Modern Artists of the American South
Published September 19th 2024
By Elaine Slayton Akin
I recently watched the 2023 Julia Roberts film Leave the World Behind on Netflix. While the film takes an expected but dark turn midway, causing some characters to actually leave the world behind through death, the exposition, I have to admit, resonates. It represents a more metaphorical interpretation of the film title in which hostility and unrest have comfortably settled into all the nooks and crannies of civilization, as Roberts’s character Amanda blankly stares out her New York high-rise window and declares:
I came over here. To watch the sunrise. And I saw all these people starting their day
with such tenacity. Such verve. All in an effort to...... make something of themselves.
Make something of our world. I felt so lucky to be a part of that. But then, I remembered...
what the world is actually like. And I came to a more accurate realization.
Later that same day, she books a short-term rental for her family titled “Leave the World Behind” with the promise of respite from the presumably post-pandemic, capitalist-driven, politically divided world Amanda has discerned. We, the audience, can assume these qualities about Amanda’s world, because we recognize her disease of fatigue. Her symptoms are all too similar to our own—angry, tired, and seeking our next hit of escape.
Escapism takes many forms; notably powerful among them is nostalgia—a rose-colored rear view of the past that tends to remember all the good things and forget all the bad. Last year, I visited the much talked-about Johannes Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, which presented 28 of the artist’s 37 known paintings. While Vermeer is famously touted for his technical ability to capture light and detail, I wonder if his universal renown has stood the test of time more so because of how his work makes the viewer feel through spatial intimacy, visual quiet, and sentimental appeal—rarities we crave in our busy modern lives. Since seeing the show, I have been unable to shake the urge to inject Vermeer into every interior I can, and I’m not alone. Creative directors of high-end design brands, such as Restoration Hardware, Lemieux et Cie, and RW Guild NY, are bottling the magic in moody, under-exposed commercial shoots and sumptuously minimalist vignettes. I find myself caught up in a zeitgeist not immune to the lingering popularity of the Rijksmuseum blockbuster, but I suspect more vigorously stirred by world circumstances. The Vermeer aesthetic is en vogue—dark without being wicked, luxurious without being gaudy, and meaningful without being obscure. These superficial qualities, however, are just the beginning of Vermeer’s allure. They are entrenched in Vermeer’s deep well of machinations to visually define “comfort” and “home” that pulled at the heartstrings of a nation in the face of overwhelming anxiety and looming catastrophes of war, poverty, illness, and human rights violations—the same that pull at us today. Despite the modish fashions and households of Vermeer’s painted middle class, he still offered his patrons an escape from the present with familiar values of the past. Similarly, Vermeer’s work endears us to a bygone era before e-mail and cell phones and the breakdown of normal barriers to access a person. It reminds us of the warmth of our mothers, the purity of our childhood homes, and the easy simplicity of analog chores, but, importantly, what does it cause us to forget?
Me and my husband Tim from Vermeer exhibition at Rijksmuseum, May 2023.
As it turns out, nostalgia is a two-faced Janus, manipulating our recollections and emotions at its whim. With the faintest smell, touch, or sound, it can provide immediate, safe cover from our current poor circumstances; it can also revive past wrongs best left behind. In Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence, Marjorie E. Wieseman wrote that “Vermeer’s deceptively modest painting represents the ultimate distillation of a [Dutch] trend… throughout the second half of the 17th century: a growing taste for quiet, self-contained images that incorporate contemporary ideals of feminine beauty and domesticity” (1). Holding women hostage to the home and to the margins of a so-called “important life” was a tired antidote for the fraught male gaze in Vermeer’s time, even if his techniques were extraordinarily innovative. Renaissance painters such as Botticelli and Titian notably employed women as singularly decorative or devout objects in the 1500s, medieval artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden before that, Byzantine iconographers before that, and so on, and so on. I believe the Rijksmuseum show laid the groundwork for a fresh look at how Vermeer romanticized women and the domestic sphere as a visual tool of escapism for a recovering upper middle class and how his work functions as a crucial stepping stone in a continuing art historical narrative.
Tracy Chevalier glowingly reviewed the Rijksmuseum show for The Art Newspaper, noting that early on visitors were led “nicely into the domestic realm, where for the most part we [remained].” While the exhibition was neatly organized into sections such as “Gazing Out,” “Up Close,” and “Musical Appeal,” Chevalier rightly underscored Vermeer’s environments, almost exclusively inside the home. Paintings such as Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657–58) and The Love Letter (1669–70) depict common Vermeer subjects and stylistic choices, including women, domestic items, fine fabrics and draperies, furniture, hanging art—everything (and everyone) you need in a tidy 17th-century Dutch genre scene, accentuated by dramatic window light, rich color, and safe gazing distance from the next room as indicated by the various curtains and doorways that break the frame. Sometimes, Vermeer’s women play musical instruments, write letters, try on jewelry, entertain guests, or interact with each other (i.e., Mistress and Maid, c. 1664–67). By contrast, Vermeer only twice tackled the discipline of science and twice chose a man as sitter, surrounded by the necessary professional gadgets of The Astronomer (1668) and The Geographer (1669), respectively (2).
Johannes Vermeer, The Geographer, 1669, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Like the pious portrayals of royal matriarchs and Madonnas that preceded them, the women in Vermeer’s paintings still convey aspiration more than realism. “Acting with unruffled calm and perfect decorum, these stylish players are paradigmatic of the era’s (unattainable) ideal of feminine behaviour,” Wieseman urged, as Vermeer’s shrewd subtleties of perspective, symbolism, and entertainment mask the time’s gender politics with a masterful “sense of intimacy and silence.” The Northern European experience in Vermeer’s time was not as unlike ours in present-day America as we think: the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, liberating the Netherlands from Spain but delivering a whole new set of injustices with “power overwhelmingly in the hands of a non-aristocratic urban mercantile elite” and a brand new sense of nationalism; bouts of the plague cyclically resurfaced, but, the worst over, cautious optimism and peace filled the hearts of the privileged; and with independence from Spain, the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by devout Protestantism. “Unlike other European countries governed by kings and princes, here the family and domestic virtue… were prized as the cornerstones of a successful society, and indeed became a metaphor for the nation itself,” explained Wieseman. “In one particularly telling example, the famous Dutch obsession with household cleanliness became a metaphor for patriotism and virtuous political governance” (3). As the domestic agent, women were the primary instruments used to achieve this immaculate image through moral didactic illustration.
"Looking Inwards," view from Vermeer exhibition at Rijksmuseum, May 2023.
In The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes, Judith Flanders defined the Dutch 17th-century home as “the very epitome of homeness”—the home as depicted in “works by Vermeer and de Hooch, or Metsu, or Maes… [that] say ‘home’ like no others.” To this day, Western European and North American children upon prompt draw houses with pitched roofs, smoking chimneys, centered front doors, and fenced gardens—not at all like the houses they grow up in, but shaped by the deeply rooted ideal home in our collective subconscious. Flanders also keenly pointed out, however, that “these painted rooms, these rooms we know so well from art, never existed.” Besides the universally recognized everyday objects of the home, “almost everything else in the picture… were constructions of the painters’ studios” (4). And the constructs don’t end there. The main character of these interiors is almost always the same—a woman. “As the primary breadwinner and decision-maker, the male head of household was undeniably a significant figure, but within the home women were by far the dominant force,” asserted Wieseman (5). Accordingly, the women in Vermeer’s paintings are treated as protagonists that command the space they inhabit, albeit limited to an enclosure of decorated walls. But just like the posh furnishings in many 17th-century Dutch paintings, the “perfect” women sustaining Dutch virtue with merely stick brooms and homemade bread are not real because that causation is not realistic.
”First Interiors," view from Vermeer exhibition at Rijksmuseum, May 2023
With so much riding on the immutable calm and orderliness of the Dutch home, it’s not a far reach to deduce that Vermeer’s paintings were not only used as domestic exemplars, but also as visual nirvana for anxious men, among other purposes. “Perhaps most importantly, in times of peace as well as in times of war, the home was a refuge of peace, virtue and prosperity, a secure bastion against the stresses and depredations of the outside world,” argued Wieseman (6). Therefore, the fixtures of home in 17th-century Dutch paintings—women and the domestic objects associated with them—were sure to offer escape to their contemporary viewers. Today, the use of escapism in art persists, but the subjects from which we seek to escape are quite different. Since the 1950s, the rise of feminism in the mainstream has empowered artists to publicly give voice and form to women’s lived experiences and injustices, often focused on escape from precisely that which Vermeer and his contemporaries escaped to—the home and its domestic comforts. As we examine escapism and modern artists working and exhibiting in the American South, we see Vermeer’s enduring devices translate to 21st-century issues related to women and the domestic realm—issues from which Vermeer is feasibly inseparable due to his near-singular focus on women and their environments.
The global influence of Vermeer in the centuries following his life and career is acute and incalculable; Vermeer is an artist for all time. As I’ve pored over Vermeer books and the Rijksmuseum exhibition catalogue over the last year, I feel like I’m seeing Vermeer everywhere, and sometimes in surprising places, which I’ve found to yield some of the strongest connections. Residual embers of Vermeer’s artistic fire still glow in works by a multitude of contemporary artists—not just in style or subject matter, but in curiosity of technique, exploration of the strange, and, of course, the treatment of women and “feminine” spaces as they relate to nostalgia and escapism. With the distance of almost 400 years, Vermeer’s devices fare fruitfully in the hands of a more self-aware generation privy to unconscious bias and fearless to employ Vermeer’s own tools as counter-statements.
Something Borrowed, Something New
Seth Fite, for example, is a Kentucky-based portraitist and landscape artist who founded the Louisville School of Painting in 2020 to teach classical drawing and painting. The painterly style of old masters, as passed down through Fite’s American artist heroes Andrew Wyeth and Frank Duveneck, is immediately recognizable in Fite’s work. Amalgamations of Rembrandt, Velazquez, and certainly Vermeer, among others, Fite’s surfaces and subject matter are self-described as traditional. At first look, Fite’s paintings could easily be dated to a hundred years ago or more; slight yet unmistakably modern clues, such as a hoop earring, a cell phone, or a “man bun,” however, bely their more recent creation. To trick, though, is not Fite’s goal. “I usually set my paintings in a vague time, not really here nor there… [because] a painting bound to a certain time struggles to live,” Fite shared with me in an email this past January. Where Vermeer aimed to embody the ideology of a nation as political and religious propaganda, Fite is much more focused on the individual response, a spiritual experience that feels true, that one can internalize for eternal reflection. “If I struggle with a portrait enough, people will feel they know something intimate about that person. I try to paint the angel in a person or the devil in a person—painting both in the same picture is even better… The aim is to be poetic, and therefore more real than reality.”
While Fite has no particular bend toward painting women or their environments, and to my question, “Do you notice a difference in your process or experience of painting men versus women?,” answered simply, “no,” I can’t help but notice that in all the works I’ve seen by Fite, which admittedly aren’t all of them, the women often glance slightly to the side, avoiding eye contact, and the men, dead ahead into the viewer’s eyes. Perhaps the sitters asked to be portrayed this way, or chock it up to artistic license, compositional balance, or simply coincidence. Or, irritatingly, the male gaze is creeping in where it shouldn’t. More concerning is that it’s possible our patriarchal inheritance skews our perspective and makes it difficult to unsee the male gaze even when it’s not there; the paranoia is deeply disturbing. Nonetheless, Fite drastically departs from Vermeer and the old masters in works such as Sonia (2021) and Sue in Trapper’s Costume (c. 2020), in which women display character or dress considered indecent for ladies of Vermeer’s time. Sonia is based on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment heroine and sex worker who serves as the book’s moral compass for her selfless decisions, devotion to family, and symbolism of social justice for the rights of women and the poor. While the book’s version of Sonia isn’t completely flawless as a banner for women’s rights (she shares one too many burdens with Wieseman’s 17th-century Dutch woman for my comfort), Fite paints Sonia with sincerity and respect, as opposed to, say, Vermeer’s The Procuress (1656) with a man’s hand over a woman’s breast.
Seth Fite, Sonia, 2021. Courtesy of the artist
Likewise, Sue in Trapper’s Costume depicts a woman in traditionally masculine gear—someone we wouldn’t find in the old masters’ oeuvres (but later by 19th-century artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec when cross-dressing in art would become more normalized), but the timelessness of the painting style strengthens the challenge to gender norms by grounding something “new” in something we already know well. In these examples, Fite uses the old style to softly introduce new and different protagonists to the narrative. While escapism here feels like a stretch, appealing to the comfort we find in the past doesn’t. Fite isn’t sure, dryly pondering, “Nostalgia is a little tricky… When I paint people with clothing that appears to be from, say, the early 1900s, it is not necessarily because I am nostalgic (although there may be something to it; I have no particular love for our time period).” In this case, perhaps the escapism piece is experienced by Fite during the painting process, rather than the viewer on the finished end.
Seth Fite, Sue in Trapper's Costume, ca. 2020. Courtesy of the artist
Inside, Out
I first saw the work of Seattle-based artist Anne Siems in 2016 at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. Then, she was painting mostly women with a mix of abstract shapes, lush flora and fauna, and dress and coiffures reminiscent of the 18th-century France. Her surfaces appear as many thin, translucent layers of paint built up delicately to achieve an ethereal finish, accentuating the untamed, dream-likeness of the subjects and composition. According to her website, while her interests change with current events, Siems has always been drawn to nature and magic; they are common threads throughout the years. “My work prior to 2016… certainly had nostalgia for the old and was influenced and inspired by old European masters, but below the surface was always an edge; the work dealt subtly with the threat to our environment, celebration of knowing we are part of nature, and that all is connected.”
Siems’s romantic focus on nature in these earlier works could have trapped women within yet another gendered setting of flowers and frivolity, but it doesn’t. Instead, Siems has kicked wide open the front door of the 17th-century Dutch home and beckoned the image of woman from the dark interior outside into the light, where she is aligned with the earth as sister life-bearers and governed by the impartial laws of nature, not man. In a similar way Vermeer and artists of his time used the warm presence of women and domesticity as a backwards gateway to nationalistic thought, Siems uses women to elicit nostalgia for a gentler time when nature and femininity reign—a time not necessarily from the past but, conceivably, so repeatedly imagined that it feels like a memory—and to which love-, freedom-, and justice-seekers escape to open-mindedness. The result, of course, couldn’t be more different. In works such as Bear (2017), women wield power and presence through strategic body positioning and oneness with nature. In Two Corals (2017), the coral-shaped vascular systems of identical girls reach out and touch, transcending reality for the supernatural. The girls appear as ghosts while their bodies fade into the speckled background, yet their determined faces suggest strength and control. Siems is able to generate feelings of awe and connectedness by borrowing, certainly from happy childhood memories, but also from more figurative sources, such as lore, dreams, and metaphor. Though intangible, they still weave a truthful-at-heart narrative about the trajectory of women by a woman for women, as opposed to a twisted agenda about women by men for men. Hints of magic realism in Siems’s work emphasize enough “real” that the “magic” parts seem plausible.
Anne Siems, Bear, 2017. Courtesy of the artist
Motivated by the fallout of the 2016 presidential election and the #MeToo Movement, Siems has diverged from her self-described “personal Garden of Eden” for matters more pressing to her. Her more recent work retains her signature style and overall themes but covers a wider scope of people, issues, and artistic techniques. “I was inspired by a new sense of feminism, a place of wildness, unconcerned with dictates of the fashion industry, the ideas of what a beautiful woman is supposed to look like, the letting go of rules about body size, and embracing women of all color,” Siems explained in an email earlier this year. In Crow Hand from the 2019 exhibition “Her Hands Are Wild and Dangerous,” for example, a woman stands in the woods wearing a ‘60s-era pea coat fit for Jackie O with a hand that is literally a crow’s head. She’s not just aligned with or protected by nature, she has become nature and embodies its spiritual power. In What I’ll Want (2023), Siems has stretched even further to depict a man, bald and shirtless, bearing the markings of nature on his skin; his disarming sensitivity is a far cry from Vermeer’s scientific man. The ancient practice of tattooing feels strikingly modern alongside the subject’s trendy black denim and sneakers. Whimsical vines and monsters crawl up his arms, and the following script dominates his chest:
What I’ll want most from myself is that I came out of hiding from myself
That all parts Godly and Grotesque, Miserable and Magnificent
Were known and that I made a lasting friend of my Heart.
This painting conveys urgency; there’s no time for escape, and I think that’s the point. Siems confirmed, “These tattoos are political; they are unapologetic and brave. They are markers of the world we live in and are… right on the edge in many ways.” The arc of Siems’s work is a testament to the virtues of growth and willingness to pivot when the call strikes. It also reinforces the possibility of nostalgia and escapism in art, or the lack thereof, to kindle emotion, instill ideology, and inspire reaction.
Anne Siems, What I'll Want, 2023. Courtesy of the artist
Outside, In
New Orleans-based artist Erica Westenberger leads us further into the personal landscape, exposing a feminine experience so visceral that “inward and outward looking occur simultaneously,” Westenberger explained in a January email. Generational trauma accumulated since the beginning of time is epitomized as objects of capture and domesticity comprise the building blocks of her female subjects’ interior psyches. References to confinement in the presence of actual chains and ropes, but also visual tension and the elaborate twisty-turns and knots of the bodies, deliciously complicate the intersection of escapism and nostalgia in Westenberger’s art. Internal constructs of an external patriarchy that include unnatural scale of environment, dexterity of body, and physics of matter are not of this world, offering a portal of reverse escape that does women favors perhaps only a psychiatrist can fully untangle. Westenberger dares to traverse what many of us spend a lot of time avoiding—the mountain of our own feelings, and then telling ourselves the truth, a result of self-awareness a Vermeer woman would have never even known was possible. Westenberger’s works illustrate escape into ourselves, where the past lacks nostalgia and instead presents danger. “The vaguely-threatening vignettes of object and figure interaction border on moments of fear and care,” she explains, “and reflect the ambivalence women have about choices, or lack thereof, to participate in societal standards of idealized appearance and caregiving relationships.” Like a coach recounts the opponent’s weak spots and tired tricks before a game, Westenberger invites us to stay and practice fortitude in the training ground of the mind for the confusing world outside, where autonomy and repression coexist; as above so below women grapple with taking care of themselves and everyone else.
When I say Westenberger’s compositions are intricate, I mean superlatively so. The artist-described fluid and “fragmented bodies” contribute largely to the complex whole as they “contort around realistic renderings to reflect the chaotic experiences of fitting into societal templates for femininity.” The Spectral Stranger (2019) is one of Westenberger’s simpler compositions, although not simple, and a more approachable entry point for diving in. It features a nude, back-turned feminine figure in the artist’s playful and curvy style who has lassoed herself with a rope to a neatly-made bed in a sterile interior space complete with a wall, tiled floor, and rug. A tiered and iced cake, as well as an apple that seems to have gone “splat,” stand out on an otherwise empty floor. We can’t see her face, just the back of her head and her long, dark pigtails. There’s a self-imposed darkness to this scene, as she’s tied herself down, balanced by the more light-hearted foodstuffs and round shapes. “I use tension to address the comfort of the home as interrupted by women’s complicated relationships to familial caregiving responsibilities,” Westenberger added. “With The Spectral Stranger in particular, I incorporated the bed/bedroom to give the surrounding space the environment of a private setting, one where fantasies, nightmares, and dreams collide.” Hallmarks of an orderly domestic state loom large, down to the figure’s tiny waist and painted nails; still, there’s a sense she doesn’t want to be there. A laundry list of hypotheticals could be holding her back—guilt, obligation, or fear of an oppressive governor beyond the frame to name a few, but nothing physically keeps her there but herself.
Erica Westenberger, The Spectral Stranger, 2019. Courtesy of the artist
On the other side of a global pandemic and an American presidency that greatly hindered human rights progress, it’s easy to imagine that the modest figure and space from The Spectral Stranger from four years prior has grown and morphed, parallel to the artist herself, into the inconceivably labyrinthine promises that stir up the flowers (2023). A behemoth tangle of body parts, including two heads, and objects in Westenberger’s distinctive wiggly and voluminous style occupies the bottom half of the drawing. We can see the face of the head on the right, partially covered by squiggles of hair, while the other is completely back-turned, accentuated by a darling, bow-shaped hair barrette. Whether the figure is two-headed or there are actually two figures, the posture of the heads indicates an embrace and a shift toward self-love and -care that is noticeably absent from The Spectral Stranger. Shapely limbs extend like conversation bubbles from our two-headed protagonist, each containing an object or figure that evokes the slightest whisper of simultaneous dreams, paths, alternate dimensions, truths, or escape hatches—“promises that stir.” In the foreground, we see a baby, a corset, a geography book, pearls, a wing, a comb, braids, chains, a rat, a thorny-stemmed thistle, flies, a scorpion, a bell. Either way, they’re all valid parts of this character, both sweet and sordid, even if they never make it beyond the interiority.
Erica Westenberger, promises that stir up the flowers, 2023. Courtesy of the artist
Additional layers of symbolism and myth deconstruction multiply in microscopic form the further you progress into the background. The garden or pool just behind the main figure is worthy of Versailles in its labored detail and liberal sprawl. Beyond, the same sterile tile floor from The Spectral Stranger leads to a round barred door guarding a lamb, while surrounding windows are also barred or difficult to access. The lamb, which often symbolizes innocence, sacrifice, or even truth, is a dangling carrot to our main character, on the opposite end of an obstacle course seemingly designed to mimic the sins of our fathers in the real world. At the same time, the fence around the main figure is comically small, no match for her powerful body, and the planar breaks, while barred, are access points to the outside world The Spectral Stranger didn’t have. Considering Westenberger’s focus on the feminine interior, it’s possible these more benign threats represent self-preservation in the form of mental barriers, or “femme apprehension” in the artist’s words, to keep us safe from the vile consequences of breaking societal norms. While “the domestic space reflects contradictions without a way to resolve them,” says Westenberger, there’s a sense of progress in promises that stir up the flowers through new sprouts of feminine self-hood and narrative control.
Same Objects, Different Interaction
If a woman’s act of micro-resistance to advocate for herself wasn’t disquieting enough, artist Marilyn Murphy, Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, conjures humor at the idea of having it any other way. In over 30 years, Murphy has created a breadth of work, including drawings, paintings, and prints, that is as relevant and evolutionary as the times. While elements of her work can be traced to the Northern Renaissance, Italian Baroque, Dada, Realism, Film Noir, and other movements, a distinctively Surrealist quality lends a light, dream-likeness to her subject matter—floating clouds, balloons, and pillows recur (and some surprising objects float, too)—that complements the heavier concepts beneath the surface. “Ephemeral environments have played a role in my work for many years, both for their beauty and possible danger,” Murphy intimated in a January email. “In the last few years, I have turned my gaze from the ground to the sky.” This ephemeral state of creation is especially ripe for nostalgic consideration, as dreaming in both the aspirational and literal senses is often associated with youth, where dreaming in adulthood, when our path is likely to have already been chosen and the stress of said path upsets our time and sleep, can be more difficult. Even Murphy cited her childhood under the big sky of the Great Plains and her parents’ interest in aviation when she was young as reference material: “The action of the wind and the fleeting nature of clouds currently informs and often creates a setting for my ideas.”
Murphy’s gravity-free zone often reveals the comedy in society’s flaws by contrast, as the women and men depicted seem totally calm while accidents, emergencies, and unnatural phenomena occur around them. In Haunted by Tradition (2010), a large silver creamer, a silver sugar bowl, a full wine glass, and a spilling cup of coffee—20th-century upgrades to the same domestic objects seen in Vermeer paintings like The Milkmaid (c. 1658–1659) or Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c. 1662–1664)—linger mid-air against an indistinct background of stratus clouds or fog. The various materials shine and reflect as if recently polished with the diligent hospitality of human hands. We can only see the bottom half of the face of the figure in the bottom right corner of the drawing, but judging by the precision of makeup and shapely lips, a woman in a protective suit appears unflustered by her unusual circumstances, if it weren’t for the protective suit she’s wearing—the same kind used for handling biohazardous waste. Murphy’s comparison of domestic objects to infectious disease is quite a charming tongue-in-cheek critique of humanity, reminiscent of works by Roy Lichtenstein and Banksy that draw from the currency of commercial design and popular culture to drive a point home with viewers. The eerie nonchalance is reinforced by the stylistic proximity to the advertisements of mid-century magazines. Their idealistic “sense of optimism,” according to the artist, is particularly beguiling with big smiles, clean lines, and happy endings no matter the situation. In Murphy’s case, the picture plane doesn’t function as a portal to escape; instead, the act of escape is unfolding before our eyes. The protective suit prohibits the domestic objects from touching the woman’s skin, and she is therefore able to escape the responsibilities associated with them.
Marilyn Murphy, Haunted by Tradition, 2010, Courtesy of the artist
The Startling Incident (2023) challenges us to think a little differently about the gravitational orientation of the domestic objects in Murphy’s work; are they floating or falling? This time, the human presence comes in the form of an elegant, gloved hand actively reaching downward for a silver creamer as milk sloshes out the top. In this moment of looming catastrophe, one must ponder if “the startling incident” is the falling creamer or the fact that she, the glove-wearer, reaches for it. Like the protective suit in Haunted by Tradition, the glove offers a layer of separation between the wearer’s skin and the polished silver, but instead of idly watching from a safe distance, she is caught caring. The theatrical nature of this interaction between woman and domestic object, as well as the attention of a viewer, is emphasized by the comedy of error and the stage-like positioning of the spotlight on the hand and the draped curtain. The corresponding shadow further accentuates the folly of the hand. If The Startling Incident were a response to Haunted by Tradition, we see the consequence of prolonged domestic neglect; the creamer is no longer floating but falling, and, even if the reach to save is reflexive and/or performative, it’s startling from all angles. The scene begs the question: Is it so dangerous to escape, to dream, to defy gravity that women are bound to revert? The lack of a clear answer and the confusing multiplicity of interpretations mimic women’s difficulty in navigating the patriarchy in real life. Any step can be construed as a misstep. The would-be lesson from The Startling Incident is that bad things happen when you forget your place, and yet the tone still reads humorous and ironic in the juxtaposition of the Stepford-perfect styling and imperfect fumble, thereby diminishing the power of unrealistic expectation and championing women to stay the course.
Marilyn Murphy, The Startling Incident, 2023, Courtesy of the artist
I chose to end with Murphy because her work brings us full circle; it offers the most parallel feminine experience to that of Vermeer, and yet the pictured women’s reactions couldn’t be more opposite from each other. Vermeer’s women play their domestic roles dutifully, while Murphy’s women take comedically disproportionate measures to avoid theirs. While we can’t discount the influence of our Protestant inheritance in America and its domestic values under nationalist ideology, the allure of nostalgia and our basic human need for warmth, connection, and comfort have come to outweigh our desire to please. As time marches on, the past for each consecutive generation holds different meaning; our relationship to the past is in constant flux, perhaps never to return to the same, and yet nostalgia remains. Can we be nostalgic for a time we haven’t experienced yet? I think so. Like Fite, Siems, and Westenberger, Murphy is attracted to the edge of danger, where change lives. Each artist joins with the next to evolve Vermeer’s definitions of “comfort” and “home” so that, in time, the reference point for our collective nostalgia has hopefully transformed so much that future generations escape to a past in which we were all equally valued (and hopefully still so). Escapism and nostalgia are powerful tools in which to retreat, but also to forge ahead. In a future world we can use Vermeer’s own harkening to the past, not to double down on ancient and out-dated traditions to comfort us, but to uphold modern values of equity and inclusion that comfort us all.
(1) Wieseman, Marjorie E., Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2011), 2-4.
(2) Roelofs, Pieter and Gregor J. M. Weber, ed., Vermeer (Antwerp: Hannibal Books, 2023), 242.
(3) Wieseman, Vermeer’s Women, 6-7.
(4) Flanders, Judith, The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes (New York; St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 5-7.
(5) Wieseman, Vermeer’s Women, 7-8.
(6) Wieseman, Vermeer’s Women, 7.
Artist websites:
http://www.sethfite.com
https://www.annesiems.com
https://www.ericawestenberger.com
http://marilynmurphy.com
Elaine Slayton Akin has supported the missions of various arts organizations and art professionals, while covering arts and culture for publications wherever she has lived, such as Arkansas Life, Number: Inc., Burnaway, and Nashville Arts. She first got involved with Number while pursuing her masters in art history at the University of Memphis. Currently in Jacksonville, Florida, she splits her time between archiving the historic collection at Riverside Avondale Preservation and supporting the needs of the members and urban core population at Riverside Presbyterian Church. You can follow her on Instagram @nounou_moderne for art, history, and travel content.