Word: vel
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...course, the face is familiar. Like the pink convexities of Rubens' child-wife Hélène Fourment, it is one of the obsessive human presences of 17th century painting: Philip IV of Spain, growing older in the long succession of Diego Velásquez's court portraits. This one was painted late in the monarch's life, around 1653. The King's features-the bulbed Habsburg lip, the forehead's waxy promontory, the thick ball of a chin, the upswept mustache that Salvador Dali would appropriate and vulgarize-must have been more familiar...
...thoughtful, 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...
Seen as a group of objects, "Patterns of Collection" is nothing less than superb. Some of the works in it have already been harried to the edge of cliche by publicity-the Euphronios krater, the Velásquez Juan de Pareja. But the Met is above all an encyclopedia. Its 18 departments cover virtually every kind of art ever created. So there is a great deal in the show that will be unfamiliar to even the most assiduous Metropolitan goer, and the general level is high. One would have to travel a long way east of New York to find...
...believes that a portrait of a Pope is ipso facto a religious image; this illusion has stuffed the Borgia Apartments with a plethora of weak, vulgar bronzes of recent pontiffs. The only distinguished image of a Pope in the collection is one of Francis Bacon's variations on Velásquez's Innocent X. The gift of Italian Automobile Tycoon Gianni Agnelli, it sits, mouth open in a feral and silent snarl, glaring at the sacramental kitsch around it. But that it should be hung as "religious" art is unconscious black humor...
...best contemporary painters are Spanish: Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, the late Pablo Picasso and the late Juan Gris. Of these, the greatest is Dali. At least those are his opinions, delivered during a speech entitled "Velásquez and I" at the Prado. Madrid's al ta sociedad was on hand-but museum authorities were not-for the vernissage of the only contemporary painting in the famous gallery: Dali's portrait of a lady riding a horse as in a surrealist dream. His subject: Francó's granddaughter Carmencita, Princess Alfonso de Borb...