Word: velazquez
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...virginal case or resolving the optical glitter of a gold frame into tiny lozenges of paint. You're meant to enjoy both the illusion and the means by which it's brought about. Supremely conscious of his language, he puts all the machinery in the open--like Velazquez, but on a tiny scale...
...cultural ideas about materialism and transcendence, illusion and reality, pleasure and denial, life and death. Not until recently, however, has it been given deep museum treatment, and the exhibition that has done so is on view through May 21 at London's National Gallery. Spanish Still Life from Velazquez to Goya, curated by the art historians William Jordan and Peter Cherry, puts together some 70 paintings, some well known and others entirely fresh. It is a brilliant show...
Seventeenth century Spain was notorious for the parsimony of its common diet: bread, beans, onions, a scrap of lamb or fish sometimes, and garlic, garlic, garlic. It was to French or Italian cooking what the crabby-looking servant girl grinding aioli in Diego Velazquez's Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary was to the sumptuous nudes of Titian or Veronese. A modern palate would recoil at the eggs slowly frying, or rather poaching, in oil on top of a clay stove in Velazquez's An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. But what an amazing...
...anything else, by the wall labels he rashly insisted on appending to his work. All that these revealed was the vice of the autodidact-a mania for cultural name dropping. They read like Woody Allen. Thus Baseball, 1983-84, came garnished with references to Red Smith, Bill James, Velazquez, Durer, Max Brod, Satchel Paige and, of course, Kafka; while The Sensualist, 1973-84, was prefaced by quotes from Picasso ("My one and only master!") and Matisse ("It is undoubtedly to Matisse that I owe the most"). Then Kitaj: "Cazanne is my favourite painter too ... Maybe that's why he draws...
People who knew him in the '40s and '50s remember that Kline liked to talk about Gericault and Velazquez, about old silver and 18th century political cartoons, rather than the gaseous rodomontade of "tragic chaos" and "existential risk" that got loaded onto Abstract Expressionism by such artists as Barnett Newman and such critics as Harold Rosenberg. In short, he was very interested in style, a suspect idea then but one that his paintings are none the worse for raising. We can't see Kline the way the art world did 40 years ago, when critics wrote about his "desperate shriek...