Who are the  three conversing figures shown in the Windsor Drawing, almost certainly a preparatory drawing for the Linder Gallery? The excerpt below from  A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery proposes a hypothesis: Read more…

WESCHLER: Taking it one step further, I would also argue that this is the moment when art starts being art as opposed to being science. For all of your claims that the old man and the woman should be read principally iconographically — that they represent this or they represent that and so forth — there are times when a cigar is only a cigar, and there is something quite moving about that girl asleep on the lap of that old man—something crying out to be seen not just as a symbol, but as a relationship between two human beings. Thirty years from here you’ll be getting Vermeer with his insistence on the substantive presence of the sitter as a person and not as a genre and not as a symbol, not as a puzzle — not as anything other than a person.
And I think that’s already beginning to happen in a time like this. Read more…

Tamara Schlesinger’s photographs of the conversation about the Linder Gallery, 12 December 2008, New York.