Word: parejas
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...current Met ruckus goes back to 1970, when the museum bought Velásquez's portrait of his black apprentice, Juan de Pareja, for $5,544,000 -the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art. To pay it, Hoving and his Acquisitions Committee had to liquidate the capital left in the museum's Fletcher Fund, about $6,000,000, and commit themselves to pay back at least a part of it, in yearly installments of $160,000 through 1976. In effect, the buying power of the Metropolitan's 17 departments had been partly...
...British art establishment last June with his acquisition at auction of Titian's The Death of Actaeon for about $4,200,000. Just the year before, New York City's Metropolitan Museum had walked off with another British-owned masterpiece, Velasquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, for a record $5,544,000. Officials of the National Gallery and others raised a din, acting as if those rich Americans would soon leave Britons nothing to look at but the telly. At last, with considerable reluctance, the government blocked the removal of the Titian from Britain (Getty wanted...
...deter it last October from slapping what amounts to a tax on art education by reinstituting an admission fee for the first time in 30 years. But these declarations are apt to be gutted by the display of a now old multimillion-dollar painting. For what will Juan de Pareja on its draped wall in the Metropolitan mean to an intelligent 18-year-old from Spanish Harlem when he sees it and remembers the price? (As well he may, since the Met is not inclined to disguise the market value of its major acquisitions.) His probable reaction will be fury...
Thus it was with Velásquez's portrait of his mulatto assistant, Juan de Pareja, which brought $5,544,000 at Christie's last November-the highest price ever paid for a work of art at public auction. The winning bid belonged to Wildenstein & Co., and young Alec Wildenstein explained at the time, with a straight face, that the family gallery had bought it because his great-grandfather had been in love with it and left instructions to snap it up if it ever came on the market. But last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced...
...Juan de Pareja is a remarkable painting, but it is not the best Velásquez. His Rokeby Venus at Britain's National Gallery, for instance, is far more important. Similarly, the Met's Aristotle is not the best Rembrandt. The dazzling prices such paintings fetch are merely reflections of the fact that there are few Old Masters left outside museums...