TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100989/10098900.070

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 9KB | 150 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."