Reference
Vermeer,
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, c. 1662-64. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
In the last works he finished, Deem was still expanding his repertoire of strategies. ...These striking works recapitulate and yet extend Deem's wit and stylistic panache....the facing profiles of the woman in "Profiles" (2007) echo the face in his much earlier
"Restoration"(1967), where the framed face becomes a comment on the formalized figuration of portraiture. Taken as a group, these paintings show Deem was not only still probing but also more willing to reconfigure and recast Vermeer's signature images into one more act of praise, one more turn of the frame. (Charles Molesworth, "Presence and Pleasure in the Art of George Deem," Exhibition Catalogue, 2009, Allan Stone Gallery and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York).
For this painting, Deem doubled his appropriation of the figure in Vermeer's
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (ca. 1663-64; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) by "mirroring" her, as he called it, and enclosing her face within a shaded square, thereby creating a gracefully curving, symmetrical negative space at the center of the composition...(David Dearinger, exhibition wall text,
George Deem: The Art of Art History, The Boston Athenaeum, April 11 - September 1, 2012).
