Word: velasquez
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...former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor in chief of Connoisseur magazine, takes us into the international art arena, where a masterpiece has come up for auction. On the block is the Marchesa Odescalchi, a sexy full-length portrait by the 17th century Spanish master Diego Velasquez of his alleged mistress. Experts predict that the portrait will bring at least $11 million, an auction record for a single painting. Among the main competitors in the battle for the naked marchesa are two archrival museums, Washington's National Gallery and New York City's Metropolitan. The National...
...lexicon of Baconian imagery is famous. Its most familiar component is the screaming Pope, smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm, his throne indicated by a pair of gold finials, the whole enclosed in a sketchy cage -- homage to an original that Bacon firmly denies having ever seen, the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X in the Doria collection in Rome. There are the Crucifixion motifs, reflections of Grunewald and the Cimabue Crucifixion in Santa Croce that was partly destroyed by the 1966 Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down...
...image scavenging, a process somewhat different from the traditional ways in which Western art has always quoted other art. Images have been recycled within the fine-arts tradition almost since art began. The Cnidian Venus turns into a Boucher, an Ingres, a Matisse. Picasso runs 44 variations on Velasquez's Las Meninas. Always, art comes from other art, giving culture a vernacular of recurrent forms, which are reinvested with subtly or sharply different meanings. In this way, the artist connects himself to the living tissue of the past, legitimately claiming continuity...
Today, Caravaggio almost ranks with Rembrandt and Velasquez as the most popular of all 17th century artists. Mythmaking has something to do with this. We have a proto-Marxist Caravaggio, the painter of common people with dirty feet and ragged sleeves. There is also a homosexual Caravaggio, moved into the spotlight during the '70s by gay liberation: the painter of overripe, peachy bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream. Most of all, there is Caravaggio the avant-gardist...
...These are both struc- tural and attitudinal. In the Southwest, for instance, racial gerrymandering--that is, setting district boundaries which divide minority blocs--polarizes voters, critics charge. "In these areas, if you're in the minority, you can't win, so [the attitude is:] why vote?" says William C. Velasquez, director of the Southwest Voter Education Project...