Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...painters had batting records, that of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain, would be perfect. Not only did he paint the best official portrait of the 17th century -- the head of the wary, coarse, cunning old Pope Innocent X, in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili collection in Rome -- but he also made what is perhaps the greatest nonmythical, secular painting in all art history: Las Meninas, in the Prado. Neither is in the wonderful show of 38 paintings by Velazquez, about half lent by the Prado, which opens at the Metropolitan Museum...
...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 ones as well, in particular Sargent and Whistler) were transfixed by Velazquez when they found him on their pilgrimages to the Prado. Francis Bacon contorted Innocent X into his own series of screaming Popes. Picasso...
Still, it is the objectivity that seizes you. Was there ever a painter less interested in thrusting his "personality" at the viewer? He is the absolute antitype of the hot, expressive artist. His cool gaze settles on everything with equal curiosity: he is as interested in the way a formidable old nun grips her crucifix -- like a weapon -- as in the way the left hand of his monarch Philip IV rests, lightly but not quite negligently, on the hilt of his sword. There is nothing he cannot draw, though no drawings by Velazquez survive. That, however, is part...
...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, "and I am little inclined to subject myself to Velazquez's phlegm, nor thus to find further reason to witness how I am growing older...
...Adolf Hitler's lights, there was much to avenge. The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice refused to admit the apprentice painter. Very well, then, he would become an architect. But he was unqualified for further study. These rejections were aggravated by the death of Hitler's beloved mother Klara. The young man with no vices -- he neither drank nor smoked nor pursued women -- drifted in the city, living in flophouses, supporting himself by illustrating street scenes and postcards...