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...Parmelin. Every day after lunch he would go up to his studio "like someone going up to the scaffold." Picasso was attempting to repaint in his own manner and to do an analysis on canvas of the picture he considers one of the world's greatest-Velásquez' Las Meninas...
...four months he worked in solitude. "It is going badly," he would tell friends at his favorite café in Aix. "It is this salaud Velásquez. If at least he was an intelligent painter. But no, it is Velásquez, with all that implies of everything and of nothing...
...effect, Picasso has diagramed what Velásquez left represented, sculpted out space that Velásquez implied. Velásquez himself has been erected into a towering, plastic figure on the left. The watcher in the doorway has been raised in ominous emphasis by reducing him to black silhouette. The dwarf has become a Charlie Brown cartoon, and the mastiff transformed into Picasso's own dachshund. The mysterious, airy space of the room's depth has been chopped into emphatic fragments by the invented windows on the right...
Disassociation & Dream. Fact is, Velásquez is suddenly much in the modern air. Last week Salvador Dali turned up in New York with a new painting called Velásquez painting the Infanta with the lights and shadows of his proper glory. The Infanta is only shadowily visible through the darkly luminous galleries of the Prado. Explains Dali, sighting along the points of his caliper-style mustache: "The new was and is through Velásquez. Abstract expressionism is in the details of Velásquez, in the brush strokes...
Even abstract expressionists themselves have been rediscovering Velásquez. Perhaps the cold, snowy veil that abstraction has cast over almost the whole landscape of art has proved too chill, and they felt the need for a thaw, for seeing earth again. Both Dali and Picasso were trying to bring Velásquez's illusion-making genius into a new, dreamlike focus, distorting the original (as dreams do) by a breaking-up and jumbling-together process. Dali calls this "disassociation." Says Dali: "The impressionists made disassociation of light. The cubists made disassociation of forms. The surrealists made disassociation...