Word: velasquezes
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...problems is to paint like Velasquez, but with the texture of hippopotamus skin," he once remarked. And he does. Structure emerges from the tracks of the looping brush as though naturalism were being reinvented. The result is that Bacon's distortions have a unique kind of anatomical conviction. Collectively, they amount to nothing less than a group portrait in which Baconian man-lecherous, wary, perversely heroic-carries on his flesh the cumulative imprint of self-destruction...
...Oilionaire J. Paul Getty shook up the British art establishment last June with his acquisition at auction of Titian's The Death of Actaeon for about $4,200,000. Just the year before, New York City's Metropolitan Museum had walked off with another British-owned masterpiece, Velasquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, for a record $5,544,000. Officials of the National Gallery and others raised a din, acting as if those rich Americans would soon leave Britons nothing to look at but the telly. At last, with considerable reluctance, the government blocked the removal...
...table is not an isolated case. In its upper reaches, the art market has been afflicted with a kind of collective hysteria, a St. Vitus's dance of zeros across the checkbook: $5,544,000 for a Velasquez; a Titian, The Death of Actaeon, sold to Paul Getty for a little over $4,000,000; last week a Renoir, purchased for $16.80 a century ago, fetched $1,159,200 at a London auction. The list could be prolonged almost indefinitely, and will be: before the '70s are out, the first $10 million painting will probably have gone under...
...Panofsky spoke approvingly of "the unselfish rapacity of the museum director." As time passes, and as the use and function of museums come under more rigorous examination, it is arguable that the rapacity that impelled Thomas Hoving to expend more than $5.5 million on the Met's new Velasquez is not, however great the painting may be, unselfish...
...elaborate Neo-classic facade, the medallions of Michelangelo, Rafael, and Velasquez, show that the bourgeoisie needed very much to think that it was fulfilling the old humanist roles. They were unable to see how silly it was to build inhuman beehives at one end of the City at the same time that they were copying French palaces at the other end. Seen together, the Met and the skyscrapers show the perversely contorted development of the American city...