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A Love Letter to Vermeer
The Frick’s austere new show about the Dutch master is a quiet triumph.
Only one painting, The Love Letter(on loan from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands), is explicitly identified as a billet-doux, but all three are suggestive of interior dramas; secret vulnerabilities and joys; two selves reaching toward one another. The details sing: a notebook on the floor, a red wax seal casually cast aside, the curtains stirred by a breeze. He reminds us that grace can reside in the angle of a head, the creases of a letter, light passing into shadow, a “little patch of yellow wall,” as Proust famously wrote.
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