Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

[00:00:00]TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back  to Conversations with Tyler. I’m very happy to be here today in person with Andrew Graham-Dixon.  He is one of the world’s leading art historians, art critics, and he is prominent in the  world of documentary. Andrew, welcome.

[00:00:15]ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON: It’s a  great pleasure to be here, Tyler.

[00:00:17]COWEN: Andrew has a new and fascinating book out  among his many books. It’s called Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. Let’s start with Vermeer. Why was  Vermeer’s art forgotten for so long, until the middle of the 19th century? How could that happen?  To us, it looks very accessible and beautiful, and obviously better than most of his contemporaries. GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, this was part of the general mystery of Vermeer that I have tried to explain  in the book. I don’t think it had previously been very well explained, but what has emerged quite  clearly is that he painted basically all of these great paintings, the finest examples of his work,  for one single family. They kept them very close.

[00:01:01]They left them to their daughter. She died young,  left them to her husband. He died only in 1696, 20 years after Vermeer’s death, and only then did  these paintings enter the world at large. Up until that time, they’d only been owned by one family. I can’t think of another case of a great artist—I imagine if all Rembrandt’s pictures had  been painted just for one man and his wife, we would never have heard of him probably. COWEN: Where do they start being seen?

[00:01:30]What’s the first public unveiling  of Vermeer as a great artist?

[00:01:34]GRAHAM-DIXON: It would be in the mid-19th century  when they were finally—the miracle is that these paintings were sold at auction. No one’s heard  of Vermeer. As soon as they then get resold in the later 17th century, they’re being resold as  if they were by other artists because Vermeer is not a name. He’s not like Gucci. Vermeer, if it  gets sold, it gets sold as a Rembrandt or as a Gerard Douw, as even a Pieter de Hooch. His work  is being sold under false currency, if you like.

[00:02:08]What’s amazing is that it all survives, and it  survives long enough for this wonderful guy called Théophile Thoré, who’s a French revolutionary  exiled from France, goes to Belgium, a Frenchman’s idea of purgatory. But in Belgium, he discovers  Vermeer and puts together the fact that all these paintings, which are masquerading as those by  other artists, are actually by Vermeer. He says, “There is this painter called Vermeer. We never  heard of him. Isn’t he incredible?” Within 50 years, 60 years, Marcel Proust writes his great  novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, at the center of which he places a man, a character,  a Swann, who is obsessed by Vermeer.

[00:02:53]Proust makes it very clear that he regards the  View of Delft as the most beautiful painting in the world. Vermeer is one of the greatest. From  that moment onwards, Vermeer begins his ascent to become one of the most loved painters in the  history of civilization, but it’s very late.

[00:03:08]COWEN: Does this whole history make  you more persuaded by objectivist or subjectivist theories of aesthetics? That is  it inevitable who becomes a great painter?

[00:03:20]GRAHAM-DIXON: Mystical aesthetics is where I  would go with this because it seems to me that it’s a proper miracle that a painting  that has nothing—nothing on its side, no one fighting for it, no one rooting for it, no  name, it’s got nothing except itself—survives 400 years. Not only that, all of the other paintings,  more or less all of the others, survive. I think that’s a true miracle. It’s what Vermeer put  into those paintings, and that’s really the heart of my book, what’s in the paintings that  made them survive. That faith, that belief, that idealism, that dream, that beauty that’s  in the paintings, that’s why they survived.

[00:04:04]That’s why no one threw them away. They didn’t  not throw them away because they were valuable; they weren’t valuable. They didn’t not throw  them away because they were by a famous person.

[00:04:11]They didn’t know who they were by, but they kept  them because they knew they had something in them.

[00:04:16]COWEN: In what sense was Vermeer a liberal? GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, the main discovery of my book is that Vermeer was among the very first pioneers  of what we now call the liberal tradition.

[00:04:36]COWEN: What we now call the  Netherlands, then the Dutch Republic.

[00:04:38]GRAHAM-DIXON: In the Dutch Republic, and  the Dutch contribution to the Enlightenment, which is the origins of the liberal tradition,  has been very much forgotten. That’s absolutely at the heart of my book, is an attempt to remember  these people, to bring them back into the place in history that they deserve. I’m not only talking  about Vermeer. I’m talking about his friends, his patrons, because that’s the discovery of the  book, is that he and his friends were a remarkable group of people, and they have been  completely forgotten, and what they believed has been largely forgotten too. We need  to remember it now, probably more than ever.

[00:05:15]COWEN: This was also a religious movement. GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes.

[00:05:18]COWEN: Doctrinally, how would they have been  different from, say, Protestants in England?

[00:05:24]The Collegiants, the Remonstrants? GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. Vermeer’s patrons, it emerges, and Vermeer himself, were part of a Protestant  sect in Holland called the Remonstrants. They had a more extreme manifestation called the  Collegiants, and they were unique among all Christian denominations of that time in being  utterly opposed to division, hostility, enmity.

[00:05:57]The only thing they wanted was to bring all  Christians, indeed all people—they included Jewish people and Muslim people—they wanted to bring  everyone together within a faith that only really cleaved to the essentials of what Jesus Christ  said, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount.

[00:06:19]They said, “If you actually follow Jesus  properly, you can never make war. You can never persecute someone who differs from your  opinion. You can never pick on somebody because they believe something different.” They were very,  very tolerationist. They formed the first pacifist movement in European history. They lived in a  time of appalling warfare, the Thirty Years’ War, probably the worst war in the history of the  modern West. Fifteen million out of 20 million German people died in the course of 30 years,  and the 5 million who were left, all the women had been violated, and all the men only have  one arm or one leg. It was truly atrocious.

[00:07:03]They’re responding to real traumatic historical  events. They’re responding to what is going on around the corner from where they live. They  come up with this very, very beautiful approach to life, full of optimism, full of idealism. For  about 20 years, the Dutch Republic actually lives by these codes of belief to a great extent.  It’s the only tolerant country in Europe.

[00:07:28]COWEN: If I look at The Art of Painting,  a painting by Vermeer in Vienna, one of my favorites, I used to think of that as a Catholic  painting, in part because of the map in the back of the scene. Are you revising that view? GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. Vermeer marries a Catholic, which has led to a common mistake that  he must have converted to Catholicism.

[00:07:52]It’s very clear from the documentary  evidence that I present in my book that all of his friends are from this  Remonstrant, Collegiant axis. Of course, that’s exactly what a Remonstrant  would do, is marry a Catholic.

[00:08:05]COWEN: A lot of my friends are  Jewish, and I’m not Jewish. That’s not dispositive. It may mean something. GRAHAM-DIXON: No. We’ve got so much evidence to show that Vermeer was a member  of the Remonstrant and Collegiant movement, and he painted all these pictures for those  people. If the Remonstrants and the Collegiants had a bone of contention with anyone, it was  probably with the extreme militant Jesuits, who did more or less want to extinguish them. This is  the problem with toleration. How do you tolerate someone who actually wants to snuff you out? They  did their best. Vermeer is a tolerant Remonstrant who’s actually married to a Catholic and living  in a Catholic corner in Delft. His pictures are most certainly not Catholic paintings. COWEN: If I go to the Met in New York, there’s a painting which we call Allegory of the  Catholic Faith. Of course, you know it well. At least I was taught the painting is showing the  celebration of Catholic mass in private homes in a surreptitious manner. Is that wrong? GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes, that is wrong.

[00:09:13]COWEN: What’s the correct way  to think about that painting?

[00:09:16]GRAHAM-DIXON: In my book, it’s all about  toleration, so I cannot possibly lay down to you what I think you should believe. The key,  as always, is the context. I’ve discovered the context of the picture, which has not really been  written about. If you look at the Met’s text that it puts forward to promote a particular idea about  that picture, they don’t mention at all the owner of the painting, who was a very interesting  man indeed, called Hermann von Schwoll, who was the head of the Hamburg post office and a  very, very rich man, free-thinking, dissident.

[00:09:59]He supported a young man who lived in his house,  didn’t have any money, and he was one of the first popular journalists, a liberal journalist. He wrote in favor of the Collegiant movement.

[00:10:10]He wrote proto-feminist tracks. That was  another aspect of these people. He was most definitely not a militant Catholic. He liked  allegories. The Allegory of the Catholic Faith, in my opinion, is an allegory of how hard it is  to get to God if you are a Catholic. The woman in the picture is surrounded by emblems of the  complex doctrines of the Catholic faith, which Remonstrants and Collegiants said, “That’s what’s  holding you back. You’re far too doctrinally complicated, you Catholics. You’d kill us over  whether we believe or not that the wafer is actually the real flesh of Jesus.” Or, “Let’s just  forget all these doctrines and we’ll get together and we’ll just unite and read the New Testament  together and we’ll get straight to God. We’ll get straight to heaven without all of this clutter.” That painting is full of clutter. Everywhere you look, there are trip hazards. She’s almost  about to fall over this globe, which symbolizes, in theory, the Catholic Church’s dominion over all  of this world, which was a doctrine which Vermeer and his friends found not to their taste. COWEN: What do you make, though, of the 15 children being baptized Catholic?  Yes, there were 15, as you know, which is remarkable. Only one wife, right? GRAHAM-DIXON: He loved his wife very much, but it wouldn’t be right—Protestants had lots  of children. You can’t say that, oh, he’s had lots of children, and therefore he’s a Catholic.  That doesn’t really compute. People have kids.

[00:11:49]COWEN: No, but the kids were Catholic, right? GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes, sorry, absolutely. No, his children are raised as Catholics  because Vermeer has no money.

[00:11:59]COWEN: What about the simple hypothesis, Vermeer  wasn’t very Protestant? A lot of men just aren’t that religious. They’ll go along with what their  wives want. She was Catholic, we know that. He did these pictures for money. His patrons were  Protestant. He just wasn’t very religious.

[00:12:16]That’s how I would read Vermeer’s career. GRAHAM-DIXON: Would you still read like that?

[00:12:22]I think the paintings are profoundly religious. I  think he was profoundly religious. What he didn’t do was paint for money. Someone with his  talents, if he’d wanted to paint for money, he could have been rich. He didn’t need to paint  for money because his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, was one of the richest women in Delft. He struck  a devil’s bargain, if you like, I think, whereby she will support the family. She will support her  daughter, who’s rebelled against her, to marry Vermeer in the first place. She didn’t approve  of the marriage, but she reluctantly agrees. She will pay all the bills, but it’s to be her rules. They will be brought up, like her, as Catholics.

[00:13:09]Vermeer doesn’t like it, but it’s okay. He’ll put  up with it. Where his heart is in the Remonstrant corner of the city, his heart and soul is there.  That’s what he believes in. He does all of this so as not to have to paint for money. COWEN: The Vermeer painting, The Concert, that was stolen from the Gardner Museum,  do you have any intuition where it might be or if it still has survived? GRAHAM-DIXON: Oh, man, I wish I did.

[00:13:35]COWEN: You must have a best guess. Who  can I ask who will know better than you?

[00:13:40]GRAHAM-DIXON: I’m not that kind of  art detective. I try to excavate the meanings of the paintings, not their whereabouts.

[00:13:46]I’m really sorry to disappoint you. COWEN: You may contest the premise here, but why did not Dutch music blossom in  the same manner that Dutch painting did?

[00:13:55]GRAHAM-DIXON: That painting that you just  mentioned, The Concert, is a very good example of Dutch music blossoming. To simplify things  a little bit, Dutch music essentially doesn’t blossom because Dutch Calvinism, orthodox  Calvinism that is, the official faith of the Republic, considers music to be dangerous to  the soul. To listen to music or to perform music, it’s like admiring a beautiful statue of the  Virgin Mary. They think it’s wrong. The statue has to be smashed. The music has to be got rid  of because that’s in the way of your faith.

[00:14:42]That’s why you have these wonderful pictures of  the white churches of the Reformed Dutch. They’re churches without images, but they’re also churches  without music. But the Collegiants don’t have such objections themselves. They think music helps  bring you to God. A Collegiant meeting is a very beautiful thing. I should perhaps explain  for people who are not familiar with any of this that the Collegiants are Christians without a  church. Most of them are women, 80 percent. This, by the way, is why all of Vermeer’s paintings  are of women, because he’s painting for this predominantly female Collegiant group  who meet in the house of his patrons, which is next to the Remonstrant church. That painting, The Concert, as it’s called, which is a misnomer, it’s not a concert; it’s a  painting of a Collegiant meeting taking place.

[00:15:41]It’s a pair with a painting, which I can’t tell  you where it is because it’s owned by the King of England, Charles. It was his mother’s favorite  painting. I saw it once in her bedroom. She used to keep it very close. Those two paintings  show us what the music-making at the end of a Collegiant meeting might have looked like.  You see this group of people playing music.

[00:16:09]There’s a wonderful CD, I can’t remember the  name of it, I could get the reference for it, where you can actually hear this music. They set the Psalms to very complex, musical, beautiful, multivocal  harmonies. You have to imagine that there’s a meeting. The meeting might go on for five  hours. These women are all there together, and they’re talking, talking, talking, talking.  First of all, one of them reads out a passage from the New Testament. Then they all talk about what  it means. Then they discuss what they’re going to do the next day, how they’re going to help  because they do a lot of charity work, these people. They plan their proposals. They probably  have an argument about whether the Messiah is actually going to come in the year 1666. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. They might have a quarrel about that. At the end, when  all the single voices have finished speaking, the voices all come together in this song, in  this music, which is itself a demonstration of what harmony between people looks like. COWEN: Was there more, you could call it iconophobia, in England at the same time?  Churches stripped bare, visual arts penalized?

[00:17:20]GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. In Britain, the Church of  England was as astonishingly destructive as the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They  destroyed the entirety of British art.

[00:17:35]COWEN: Say, Durham or Lincoln,  those places were not wrecked.

[00:17:38]They’re in remarkably good shape today. GRAHAM-DIXON: The church is left. It’s like theaters, but all of the actors have been killed.  The stage set is left, but everything is gone, all the art, all the sculpture, all the  stained glass. There’s a wonderful quote by one of my favorite historians, Lawrence Gowing.  He said, “If you were to try to reconstruct the glories of British medieval art, it would  be as if you would try to put together a diplodocus from half a tailbone and one tooth.” COWEN: I’m a big fan of your book, A History of British Art. In that, you insightfully remark that  a lot of English art earlier on was harder, more angular, and less obsessed with perspective. Have  those traits carried down into English or British art of the 19th and 20th centuries, or even today? GRAHAM-DIXON: I’m a bit suspicious about identifying national traits. I’m not sure. COWEN: If you see a painting that’s English, my guess is you can recognize it as  such. Oh, that’s English. It’s not French. I’d be shocked if you couldn’t do that. GRAHAM-DIXON: I think in the 20th century and the 21st century, that might be harder. I think I  might struggle because the power of Esperanto and also the herd mentality of the modern artist  should not be underestimated. People are very good at imitating other people. You can look  at Russian art in the 19th century. An awful lot of it looks very French because they were  so obsessed with trying to imitate the French, because that was the pinnacle of civilization.  I think it’s a bit of a tricky one.

[00:19:12]To go back briefly to Vermeer, his patrons  and their meetings, and these pictures that are painted for their meetings, I just  think it’s such an astonishing thing, the lesson that’s being shown to other people in  a time when, as you just alluded to, in Britain, if you’re a Catholic, forget marrying  a Catholic. If you discover a Catholic, they will be tortured to death in public. They  will have their entrails ripped out in public.

[00:19:47]They will be fed their own eyeballs. It’s truly  awful. Yet in Holland, a tolerant Remonstrant such as Vermeer can actually marry a Catholic. He’s painting for a Remonstrant and her husband, who, to their meetings for these Christians  without a church, you don’t have to believe in God. You can be Jewish. You can be a  Muslim. The only thing you have to believe is that Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on  the Mount contain the salvation for mankind.

[00:20:22]When you think of those people actually meeting,  it’s the difference between, say, for example, if you’ve got the Troubles in Northern Ireland  and you’ve got people from Sinn Féin meeting, the nationalists, the politicians meeting. That’s completely different than if you’ve got Catholic mothers of sons who’ve  been shot in the conflict deciding to meet in their houses with Protestant mothers,  women who’ve been shot, meet together, hug, talk, and embrace. That’s completely different.  That’s what these people were doing. It’s as if, I don’t know, what would the example be today?  It’s as if, say, for example, some Jewish mothers got together with some mothers from Gaza and had a  picnic in the rubble together. What message would that send? That’s the message they’re sending. It’s an aspect of Dutch history that is just, as far as I’m concerned, it’s never mentioned.  It’s been forgotten. You can go to any number of wonderful galleries like the Washington National  Gallery, where you’ve got amazing, beautiful, wonderful Dutch art, but this context, this  troubled context behind it, the war, the death, it’s just been edited out. It’s been forgotten.  It’s not part of people’s consciousness.

[00:21:46]I’m trying to put it back. COWEN: How does Rembrandt fit into this doctrine of toleration? GRAHAM-DIXON: That’s a great question. I was on a show of late Rembrandt in the National Gallery  in London with a good friend of mine, Danny Katz, who’s a Renaissance sculpture expert. Very plain  spoken, but always has something interesting to say. We were just looking in this dark room,  all these wonderful paintings, The Jewish Bride, it’s wonderful, beautiful painting, so tender. He  said, “Everywhere you look, everywhere you look, there’s just love. You’re surrounded by love,  aren’t you?” That’s what Rembrandt is. It’s love.

[00:22:26]COWEN: There’s quite a bit of Judaism  in his paintings, as you mentioned.

[00:22:29]GRAHAM-DIXON: There are Jewish people in his  paintings. He painted, I’ll get his name wrong, Menasseh ben Israel, the head of the Jewish  community in Amsterdam. Very interestingly, it’s not really been talked about because  people always say Vermeer and Rembrandt are the opposite. The origin for my book about  Vermeer is really the discovery that I made.

[00:22:51]Wherever you look in detail in Vermeer’s life,  you find members of this religious movement, the Remonstrants or the Collegiants. They’re not  very common. Only one in 500 people in Holland is a Collegiant. If I find eight in Vermeer’s life,  including the leader of the movement, we know that he’s part of it. It’s just no way that he’s not. Interestingly, Rembrandt knows these people, too. Rembrandt’s older, a fair bit older, but  he paints the head of the Remonstrant Church, Uytenbogaert. Sorry for the butchery in my Dutch  accent. Uytenbogaert. That portrait is in the Rijksmuseum. As far as we know, Rembrandt’s a  slippery fish, but I think his approach is very open. He’s very nondoctrinaire. He’s certainly  not a hardline Calvinist. He’s friends with the Mennonites. The Mennonites are very liberal. I  think it’s not a coincidence that the liberal West adopted Rembrandt as its favorite artist. Looking back now with this historical knowledge that I feel I’ve gained about this period, this  forgotten secret of this amazing movement that existed, that they seem to have been a part of. COWEN: Do you have any intuition why Rembrandt prints, in even the last two or three years, have  gone up so much in price? People used to say Old Masters were greatly underpriced. They’re such  a bargain. Not long ago, a Canaletto auctions for $30 million, which struck me as a bit crazy.  Rembrandt prints, which are more or less the same thing over time, they’ve gone up by two times  or three times over a few years. What’s going on here? Old Masters coming back because people  are sick of the rest, or is it just anomalous?

[00:24:42]GRAHAM-DIXON: It might be a little bit anomalous.  I’ve been following it because I was friends with a guy at Sotheby’s who did a lot of research into  a recently discovered Rembrandt. It felt like there’s a ceiling for a Rembrandt painting.  This is a lovely painting of the Nativity, a monochrome painting. It sold for £10 million or  $10 million, which is the same price as the last two Rembrandt self-portraits have sold for. When  you think an Andy Warhol, which is essentially a screen print, is selling for maybe $100 million,  it does seem really weird and underpriced.

[00:25:24]Yet, as you say, the prints have been selling  for figures that, compared to the paintings, are really high. I don’t know. It is my belief  that Rembrandt is a painter just full of love for the world. The values that are enshrined in  his paintings are important values. Maybe that we live in such tough times, maybe people just  feel the value of those things all the more.

[00:25:59]COWEN: There are attributions for both Vermeer  and Rembrandt, as you well know. How uncertain are they? What does the uncertainty hinge upon? GRAHAM-DIXON: I’m not interested in paintings that weren’t in the house much. I know what  they were, so I don’t need to get involved with attribution. I’m only really interested in  the paintings that were in the house. You have one here in Washington. COWEN: Sure.

[00:26:22]GRAHAM-DIXON: Woman Holding a Balance. COWEN: It’s now accepted. Formerly, it was uncertain. I’m never sure  whether I should trust the new judgment.

[00:26:28]GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, there’s no question. As I show  in my book, one of the things that emerges from the book, once you actually know why the paintings  were made, once you know the beliefs of the people for whom they were painted, suddenly, one of  the things that emerges really clearly about the paintings is that a lot of them were painted  in twos. The Woman Holding a Balance is clearly, without any doubt, the pair to the famous painting  in the Rijksmuseum called The Milkmaid. All of the painting’s titles are nothing to do with  Vermeer. They’re all modern inventions.

[00:27:08]She’s not a milkmaid, and she’s not just a woman  with a balance. What the two pictures represent is the two aspects. They simplify Christianity to  its bare essentials: Do well, think well. At the end of the day, you consider, have I behaved as  Jesus would have wanted me to behave today? Have I done everything that I should have? I ask my  conscience this question. That’s what the Woman Holding a Balance is doing. She’s not weighing  gold. She’s weighing her conscience. Behind her, there’s a painting of the last judgment where  the souls are being weighed by Archangel Michael.

[00:27:46]She has weighed her own soul. There’s nothing  in the balance. The scales are empty. They’re perfectly poised. Her conscience is clean. The  other lady, exactly the same scale to the room she occupies, the same light source coming from  the left, she is crumbling bread into a bowl of milk. She’s making what the Dutch call bread  pudding, which was the food that you gave when you administered charity to the old and to the  very young, people who were too infirm or old to be able to chew solid food. You gave them this  pap, this bread pudding. That’s what she’s doing.

[00:28:25]She’s robed in blue, almost as if she were  a modern Madonna. If you’re seeing them in traditional Christian terms, they are Martha  and Mary. They are the contemplative life and the active life. If there’s any doubt in your mind  about them being a pair, which they’ve never been identified as a pair as far as I’m aware up until  now. They were certainly not hung as a pair in the great Rijksmuseum exhibition that happened a few  years ago. If you look at the two pictures, if you get them up onto a computer screen together,  you’ll see that there’s a nail in the wall.

[00:29:00]Just above and to the left of each woman in  exactly the same place. It’s Vermeer tapping us on the shoulder from 400 years ago and  saying, “Yes, if there’s any doubt that these paintings are a pair, look at the nail.” COWEN: What did you learn from the great Rijksmuseum exhibit of more or less all the  Vermeers? When you saw them all together, it must have been the first time  for you. What new idea did you have?

[00:29:24]GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, I was testing the big  new idea, which is the book. It was great timing for me because I had completed the  first draft of my manuscript, or most of it, certainly when it came to the paintings.  I’d written more or less everything that I wanted to write about the paintings. There  was this fantastic opportunity to see them all.

[00:29:52]The Rijksmuseum’s director, Taco Dibbits, who I’d  known for a long time, was kind enough to give me, in effect, a free pass because it was  a very tough ticket. I think I went to the exhibition maybe 30 or 40 times. I went many, many times just to really embed in the paintings. You had to go  toward the end of the day, particularly when the crowds slackened off a bit, or right  at the beginning if you got in before anyone else. You’d get a little bit of time, especially  with the paintings at the far end of the show.

[00:30:27]It was great. I’m very grateful to them. COWEN: Putting aside the details of your own thesis, what is it you think you see  more of on the 17th visit as compared, say, to the second visit? Most are all  of the pictures you had seen before, anyway, in other places, just not together. GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. I think the subtlety of the light, things like that, and certain details.  Those nails in the wall may have come fairly late, actually. I think I may have seen those late,  although the paintings were actually hung 120 yards apart, because when they put on that  exhibition, they obviously weren’t aware of the context that I’d discovered. No one could  really be in a position to understand those sorts of meanings, perhaps. It’s only with the  discovery of the context that it’s possible to see what he was actually trying to do. It was a  very interesting exhibition from the point of view of looking at the pictures purely as paintings  because there was no strong narrative drive to it.

[00:31:44]COWEN: What do you think of the  quality of the restorations?

[00:31:49]GRAHAM-DIXON: Vermeer’s paintings were in  fantastically good condition. I was lucky enough 28 years ago to film at the Mauritshuis  with the BBC crew just at the point where the View of Delft had been restored, and the Girl  with a Pearl Earring had been restored. I could see very clearly, and he talked me through  it. It was a man called Jørgen Wadum who’d done the restoration. The minimal retouching  necessary in a Vermeer, almost nothing wrong with the painting. There’s no controversial  filling in of void space, which you normally have, certainly with a Renaissance painting. To what extent do you bring that area of loss back? How much do you harmonize  it so that it doesn’t disturb the modern eye looking at the painting? You can’t really  leave a gaping hole. In the case of Vermeer, there aren’t these gaping holes. One thing I  remember that was fantastic, which is one in the eye for the people who are always going  on about the camera obscura, which I think is one of the more boring things people talk about  when they talk about Vermeer. Did he use a camera obscura and all that? If you look closely, as  Jørg showed me, at the highlight in the pearl, in the Girl with a Pearl Earring, there’s a splash.  He’s dropped the paint. He’s dropped the paint.

[00:33:08]Likewise, if you look at The Lacemaker, the  painting in the Louvre, which I controversially describe as a painting about maternal love, and  I say that the sewing cushion with all its red threads is a visual metaphor placed there by  Vermeer for the woman’s placenta, nourishing the baby. She’s making a piece of lace for her  baby, and she’s pregnant, and the sewing cushion.

[00:33:37]All of those red threads, they’ve actually been  thrown. It’s like a little Vermeer Jackson Pollock prefiguration. He’s thrown the paint. COWEN: What makes George Stubbs such an underrated painter? GRAHAM-DIXON: I think he’s been underrated forever because of his subject matter. I blame the  French. The French in the 17th century invented a system for ranking works of art by their subject  matter. Up at the top, you and I, we could put on some armor and confront each other with swords,  and Poussin would paint us. That would be a history painting done from the life. That would  be at the pinnacle. Then would be a painting of an event, maybe a meeting between great men.  Then, below that, there would be a portrait.

[00:34:26]You’d keep going down, and eventually you’d get to  paintings of still lifes, like flowers and fruit, or paintings of animals. These were the  lowest works of art because they featured the basest things. I think that Stubbs, to  a certain extent, was the victim of that.

[00:34:46]COWEN: Are we now able to see them properly? GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. It’s been no problem since Stubbs and Constable, more than anyone  else, slightly controversial to say, but I think they paved the way for modernism  because they showed, not necessarily deliberately, but they showed that anything could be painted,  anything at all, like a piece of mud or a piece of a river could be painted in such a way as to  touch on the very highest thoughts and ideas and beliefs and feelings that subject matter is  completely, in a sense, irrelevant. Cézanne picked up on that when he said, “I want to stun  Paris with an apple. I’ll paint an apple, and I’ll paint it with such astonishing concentration  that you’ll see it as an epistemological challenge to all of your philosophy.” I think that French art gets that from British art because British art has to be like  that because that’s all the aristocrats are going to commission. They look down on people like  Stubbs, in a sense. If I’m an aristocrat in the 18th century and I want a really important  picture, I’ll go to Italy and I’ll buy one, thank you very much, and I’ll buy my history  painting from Titian. You, sir, Stubbs, you just paint my horse. It’s my racehorse, and I’m very  fond of him. Paint him well and don’t scare him.

[00:36:07]COWEN: You think the French also have underrated  Géricault, who painted and drew many horses?

[00:36:12]GRAHAM-DIXON: Géricault, of course, went to  England. Géricault spent some of his formative years in the early 19th century in London. He  brought some of that spirit of English revolution to French art. Interestingly, Géricault’s great  friend and the man who looked up to Géricault more than anyone else, Delacroix, who did he idolize  out of all the British artists? Constable. He loved Constable, Delacroix. Somebody should write  a book about it. This special relationship that’s partly to do with intense jealousy and hatred,  but also to do with unexpected mutual admiration.

[00:36:51]COWEN: How would you contrast what you absorb  from a Géricault horse compared to a Stubbs horse?

[00:36:57]GRAHAM-DIXON: Stubbs, I think, he’s not painting  himself. Géricault’s painting himself. Géricault horses are self-portraits. Stubbs is  trying to understand how the world works, and Stubbs understands the miracle. He really  sees it as a miracle. It’s very interesting.

[00:37:23]In Stubbs’s later engravings, he seems to work  his way toward the beginnings of the Darwinian theory of evolution because he’s done a lot of  dissection, and he’s beginning to see that there are similarities in the way that a chicken’s hips  are formed to the way that human hips are formed.

[00:37:41]He’s beginning to wonder whether there might  not be some contiguity of relationship between the different animal species. It’s very  near the end of his life, so of course, he never pushes forward to it. I believe it’s  not entirely eccentric to see the currents of thought that led Stubbs to those ideas as being  contributory to the great river of Darwinian theory that’s going to come about 50 years later.  I think he’s confronting that mystery of existence and of species and who we are, and maybe we can  understand who we are through looking at a horse.

[00:38:17]I also sometimes get from his horses, I  get a tremendous sense of species fellow feeling. There’s that great painting that’s  in Mount Stewart. I can’t remember the name of the racehorse, Hambletonian. The racehorse  had been flogged to within an inch of its life to win this great prize for the owner. Stubbs  has painted the horse at the moment after the race when the groom is comforting the  horse and the horse is flecked with blood, and its eyes are wild. Stubbs paints the picture  almost as if he’s painting a concentration camp victim or something. He’s saying, “How could  you do this to this wonderful creature, this wonderful being?” I love Stubbs. You can tell. COWEN: Many are held in the state of Virginia, as you probably know, in the Mellon Collection  in Richmond. I’ve seen them many times.

[00:39:06]GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes, that’s Basil Taylor. The  great Stubbs expert was huge friends with Paul Mellon. It’s all about who you know and when  you know them. Paul Mellon has got more money than anyone else. He loves art more than anyone  else, and he becomes friends with Basil Taylor, which is, I suppose, a shame for England, but a  wonderful thing for Yale. My favorite picture, I think, in the whole Mellon, is that picture  of the zebra. Do you know that picture?

[00:39:29]COWEN: I think I do. GRAHAM-DIXON: I love that picture.

[00:39:31]COWEN: Another favorite book of yours of mine, the  Howard Hodgkin study. Now, it seemed to me in the 1990s, there was some chance Hodgkin would have a  big breakthrough. The New York Times wrote him up.

[00:39:42]He might become this major contemporary painter,  but it never quite happened. His prices are still pretty reasonable. The works are lovely. Who was  right, the people who thought he was incredibly important, or that he’s a minor modernist? GRAHAM-DIXON: I wouldn’t call time on anybody’s reputation. Hey, Vermeer’s a pretty good case.  Vermeer had no reputation at all for 400 years.

[00:40:08]I think Howard’s doing okay. COWEN: I would argue for him.

[00:40:10]What’s your view now, because it’s  decades since you wrote the book?

[00:40:13]GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. No, that’s fair enough. I see  the patterns by which the world values things.

[00:40:24]I don’t pay a great deal of attention to them  unless I’m asked a question like that. I think, “Oh, gosh. Of course, this is what people  think about,” and I don’t think about it.

[00:40:33]I just think about what they are. I think they’re  such wonderful pictures. Eventually, they will be just as expensive as the pictures of Matisse  or Vuillard or Bonnard or those other artists.

[00:40:48]Howard, I think, belongs within that tradition  very much. He’s an unusual painter because he decides to extend and deepen a tradition that he  has nothing to do with personally, nationally, or historically. He just becomes so fascinated  by it. I’d probably add Degas to that, too.

[00:41:09]COWEN: Indian miniatures,  right, which he collected.

[00:41:11]GRAHAM-DIXON: He always said they  weren’t an influence on his work.

[00:41:14]COWEN: I never believed that. GRAHAM-DIXON: I never did either, to be honest. You’re darn right. COWEN: He had incredible taste in Indian miniatures. GRAHAM-DIXON: He did, he did. What a wonderful collection he had of Indian miniatures. I used to  love going to see Indian things with him. We used to go because he used to live right behind the  British Museum. When I was a young art critic, I became friends with him, and I used to go often  to have lunch with him. We would always go in to look at the Indian things. COWEN: What was he like?

[00:41:40]GRAHAM-DIXON: He would be very emotional. Very  emotional. I would say, “Oh, I loved that painting that you made of the Henry Moore at the Bottom  of the Garden.” Then he would suddenly remember, because every painting that he did was like  a moment in his life. It had its origins in a particular moment. There were emotions brought  back in tranquility, if you like. He would suddenly remember what was happening on that day  and how much he loved that person, but they’re dead now. It was just someone to turn the taps on.  He would weep great big tears, proper big tears, like Toad of Toad Hall tears, except they weren’t  fake tears; they were real tears. Very emotional.

[00:42:27]You had to rather watch your step. You never knew  if you’d have to take a timeout for 20 minutes.

[00:42:32]COWEN: Do you feel there’s a category of artist  where it’s now impossible to still love them? If I think, say, of Malevich, who is a great artist and  very important historically, but when I see them, I’m left cold. Maybe I’ve seen them too many  times, or maybe there are too many fakes, or maybe that kind of image has been too  commercialized, but it now does nothing for me, and I’m not sure that will change, but  without taking any credit away from him. Is that a meaningful concept to you? GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. I don’t feel like that, but I don’t look at Malevich all the time. I’ve  become more and more interested in context. When I look at Malevich, I just see the Black Square,  and I just see that moment. So many millions of people have died. This is a revolution. This  is a moment when the people will rise up, and all these beautiful ideas are in the air, and  all these people dreaming their dreams, and that’s going to be crushed. If I see those pictures  and I’m thinking those thoughts, I can still find that I look at those pictures and I might  feel like a choking-up feeling because of that.

[00:43:54]I feel that deeply with Vermeer. It’s so tragic.  If I look at the View of Delft, the Collegiants and the Remonstrants, Vermeer’s people, they  believed that as people read more books, as people became more educated, they would all read  Socrates, they would all read good philosophy, they would read the Bible. They would become  friends. Everyone would become friends with everyone else. All religious discord would  disappear. War would become a thing of the past.

[00:44:36]Tyrants would hand over their power to the people. They genuinely believed that, and they didn’t just believe it. It was a belief in  the New Jerusalem, which was very widespread among the Jewish communities of that period, as  well as the Catholics, the Protestants. Lots of people believed in this, but only the Collegiants  believed that it would happen, not by some Messiah coming down with lightning and thunder. They  actually believed that the spirit of Christ, by which they meant the spirit of love and the spirit  of peace, would inhabit people automatically. The more they could read and understand and talk  to one another in these Collegiant meetings, that peace on earth would happen, and that it  wouldn’t be some kind of amazing miracle thing.

[00:45:24]That heaven on earth looks like your hometown  on a really sunny, clear day. The women are at the shops. The children are playing. The boats  are ready to take you to wherever you want to go. That is heaven on earth, and that’s what that  painting is of. Every time I see that painting, in a different way from the Malevich,  it’s in touching distance. We could have that. We could have that more or less  everywhere if we just stop being so stupid.

[00:45:57]COWEN: Past Vermeer and Rembrandt, is Fabritius  the next greatest Dutch artist from that era, or who comes close to those two? GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, “Fabritius,” as I’ve been taught to pronounce him. COWEN: Forgive my American pronunciation for all these names, but it’s what people understand here. GRAHAM-DIXON: I always pronounce him like that.

[00:46:15]The only reason is because I did my book as an  audiobook recording, so I had a lot of tuition in pronouncing names right. I think Fabritius is a  fantastic painter. He’s definitely, in my opinion, the source for Vermeer’s wonderful technique.  This tonal painting that no one else does.

[00:46:38]Fabritius does it. He’s in Rembrandt’s studio.  They know Leonardo da Vinci’s theories because they’ve just been published in France. The  book’s in Rembrandt’s studio. We know that they know these ideas, and he’s doing it. He’s  putting it into practice. Without Fabritius, Vermeer couldn’t paint the way he does. I  think the tragedy of Fabritius, and again— COWEN: He dies young. GRAHAM-DIXON: —he dies young, but people don’t really understand. How does Fabritius die?  You probably know how he dies. He dies because Delft is the largest weapons store in Europe.  Somebody goes in with a candle, and it blows up, and a third of the whole city is destroyed.  Fabritius is blown to pieces. Again, why would that happen? It’s because they’re still at war.  This is a culture completely at war. There’s war everywhere. I’m going later, so maybe I’m wrong,  but I’m going to go to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, to the Dutch section, and I’m  going to see, is there any mention made anywhere, in any room, of the fact that half the  population of Germany died during this period?

[00:47:50]COWEN: I don’t think so. GRAHAM-DIXON: That 80 years of war between Holland and Spain had led to the massacre  of huge numbers of civilian populations. If you don’t understand these things, how on earth—when  you see a radiant painting by Vermeer of peace, it’s not just a painting of a woman in a room.  A painting of a woman writing, itself it’s like, “Gosh, she’s not being assaulted. She’s not  being grabbed out of her home. She’s not having her possessions taken away,” because all  over Europe, that was what was happening. These ordinary scenes are actually charged with meaning  that we can’t recover unless we know the context.

[00:48:27]That’s why I write books, really, is to try  and understand. If you don’t understand what they were thinking about, how on earth can  you understand what’s in these pictures?

[00:48:40]COWEN: Would the Dutch painters  have seen van Eyck’s and other Low Country paintings? The best ones. GRAHAM-DIXON: I don’t know what paintings Vermeer would have seen, but I’m sure that he had seen  paintings by van Eyck. It’s quite hard to piece together what they would have seen. There were  dealers in Amsterdam dealing in really wonderful paintings of that school. Flemish art is around  because, after all, the Low Countries is the Low Countries. Yes, it’s been divided into North  and South. I think he would be familiar with that tradition. For example, there’s an early painting  in the Mauritshuis of Diana and her companions.

[00:49:25]I think there’s this very strong Christian  undertow to this classical painting where you’ve got a basin and a cloth, and one  of Diana’s nymphs is washing her feet, much as Mary Magdalene washes the feet of Christ  in Flemish altarpieces. It looks so much like the paraphernalia that you’d see in a Flemish  altarpiece that Vermeer must have seen one of those altarpieces to borrow that from it. COWEN: When you think about contemporary art, which has become quite controversial  in the United States, how healthy is the current state of affairs in general? GRAHAM-DIXON: I cannot even begin to pretend to do my exam answer because— COWEN: No, you’ve been a judge for the Turner Prize. GRAHAM-DIXON: I have.

[00:50:11]COWEN: You see plenty in London.  You get around the world.

[00:50:13]GRAHAM-DIXON: I do, but to be perfectly honest,  I’ve spent seven years only looking at archives and thinking about Dutch art, really. I’m  currently thinking about a Renaissance artist, but I have hardly seen any modern art at all.  What I have difficulty with in contemporary art is the very elevated reputations certain artists  have. Because the modern art world seems to be so institutionally rigid. If Museum X has lots  of paintings by Richter, Museum Y also does, Museum A, B, C, D, E, they’ve all got lots  of paintings by Richter. In my opinion, Richter’s work of the last 20 years is almost  worthless. I think it’s just not interesting.

[00:51:18]I think it’s coasting. I might even go so far  as to say it’s almost like printing money.

[00:51:25]You make these pictures. They’re very mechanically  made. They sell for $20 million each. How, within the existing institutions of the art world,  is that downgrade going to happen? I can say that, but it’s not going to make any difference.  The museums aren’t going to change. Like my book on Vermeer. If people take my book on Vermeer  seriously, it means that every caption by every painting on every website of every museum will  have to be completely different. Now, I personally think that in 20 years’ time they will be, but I  know it’s not going to happen this week or next.

[00:52:00]How’s it going to happen with these other artists? COWEN: Take someone like de Kooning, who’s a truly great artist, but as you’ve pointed out yourself,  the variance of the works is very high. There’s a lot of bad or only so-so de Koonings. Are those  still due for a spill in terms of esteem, price, display, or do you just think the way it’s at,  well, he’s de Kooning, we’ll grant him that, and the good ones are good enough? GRAHAM-DIXON: I think it’s an interesting question. Again, I remember I reviewed in New  York many years ago—I don’t know when it would be, shortly before de Kooning died—there  was an exhibition of his late work, and people were quite skeptical about it.  I thought, looking at it, there was so much of what had been in the earlier work. COWEN: I think it’s often quite good, some of them. GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes.

[00:52:46]I felt that he was talking to himself. When I  feel that an artist is talking to themselves, when it’s real, this is what I love about Vermeer,  that it’s so real. He’s only painting what he cares about. That’s it. He wants to paint the  conscience. He’s not thinking about who likes it, who’s going to like it, how much it’s going to  be worth. Likewise, de Kooning, at the end of his life, he—not likewise, but in a very different  way, but he’s within a different tradition and so on. He’s genuinely thinking about what he’s doing. I’ve seen artists, an artist that shall not be named. I remember being at the Royal Academy  and standing behind this artist in the queue for the cloakroom. There was a very pretty  attendant taking coats, and he just said, “Do you not know who I am?” She said no. He said,  “I am a very important artist.” I thought, “Oh, man. It’s over.” As soon as that happens, you  know it’s over. You have to be thinking about the art that you’re making, and you have to be  caring about it. I think we can always tell when that’s the case, or I hope we can. I think we can. COWEN: When you’re acting in a role as an art buyer, obviously, you ask yourself, “Do I like  the work? Can I afford the work?” What’s a deeper question that you would apply that other art  buyers should apply for making better decisions?

[00:54:18]GRAHAM-DIXON: I don’t think I’ve ever bought  art. I was on the Government Art Committee, which buys art for embassies, for the  government’s art collection. That’s a very specific kind of buying because you’re buying art  by British artists that will favorably represent British art abroad in embassies and so on.  I don’t know. If I were trying to advise, you mean advise like a collector or someone? COWEN: Or yourself. You could afford a Rembrandt print. Not the very best ones perhaps. GRAHAM-DIXON: A fifth state, yes. No, you’re quite right. I think I bought a John  Nash for about £20 the other day in a junk shop.

[00:55:05]COWEN: A lot of Bloomsbury works are quite  affordable. I think they’re underpriced.

[00:55:10]GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. I’ve got a friend who is a  very rich fund manager, and he only collects work by female artists only. That’s all he buys. COWEN: Yes, they’re also underpriced still.

[00:55:23]GRAHAM-DIXON: He’s rediscovered a number  of women artists of the prewar period in Britain. He tells me that they’re so  unknown that once he’s discovered one, he can then find their work in other sales, but  it’s often not listed as being by them because no one else really knows about this person. He’s  saying he’s put together 25 works by Phoebe, whoever she is, who was an RA in the 1920s, and  he said, “I’m buying these things for £5 each.”

[00:55:53]He said it’s a great myth that the museums  of the world are correcting the patriarchal imbalances of the past by buying female— COWEN: I agree.

[00:56:02]GRAHAM-DIXON: He said it’s not actually happening.  There’s lots of fantastic work by women artists, and museums aren’t buying any of  it. They could buy it for £5 if they actually just got their fingers out. COWEN: Textiles are grossly underpriced, I think, relative to aesthetic quality. GRAHAM-DIXON: I agree. Actually, funnily enough, that’s a very good point. One of the very  few things I have bought in the last 10 years was a Mennonite textile made somewhere in the  southern states of America out of little bits of the black suits of the mourning costumes  of the men. A beautiful thing, and it was, I think, $1,000. Goodness knows how long it  took to make. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s like an abstract work of art. Absolutely.  No, I agree. That’s the thing with art, once you find a corner that you like—that’s why  I have to not get too involved. Because if I did— COWEN: You’d do nothing else. GRAHAM-DIXON: —I’d end up buying 100 Mennonite quilts. COWEN: Obviously, you live in Britain. If you think about the physical  environment of Britain, there are so many wonderful towns. Bath is famous. Somewhere like  Bradford can be stunning, not every part of it.

[00:57:12]If I think about more recent neighborhoods,  I understand King Charles may be trying, but it’s hard for me to think of a single place in  America also that I consider highly attractive in the same way that British-built neighborhoods  might have been knockouts, say before World War II, whatever the cutoff date may be. Why has that happened? Why do we not build beautiful neighborhoods anymore?  Maybe you challenge the premise, but where is it really? You could say  maybe Copenhagen, maybe parts of Helsinki, but the Western world seems to be failing at that. GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. Generally speaking, we appear to be living through a crisis of confidence in  our own ability to make the world a better place.

[00:58:05]We talk about it a lot. We agonize over things  like the environment and issues like that, but there’s very little of that. I made a TV  series years ago about the art of Scandinavia.

[00:58:18]There was that amazing project in Scandinavia  where they decided they were just going to build 5 million houses, and they did it. They were  beautiful houses. They were made for ordinary people to live in. Even actually in America in the  1950s, there were not dissimilar projects to that, utopian schemes of that kind, which  produced very beautiful neighborhoods.

[00:58:45]COWEN: It’s now a long time ago, isn’t it? GRAHAM-DIXON: It’s a long time ago. And I keep coming back to this book about Vermeer, but  that’s what I find so touching about those people.

[00:59:03]There’s a painting called The Little Street by  Vermeer, which is on the cover of the book. It shows us the house in which Vermeer’s paintings  all hung. I have discovered it’s actually the house of his patrons. If you could press way  face to the window, you’d see Vermeer’s paintings inside that house. That painting is about what  it is that makes a beautiful neighborhood, and it’s belief and it’s cooperation, it’s  toleration, it’s love, it’s all the things.

[00:59:35]Vermeer’s Remonstrant preacher friend of the  family wrote a book, and in his book he talks about religion and faith, and he says it’s like a  house. Everyone has to put a brick in. It’s not a house one person makes and everyone else worships  in. Everyone has to put a brick in. That painting, if you look at the join between the two houses,  the house which used to hold all Vermeer’s paintings and the house next door, each owner  of each house has mended a bit of it. You’ve got this sense that in this neighborhood, everyone  has contributed a bit to each other’s houses.

[01:00:18]James Fenton wrote a great poem about Jerusalem,  which is essentially a poem written a number of years ago about the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  It’s got these two terrible crushing last lines: “I have destroyed your home, you have destroyed my  home.” Vermeer’s painting is the opposite of that: “I have made your home, you have made my home.  I have repaired your home.” You can imagine that painting opening out into the whole of a beautiful  town, and in Delft you can still visit that town.

[01:00:58]The more I’ve thought about  this book I’ve been writing, the more I’ve felt I’ve been writing almost  meditations on the lessons that those people, Vermeer and his friends, had to teach us,  because you can’t make anything beautiful, you can’t make a good community unless you have  beliefs. To me, people have just lost their beliefs, and they don’t believe strongly  enough in the importance of cooperation, and it’s sad. It’s not that it can’t be got  back. I don’t believe it can’t be got back.

[01:01:33]What you touch on, it’s a raw nerve. COWEN: Two final questions. First, let’s say you meet a young British person who  wants to be some version of the next Andrew Graham-Dixon. What non-obvious advice do you  have for them? Work hard, look at art, sure, but what do they really need to hear from you? GRAHAM-DIXON: My first advice is never, ever, ever try to be a version of someone else. COWEN: They want to be in the world of art and do TV documentaries and YouTube  and write books. That’s what I mean.

[01:02:06]GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes, I know. I think build networks  of friends and don’t rely on corporations. Do it yourself, that would be my advice. I was lucky  because I was a young would-be art critic and all the jobs were taken. There were six national  newspapers and they all had art critics. They were all over 60 and they’d been in their jobs for  20 years. I was lucky because a new newspaper was founded called The Independent, and they  hired me to be the art critic. That’s not going to happen for most people. The BBC employed me to make art documentaries. The BBC doesn’t do that anymore.  They’re not interested in culture anymore, which is weird, but they’re not. Nowadays,  you’d have to do it for yourself—self-fund, self-finance, and above all, have fun. COWEN: Just to plug your book again, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. I  like this very much, as I do all of Andrew’s other books. Last question, what will you do next? GRAHAM-DIXON: I’ve found a really interesting painting by one of the greats,  and I’m writing a book about it.

[01:03:19]COWEN: That’s a secret, that painting? GRAHAM-DIXON: It is a secret.

[01:03:21]COWEN: Great. GRAHAM-DIXON: It is a secret.

[01:03:22]COWEN: I look forward to the book. Andrew, thank you very much. GRAHAM-DIXON: Cheers, Tyler.