TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.070

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.1 KB | 165 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 104

Velazquez's Binding Ethic


The genius of Spanish realism is seen in the U.S.

By Robert Hughes


    If painters had batting records, that of Diego Rodriguez de
Silva y Velazquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain, would
be perfect. Not only did he paint the best official portrait of
the 17th century -- the head of the wary, coarse, cunning old
Pope Innocent X, in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili collection in
Rome -- but he also made what is perhaps the greatest
nonmythical, secular painting in all art history: Las Meninas,
in the Prado. Neither is in the wonderful show of 38 paintings
by Velazquez, about half lent by the Prado, which opens at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City this week. Nor
should they be, since such things cannot be exposed to the risk
of travel. We can be abundantly grateful for what we have: the
first Velazquez exhibition ever held in the U.S., comprising
more than a third of his total known output, including such
great works of his maturity as the Prado's portraits of the
Count-Duke of Olivares on horseback and Queen Mariana and early
ones like The Waterseller of Seville, painted when he was
around 20, from London's Wellington Museum.

    If you want to know what painting is or can be, look at
Velazquez. This has been the judgment of artists for the past
300 years. It is as though Velazquez has never been seen as
anything but the summit of excellence in art, embodying a degree
of intelligence, pictorial skill and lucidity of realization
that defy not only imitation but, in some final way, analysis
itself. He is to realism what Piero della Francesca is to
abstraction. First Edouard Manet and then a whole succession of
French painters from the 19th century into the 20th (not to
mention English and American ones as well, in particular Sargent
and Whistler) were transfixed by Velazquez when they found him
on their pilgrimages to the Prado. Francis Bacon contorted
Innocent X into his own series of screaming Popes. Picasso did
a knotty and unsuccessful series of "variations" on his work,
attempting to reconstruct it in terms of something other than
empirical vision. Velazquez's influence appears in unexpected
places: if, for instance, one wants to know where Philip Guston
felt some of the authority for his last paintings lay, where
those eloquently clumsy speckled gray-and-pink shapes looked
back to, one need only consult passages in Velazquez like the
extraordinary plumage of the headdress worn by Queen Mariana
for his formal portrait of her in the Prado. Yet not one of his
painter-admirers has made Velazquez seem "newer," or in any
significant way changed the address of his work. Velazquez
himself seems always new, fresh on his own terms, which record
the act of scrutiny in the purest imaginable form and so have
never dated. He is, to quote Lenin very much out of context, "as
radical as reality itself."

    He was not, of course, only an eye. The intellectual
discourse of Velazquez's art took in allegory as well, and the
details are never insignificant. When he painted the flamboyant
and overweening Olivares on his rearing horse, in front of a
city (perhaps the Basque town of Fuenterrabia) that is being
burned for its disobedience to the crown, he went to some pains
with the kind of detail one overlooks at first -- the pruned
stump of a tree branch above the commander's head has fresh
green shoots, suggesting that the state is replenished by
merciless excision. The Weavers would satisfy anyone as a genre
picture of women at work, spinning the woolen yarn for the Royal
Tapestry Factory of Santa Isabel; but its meanings unravel far
beyond that, back to the fable of Arachne in Ovid's
Metamorphoses, taking in complicated references to Titian and
even to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.

    Still, it is the objectivity that seizes you. Was there
ever a painter less interested in thrusting his "personality"
at the viewer? He is the absolute antitype of the hot,
expressive artist. His cool gaze settles on everything with
equal curiosity: he is as interested in the way a formidable old
nun grips her crucifix -- like a weapon -- as in the way the
left hand of his monarch Philip IV rests, lightly but not quite
negligently, on the hilt of his sword. There is nothing he
cannot draw, though no drawings by Velazquez survive. That,
however, is part of his fascination to eyes conditioned by the
spontaneity of painting since Manet, for now that Velazquez's
paint has aged, one sees the radical shifts and erasures of form
below the unperturbed surface. There is no texture he cannot
paint, from the massive chains of silver embroidery that anchor
a Bourbon Queen's black dress to the bottom of the canvas, their
slightly tarnished sparkle amazingly conveyed in opaque blobs
of gray and white, to the hair of a hunting dog's leg whose
living animal nature gets its due in three long and five short
strokes of the brush. He does not truckle to King, Infanta or
Pope; he does not satirize the dwarfs and idiots kept for the
court's amusement. Nothing human is alien to him. Everything is
worthy of respect -- a respect whose sign is an unswerving
attentiveness. The morality of his art is one of transparency
and proud restraint. He was, as all who knew him agreed, a
paragon of the phlegmatic temperament: a walking mirror whose
reflections could not be argued with.

    Velazquez's portraits of Philip IV are the most remarkable
biography of a monarch in all art, spanning his life from the
confidence of youth to the melancholy and distance of his
afflicted age. The face thickens, the eyes sag, the Bourbon lip
takes on a heavy repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver.
Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by
Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine
years since any (portrait) has been made," Philip IV noted in
1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives, "and
I am little inclined to subject myself to Velazquez's phlegm,
nor thus to find further reason to witness how I am growing
older."

    Velazquez's life was even, and little is known about its
details. It looks quite seamless compared with the struggles of
Spain's other archetypal painter, Goya -- a steadily mounting
curve of recognition and respect, unmarred by scandal or
alienation (although he did father one bastard in Rome). Born
in Seville in 1599, the son of a minor Hidalgo family,
half-Portuguese, possibly with a trace of Jewish ancestry,
Velazquez would always be preoccupied with his social position.
(He went to great lengths to qualify as a knight of the Order
of Santiago, whose members would not accept him until the King,
who loved his painter, made them do so by changing the rules of
entry.) He studied under a rather dry, decorous artist named
Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. He made two trips
to Rome, both financed by the King, who had some difficulty
getting him back -- the first time because Velazquez had gone
into an ecstasy of discovery (Rome, in 1630, was the world's
capital of contemporary as well as ancient art, and the young
artist was absorbing the lessons of Caravaggio, Poussin and
Guido Reni), and the second time because Velazquez, now in his
50s, was basking in his European reputation. And in between,
nothing but security and hard work.

    Velazquez's maturity is a sublime, intensive lesson in
pictorial coding, and this, as much as anything else, has been
the source of its fascination to other painters. In rendering
appearances, every artist has a code of some sort -- a way in
which the licks and smears of colored mud on cloth manage,
seemingly without intervention from the viewer, to recompose
themselves as hard shiny metal, warm flesh, wind-ruffled grass
or the sweaty sheen of a horse's flank, all in the blink of an
eye. But no artist seems as explicit about this legerdemain as
Velazquez. At 20, as The Waterseller attests, he was already a
virtuoso of appearances. To be able to record both the
half-sunken splash of water and the light dew of condensation
on the pottery jar in the foreground was to have touched a level
of skill beyond that of most painters. But then the virtuosity
is replaced by something deeper -- a meditation on the way the
painter translates sight into mark and how the viewer turns mark
back into sight. How can painting serve empirical ends and
reveal truth? Only by disclosing its stage machinery -- not by
fooling the eye, but by making the mind more aware of the ways
in which it reads marks and constructs them as things. When you
look at a Velazquez, you do not look at an illusion of reality.
You are inducted into a relationship with the painter's civil
candor about what he does. You are invited to think about how
paintings come to mean what they say. Brought to the fore,
embodied on the surface ever more boldly, this is the great
conceptual theme of Velazquez's work, its binding ethic. It
precludes all sentimentality and rhetoric. It is -- as one of
his contemporaries exclaimed, on seeing Las Meninas -- "the
theology of painting."