Word: velazquez
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...girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass like cream with gravel in it. For in his own way Freud has done (in this picture and others) what Velazquez did: assimilate the life of the subject to the life of the paint surface and of each gesture held in it. Very few painters can do this. It is not a trick. This is the difference between painting something and merely rendering it -- between Freud's fat woman, which...
...into the paint with which he depicted flesh, helping him compose the body's structure in terms of twisting and displacement. This "Freud effect" is not unlike the quick, coarse expressiveness of Frans Hals, but less benign. A broader stroke didn't diminish the closeness of his inspection. If Velazquez had ever chosen to paint water dribbling from a spout, he might have come up with the sort of brilliant fiction about unstable, passing appearances that Freud achieved in Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink, 1983-87. (The "Japanese wrestlers" of the title are not real sumo contenders, but fragmentary...
Porter's feeling for the old masters, and his oblique way of quoting them -- testing himself against them -- is quite explicit in a painting like The Mirror, 1966. It is his homage to Velazquez's Las Meninas. A young girl sits with her back to a large mirror, propped up behind her in the studio. The mirror reflects her back and, beyond that, the painter, whose posture recalls the image of the distant chamberlain at the end of Velazquez's long chamber. And yet, once you have figured out its setup, seen that the window with its blurred blaze...
Dozens of new women are coming to the House, perhaps doubling the current number of 28. The fresh faces include Eva Clayton, the first black Congresswoman from North Carolina, and New York's Nydia Velazquez, the first Puerto Rican female in Congress...
...YORK / Nydia Velazquez...