DUTCH TREAT

By ROBERT HUGHES/WASHINGTON

TWO OF THE CASUALTIES OF THE Republican Congress's petulant drive to shut down parts of the government have been--well, you'd hardly guess. Not only nine Cabinet departments and 38 federal agencies, commissions and boards, but the artists Winslow Homer and Johannes Vermeer.

Winslow Homer was, along with Thomas Eakins, the greatest American painter of the late 19th century. Vermeer of Delft was the greatest Dutch one of the late 17th century. Both are the subjects of extraordinary retrospective shows at the National Gallery in Washington. But because the Republicans' zeal to pressure Bill Clinton into signing their balanced-budget bill has closed the National Gallery (along with the whole Smithsonian complex, and much else), nobody can see Homer in Washington, though the show will travel to Boston in February and New York City in June.

Vermeer is more difficult. From the moment it opened two months ago, it was besieged by art lovers--as many as 4,000 a day, lining up to see 21 paintings, two-thirds of the master's surviving output. Because Vermeer's work is so rare, no such gathering of it has been made since his lifetime, or will happen again in ours. But, on Dec. 16, the show had to close. Last week the National Gallery's director, Earl ("Rusty") Powell III, managed to scrape together the necessary $12,000 or so a day from private museum funds to reopen the Vermeer galleries--though none of the rest of the museum--for just a week, until this Wednesday. Now you see it, now you don't, then you do. But next week, who knows?

Whatever happens, the show has to close for good on Feb. 11 in order to go on view at the Mauritshuis in the Hague in March. Nothing in the budget blackmail epitomizes the Republicans' folly as well as Vermeer. He's the canary in our ideological coal mine. This, one realizes, is part of what Congress's cultural ignorami mean by renewing American civilization. It is done by humiliating cultural institutions and depriving Americans of what the institutions contain. Meanwhile, at the National Gallery, lines have been forming at 6 a.m. in below-freezing weather and stretching round the block. And what are the unticketed missing? Quite simply, one of the most perfect shows that has ever been installed in an American museum.

Forget about social history. Though any post-Marxist pedant can wring out the usual insights about patriarchy and property in 17th century Dutch bourgeois life, none of them touch on the peculiar magic of Vermeer's images. Like Piero della Francesca, Vermeer was a highly inexpressive artist. He didn't even paint a self-portrait, as far as anyone knows. You come out of the exhibit knowing almost as little about Vermeer the man as when you went in. Biography, faint: Lived in Delft, a backwater. Son of a silkworker. A Papist in a Calvinist town. Quite successful nonetheless. Married Catharina Bolnes, about whom equally little is recorded. One of the few sure facts is that he had 11 children, all of whom faced destitution after he died in 1675, at the depth of a financial depression that all but destroyed the Dutch art market. But his pictures don't show a trace of what must, at times, have been a domestic hell of squalling and brown diapers.

His interiors raise the obsessive cleanliness of Dutch domestic culture to the level of abstraction--no wonder his great Dutch successor, Mondrian, loved him, for that and other reasons. Vermeer's jonkers and juffers (dandies and damsels) are so neat, dressy and full of decorum that you can hardly compare them to the rowdier figures elsewhere in 17th century Dutch art, coming on with wineglasses and making gestures of sexual insinuation. Vermeer's are seldom marked by experience, and except for maids and servants, they all belong to the same stratum--a class, needless to say, rather above his. Does this make them insipid? Sometimes, yes, but it can also turn them into vessels of lyric innocence, as in the Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665-66, with her liquidly painted turban of virginal blue, who turns her shining gaze to meet yours as though she'd never seen another human being.

Vermeer wasn't a great draftsman, and he could be an oddly clumsy one in some details of the human body--though he excelled in virtuoso rendering of inanimate objects, catching the moony sheen of pearls or the precise tautness of a viol's catgut strings. As an analyst of human character, he was quite vapid compared with Rembrandt or Frans Hals.

He was, above all, an unsurpassed painter of light. He used the finest-ground colors, and he knew everything about glazing and underpainting. Those ultramarine blues, whites and lead-tin yellows make each image an epitome of a luminous world, a place not merely revealed by light but constructed by it. Even his darks shine. The late 17th century in Holland was an age of the eye: optics was a ruling scientific interest, and the telescope and microscope were opening tracts of nature that up till then had been below or beyond normal sight. As an aid to painting his View of Delft, Vermeer probably used the camera obscura--a box with a lens that captures the image of a scene on ground glass. It may be that the circles of confusion--the luminous spots caused by imperfections of the lens--gave him the idea for his poignant highlights, the liquid white dots that sparkle off eyeball, lip or chair and give them such a dewy appearance, as though rendered with an airbrush.

Light comes out as sacred, even in a homely scene--or especially there. Vermeer's religious paintings and allegories aren't very moving or convincing; God is in the shimmering, glinting details of the house. In Young Woman with a Pitcher, circa 1658-60, the subject holds a gilt water pitcher while opening a casement window whose leaded pane looks just like a 1912 Mondrian apple tree turned on its side. Blue is everywhere: deep ultramarine in her skirt and sleeves, lighter blue in the cloth on the table, whose tone rhymes with the rolling bar of the map on the wall--a recession of precisely judged color echoes. It is also reflected in the pitcher, whose basin gathers beneath its rim an exquisitely ordered mosaic of reflections from the tabletop. And then there is the white cotton that drapes her head and shoulders, whose every starched plane and level of translucency is observed, light filtering through a small, soft structure that's as satisfying as one of Cezanne's hillsides.

Sight has taken over from narrative. Nothing really happens. Time has stopped. Yet for all his classicism, his tense repose and care with proportion and interval, Vermeer can be a theatrical painter. It's just that the theatricality is cooled down by being shifted from people to props, leaving the peace of the figures undisturbed. It's like the moment when a curtain rises to show an actor in reverie ignoring the audience.

A vivid example is The Music Lesson, circa 1662-64. The foreground is occupied by the elephantine bulk of a table draped in a Turkish carpet. Its thick folds of wool and the blue tracery on its shadowed flank, which looks dull in reproduction but fairly blazes in the original, delay your eye as it tries to get into the picture. More obstacles are built into the space between the carpet and the figures at the end of the room. There is a white pitcher on the table, a sky-blue chair with gleaming brass tack heads, and finally the voluptuous mass of a bass viol lying on the floor.

In negotiating these things, your eye becomes tuned to the distance of the figures and to the air around them: the woman at the keyboard whose back is turned but whose absorbed face can be glimpsed in the canted wall mirror, and her teacher (or perhaps, given Vermeer's interest in music as a metaphor of harmonious love, her suitor) in black. You can gauge the depth of the room from the perspective clarity of its floor tiles. It is real, but at the end it becomes a paradise of abstraction, in the sober play of dark-framed rectangles of picture, mirror and the long lid of the virginal's cabinet.

Vermeer's visual music is utterly mysterious. He wasn't only abstract on the large scale of composition, negative shape and depth. When you look at the details, you see a system of coherent microforms in every representation of small pattern and texture, whether he's doing the faux-marble finish of a virginal case or resolving the optical glitter of a gold frame into tiny lozenges of paint. You're meant to enjoy both the illusion and the means by which it's brought about. Supremely conscious of his language, he puts all the machinery in the open--like Velazquez, but on a tiny scale.

And then, suddenly, he pulls you inside, through the looking glass, and you are left in awe at the intensity of this seemingly quiet vision, its power to enclose you in its fictions. Unless, presumably, you are up there on Capitol Hill, talking about how you can abolish the deficit by funding B-2 bombers and closing down Vermeer.