The Milkmaid’s realistically rendered bread looks almost touchable. The Met’s curator, Walter Liedtke, almost touches it.
“Don’t say that the curator says it’s about sex,” the Metropolitan Museum’s Golden Age master, Walter Liedtke, admonished us at the press preview for Vermeer’s Masterpiece: “The Milkmaid”, which opened today for a too brief two-month run (to Nov. 29).
Liedtke would prefer that we describe that small, iconic painting (on a rare journey from its home at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) as being about “attraction and restraint, and a subtle form of voyeurism.”
Oh, all right: No sex, please. We’re Dutch!
So what DID I say when asked about this much loved lady by WNYC radio’s Soterios Johnson (with whom I have a fizzy chemistry at least as good as my rapport with print journalist Deanna Isaacs)?
Patience, art-lings. To hear “Vermeer,” you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s “Morning Edition”—on the radio in the NYC metropolitan area from 7-9 a.m. on 93.9 FM; from 6-8 a.m. on 820 AM; and live on the web, if you click the red arrow in the lefthand column, here, at the appropriate moment. (If I learn anything more about what specific time(s) I’ll be on, I’ll update at the end of this post. Later tomorrow, I’ll embed the podcast on CultureGrrl, when it becomes available online.)
When you listen, see if you can discern the disconcerting moment when I tip over my cup of coffee but keep babbling into the microphone while I set it aright. (After all, I do have experience being doused by liquids!) Let’s also see if the editor has left in my one off-color comment, which also had to do with fluids.
If nothing else, my contribution should provide a brief, lighthearted respite on a day heavy with 9/11 remembrances.