Word: vel
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...eyes renders the thing "special," isolated, fetishistically rare. It not only removes the painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still...
...upper reaches of a 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...
...wistful clowns and 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...
...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...
Quite a few are: there are five other Velásquezes and five major El Grecos, including that overwhelming trumpet voluntary, the Prado's huge Annunciation of 1600. There are works by Francisco Ribalta and his great junior Jose de Ribera, a group of paintings by Zurbarán-including an exquisite still-life of cream and ocher pots drawn up like liturgical vessels on a table...