'Tim's Vermeer' sheds light on a great artist

EDGAR Allan Poe once described science as a vulture, whose wings are dull realities.

That vulture trains its beady eyes on the work of a master painter in "Tim's Vermeer," a documentary about an American inventor who deduces and demonstrates that Dutch master Johannes Vermeer almost surely used an optical machine to create his eerily photographic canvasses.

Nobody in "Tim's Vermeer" calls the artist a cheat, but the whiff of it is there - the movie is made by Penn Jillette, who's made a career revealing and debunking magic, and here implies that Vermeer's stunning images are a kind of sleight of hand.

The Tim of the title is Tim Jenison, founder of a thriving visual-effects company and who saw something uncannily modern and photographic in the 17th-century work of Vermeer. Artists of the time had access to lenses and optical devices, and Tim believed that Vermeer must have used them to create his haunting images (other artists and art historians have advanced the same theory).

So, Tim sets about to reverse-engineer the process - starting with tools that Vermeer would have had available, and devising an (ingeniously) simple combination of lenses and mirrors to create a "machine" that makes it possible for even an amateur brushman to capture images and turn them into Vermeer-ish art. He then endeavors to recreate Vermeer's "The Music Lesson" - duplicating the objects (and people) in the frame, applying his "machine" to the process -and voila, after about a year of painstaking work, he has a respectable facsimile.

We're glad for him. Tim is a kind of classic American eccentric, a likable fellow with an oddball dream who devotes massive amounts of money and time to an obscure pursuit. And we're grateful for the forensic factoids gleaned from his recreation of Vermeer's probable process - by actually doing it, Tim is able to make discoveries that strongly support his theory (the lenses yield imperceptible curvature to lines in the painting, visible in Vermeer's work).

The movie grinds a bit, but that's part of the point. The process is painstaking, and it's surprising that Penn and Teller don't take note of this - Vermeer produced only 35 confirmed paintings in his lifetime. If each one took a year, as this process would necessitate, that's more evidence on their side.

At other times, the movie diminishes Vermeer's great work. He succeeded in producing the art world's most compelling realistic figurative images at a time when realistic figurative images were most prized. Painting moved on to Impressionism/Expressionism/abstraction, but Vermeer will always be arguably the best at what he did, and at a time when what he did was most valued.

Penn and Teller and Tim brag that anyone using this method can paint a Vermeer, but the time for creating a "Vermeer" has come and gone. Mere mechanical repetition does not recreate the inventive genius of the original.

The documentary claims to "demystify" art, but the information set forth only places us more in awe of the 17th-century man concocting a method that delighted (and baffled) humanity for several centuries.

Oh, and you can stop calling the device "Tim's Machine." If your theory is right, guys, it's Johannes' machine.