Word: lessing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...accused of frivolity and sensuality, this was a colossal claim. Very rarely, an artist gets to transform the conditions of his culture--not just add to them or jog their evolution, but alter them decisively. This is what Picasso did for America and Europe in the 20th century. Perhaps less obviously, Velazquez did the same for Spain in the 17th century. He showed that the nation's painting need not be provincial, that it could be open to Europe and, especially, to such Venetian masters as Titian. Titian had made masterpieces for Philip II of Spain; now Velazquez would work...
...Frick Collection in New York City is marking the 400th anniversary of Velazquez's birth with a small but choice loan show--six paintings from New York museums. Some are well known, like the portrait of Juan de Pareja, Velazquez's Moorish slave and studio assistant. Others are less so, such as the fierce authoritarian portrait of Olivares, Philip IV's chief minister for finance and war. The show is an anti-blockbuster and not to be missed by anyone who cares about painting...
Velazquez couldn't have cared less about leaving a record of his own personality in his work. Confession (except to a priest) wasn't part of his culture. His objectivity formed itself around an almost punitively observed decorum. He must have felt he was a great painter, but his life's struggle was to establish himself as a great gentleman. No court was more hedged with exact signs and symbols of degree than that of the Spanish monarchy. Velazquez spent much of his adult life lobbying, campaigning, espaliering the family tree and sucking up to the noblesse in order...
...against the rebellious Catalans in 1640. Velazquez finished it on the march, as it were; though known at court as a pintor flematico, a phlegmatic painter, he whipped it off in a few days. The head of the King, with its long and beautifully blended brushstrokes, looks very considered; less so his magnificent red outfit, which is pure Impressionism 200 years early--the broken touches of the silver brocade and their black shadings mix on the eye, producing a delectable liveliness, a scribbled spontaneity that no other 17th century artist could rival...
...China's longest-reigning angry young filmmaker has an eye for rapturous compositions on a huge and telling tapestry. His new film mixes DeMille and Dostoyevsky: the cast-of-thousands splendor of a biblical epic and the gnarled psychology of Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. And all in less time than a Stephen King prison drama...