Word: velazquez
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...exquisite little head of Philip IV's daughter, the Infanta Maria Teresa, is even more summary. Velazquez paints shapes that look so obsolete that they're almost abstract--the massive cornrowing of the brown wig, for instance, and the mysterious, icily translucent lace butterflies that adorn it. He paints paint, or, more exactly, cosmetics: that pale mask flushed with matte pink, a plain little girl--she was a teenager then--propelled onto the international market by Papa's political schemes. Such portraits were made to be sent abroad to the relevant ambassadors, in the hope of arranging a suitable marriage...
...Velazquez couldn't have cared less about leaving a record of his own personality in his work. Confession (except to a priest) wasn't part of his culture. His objectivity formed itself around an almost punitively observed decorum. He must have felt he was a great painter, but his life's struggle was to establish himself as a great gentleman. No court was more hedged with exact signs and symbols of degree than that of the Spanish monarchy. Velazquez spent much of his adult life lobbying, campaigning, espaliering the family tree and sucking up to the noblesse in order...
...Velazquez's achievement was unique in the Spain of his day. He soon grew out of painting religious pictures. Instead he created a secular and courtly art--mainly portraits--in which a meticulous realism was conjoined with an extraordinary sense of the mechanics of painting. Velazquez gives you the physical marks of the brush, declares in advance that they are special effects, and yet defies you to shake free from their illusion...
...marvelous example of this process at work is the so-called Fraga portrait of Philip IV, named for the town where it was painted, in a temporary studio, when the King was leading his armies against the rebellious Catalans in 1640. Velazquez finished it on the march, as it were; though known at court as a pintor flematico, a phlegmatic painter, he whipped it off in a few days. The head of the King, with its long and beautifully blended brushstrokes, looks very considered; less so his magnificent red outfit, which is pure Impressionism 200 years early--the broken touches...
...thing is the long delay in Velazquez's influence. He hardly touched the next generation of Iberian artists, and the first unquestionably great Spanish painter to fall under his spell was Goya, more than 100 years after Velazquez's death. The reason was social. Most of his work was done for the King and the court, and was thus invisible to young artists. And practically none of it went abroad. Not until the museum age, when what had been private became public, did Velazquez become the intellectual property of mediocrity and genius alike. Numerically, this is a little show...