Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...want to know what painting is or can be, look at Velazquez. This has been the judgment of artists for the past 300 years. It is as though Velazquez has never been seen as anything but the summit of excellence in art, embodying a degree of intelligence, pictorial skill and lucidity of realization that defy not only imitation but, in some final way, analysis itself. He is to realism what Piero della Francesca is to abstraction. First Edouard Manet and then a whole succession of French painters from the 19th century into the 20th (not to mention English and American...
...course, only an eye. The intellectual discourse of Velazquez's art took in allegory as well, and the details are never insignificant. When he painted the flamboyant and overweening Olivares on his rearing horse, in front of a city (perhaps the Basque town of Fuenterrabia) that is being burned for its disobedience to the crown, he went to some pains with the kind of detail one overlooks at first -- the pruned stump of a tree branch above the commander's head has fresh green shoots, suggesting that the state is replenished by merciless excision. The Weavers would satisfy anyone...
...brush. He does not truckle to King, Infanta or Pope; he does not satirize the dwarfs and idiots kept for the court's amusement. Nothing human is alien to him. Everything is worthy of respect -- a respect whose sign is an unswerving attentiveness. The morality of his art is one of transparency and proud restraint. He was, as all who knew him agreed, a paragon of the phlegmatic temperament: a walking mirror whose reflections could not be argued with...
Velazquez's portraits of Philip IV are the most remarkable biography of a monarch in all art, spanning his life from the confidence of youth to the melancholy and distance of his afflicted age. The face thickens, the eyes sag, the Bourbon lip takes on a heavy repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine years since any ((portrait)) has been made," Philip IV noted in 1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives...
...Pacheco, whose daughter he married. He made two trips to Rome, both financed by the King, who had some difficulty getting him back -- the first time because Velazquez had gone into an ecstasy of discovery (Rome, in 1630, was the world's capital of contemporary as well as ancient art, and the young artist was absorbing the lessons of Caravaggio, Poussin and Guido Reni), and the second time because Velazquez, now in his 50s, was basking in his European reputation. And in between, nothing but security and hard work...