Word: velasquezes
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...Grand Guignol is now widely considered to be Britain's most exciting painter. At 52, Bacon deserves his success, for he has resisted every trend and fashion in art to hack out a path all his own. Though shaped by such old masters as Rembrandt, Daumier and Velasquez ("He haunts me so much I can't let him go"), he has been as much influenced by the here and now of the photograph as by anything else. War, terrorism, gory accidents-these fleeting instants of agony fascinate Bacon. His torn and dislocated figures often seem about to vanish...
Realism Turns Unreal. He tirelessly sketched models of Greek and Roman statues, studied Rembrandt, Titian, Velasquez, and most of all, El Greco. When it came to his own painting, he refused to be hurried, would go through hundreds of "sittings"-three-to four-hour stretches before the easel-to achieve what he wanted. With a lesser talent, the result might have been dry and academic. Under Dickinson's brush a mystic world of magic harmonies emerged...
Like many Europeans, Juan Antonio Gaya-Nuňo, director of Madrid's Velasquez Institute, becomes outraged whenever he thinks about the steady flight of European art treasures to the U.S. But he does not put all the blame on the Americans. Says he, in the French magazine Connaissance des Arts: It is selfish and dollar-mad Europeans who have really done the damage...
...Prado: "Restoration is necessary. You have to do it with great care, but you have to do it. We can be proud of the work Spanish restorers do, but in most other European museums the work is not so good. For instance, I have been told of a Velasquez portrait of Philip IV in London's National Gallery which after restoration is a very bad picture. We have another Velasquez portrait of the same king, which originally was not so good as the one in London. Now ours is much better...
Stylistically, the picture can only be described as an amalgam, with bugle-clear echoes of Raphael and Velasquez, muted ones of Turner, the impressionists, and such modern reproduction devices as the color dot screen. The composition is strict, static, deliberate and almost incredibly spacious, yet the lack of technical and emotional unity makes it seem cluttered and diffuse. It is as if a profoundly erudite painter had dozed off at his window in the dawn, and dreamed what no other man could imagine, a pearly vision of the impossible mingling with the possible...