Word: squez
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...important force in modern painting now. But he is still an incredibly important figure because of what he's been. He's not just a great painter. He's one of the towering figures of this century and all times. He goes along with Velásquez and Rubens." Demands Sir Roland Penrose: "What do people expect of a modern painter? Whenever painting of the image is considered, Picasso is of vital importance. His influence is not as strong as it was 20 years ago. But times and influences change. His will swing back...
...prodigious improvisation that, by one of the paradoxes that infest his life, he cannot focus it in any significant way. Picasso's reign over his images is such that no resistances are left-and that is his problem. Most of Picasso's variations on Velásquez's Las Meninas, Manet...
...becomes a hedge against perception. Its price has made the painting different, of an order other than art. Museums, which should resist this syndrome, tend to exploit it. Thus the Metropolitan got untold mileage out of the fact that it paid $5,544,000 for its new Velásquez, which therefore became more "interesting" than other and greater paintings in its collection. The picture becomes a tourist object to be gawked at rather than an experience to be enjoyed in all its complexity...
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...
...squez sale was an economic event, not an aesthetic one. Said one dealer: "It's not so much that art prices rise, it's more that the value of money keeps falling...