Word: squez
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...society through which they moved on almost equal terms with their clients-Paul-César Helleu, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Anders Zorn. In England and America, the most successful of all these virtuosos was John Singer Sargent, who became to the British Empire what Velásquez had been to the Habsburg court of Madrid or Sir Anthony van Dyck to Charles I: the official portraitist par excellence, the unrivaled chronicler of male power and female beauty at the top of the social heap. Sargent paid the penalty of success after he died in 1925. Reputations like his were...
...phthisic women. Kitaj's three Bathers, with their iridescent blooms of pastel and general air of tentative anxiety, pay homage to the blue period. But they stare from the paper with the look of rough creatures trapped in an alien element, refugees from Goya and Velásquez as well as from the 20th century. This ability to suggest cultural continuity in the midst of a general malaise may be the final rea son why Kitaj's art haunts a corner of one's mind that no other living painter has contrived to occupy. -Robert Hughes
...compete with Americans, Japanese, and assorted European collectors in the all too open international art market. As a result they have begun to concentrate on simply hanging onto whatever treasures they already have. They rallied round to raise $4 million, thus saving a Titian. But another masterpiece ?Velásquez's portrait of his assistant Juan de Pareja, for example, was snatched from them in 1970 by a $5.5 million offer from New York's Metropolitan Museum. This Christmas, though, Britons had an art-treasure story with a happy ending that was almost Dickensian...
...disinterested scrutiny, like Cezanne's apple, but much more mysterious. There are the signs of age and stress: an eyelid droops, the gaze is not quite focused. There is the vast dignity: no real head, seen in isolation, could possibly envelop itself in such distances as Velásquez's painted fiction...
...When I saw it, this commanded such deep respect and reverence in me that, since it already possessed so much spirit and living flesh, all the portrait lacked was the voice." So wrote Velásquez's protector, Lázaro Diaz del Valle, when he saw the portrait in 1656. It was, and remains, a "speaking likeness," but it also has the eloquence that only great art possesses. It defeats imagination by leaving nothing to imagine: imagination is replaced by consciousness...