Velazquez – mimisawhney.com

The Red Clay Jug

In 1656, Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), a giant in Western art, painted his greatest work, Las Meninas. This exceptionally large – and enigmatic – painting has captivated viewers and critics alike for over 350 years, and remains one of the most highly analyzed, debated, and discussed works of art. This monumental picture was painted when Velazquez had been working at the Spanish royal court of Philip IV for 30 years – when he was at the height of his artistic skills and creativity.

Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656), Oil on Canvas

There is so much to look at and absorb when one looks at this picture – the Infanta Margarita Teresa, her dog, the dwarves, the mirror reflecting the king and queen, the man in the backlit hallway who’s either coming – or is he going – the artist himself in the act of painting. Despite looking at this picture, analyzing it for hours, I barely noticed the red jug on the silver plate which the lady-in-waiting is offering to the Infanta. And once I noticed it, it was all I could focus on. It is the same deep red as on Velazquez’s palette – the same red as the cross of the Order of Santiago on his chest. Why did he choose the same deep red for all three – whatever his reasons they add to the enigma that is Las Meninas.

The easy to miss tiny red clay jug is almost as fascinating as the rest of the painting. The jug is there because of the trade between Spain and the Americas. Very often, paintings from this era include objects brought back by traders from oceans away. This water jug – called bucaro in Spain– was most likely from Guadalajara, Mexico and was made of a mixture of clay and spices which perfumed and flavored the drinking water it held.

But that’s not all – the clay itself has mysterious properties – and when women bit off and chewed pieces of the jug and consumed it slowly over time, it made their skin pale – white almost to the point of ghostliness. Eating the clay also induced hallucinations – and of course numerous side health issues. Queen Elizabeth of England had made ghostlike white skin fashionable and a symbol of wealth – which made bucaros a highly coveted item in Spain at this time.

In light of this, Las Meninas become even more enigmatic – look at the Infanta’s fingers just about to wrap around the bucaro, her exceptionally pale skin, and her almost levitating feet – is Velazquez hinting at a trance-like state? What is Velazquez telling us – and why is the red of the bucaros similar to the red of his paint and the red of the Order of Knighthood? More mysteries – or does the bucaro hold the key to the mysteries of this masterpiece?

(Sources: Museo Prado, Velázquez’s Las Meninas: A detail that decodes a masterpiece by Kelly Grovier, bbc.com, Oct 16, 2020)

Velazquez..Picasso..Hamilton

In 1957, almost 300 years after Diego Velazquez painted Las Meninas (1656), Picasso painted and sketched 44 interpretations of the masterpiece. Between August 16 and December 30, 1957 Picasso explored every aspect of the painting creating versions of the painting as well as almost daily sketches of the different characters in Las Meninas. While Velazquez’s Meninas was baroque with rich hues, Picasso’s black and white renditions, with their geometric shapes are true to his style.

Picasso saw a painting that was revered, and managed to hold mysteries even 300 years later, and perhaps wanted to leave something of himself in the painting. Or perhaps he wanted to analyze its details and analyze how they fit together into the composition. Perhaps he wanted to carry the painting forward by infusing it with his cubism, and perhaps he wanted to make it truly immortal by removing the humanity of its characters by replacing them with geometric shapes. Whatever the reason, Picasso worked on this, in solitude, for months towards the end of 1957 emerging with a total of 58 sketches – 44 interpretations and the rest of cubist pigeons that came to his balcony while he painted.

The interpretation was carried even further by Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) in 1972 when he made an etching called Picasso’s Meninas to celebrate the artist’s 90^th birthday. Here Velazquez’s composition and Picasso’s style are fused together – the temptation to paraphrase Velazquez in Picasso’s style was irresistible” (Hamilton). And in this paraphrasing, Hamilton did a truly fantastic job!!

Richard Hamilton, Picasso’s Meninas (1972)

In a true homage to Picasso, Hamilton covered all of Picasso’s artistic styles in this one etching – the Infanta is in Picasso’s Analytical Cubism of 1912. The meninas to the left of the Infanta is in the flat graphic language Picasso was using in the 1930s. The maid behind her is in Picasso’s neo-classical style of the early 1920s, whereas the male figure is drawn using spare lines and the vocabulary of African forms that Picasso was using around 1907. The female dwarf is a version of Picasso’s Seated Woman (1927). The harlequin from Picasso’s Rose period stands in place of Velazquez’s page, and the bull, from Picasso’s 1934 Dying Bull replaces the dog (Source, Tate Britain).

The rectangular paintings in the background are copies of Picasso’s surrealist paintings, L’Aubade, 1942 and Three Musicians, 1921. The mirror – which was the focal point of Las Meninas and showed a reflection of King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana, are replaced by Hamilton himself and the artist Rita Donagh, who later became his wife. They are rendered with a particular etching technique that was created by Picasso which made the two figures appear painted in the print. He replaced Velazquez’s self-portrait with Picasso in his etching and added a hammer and sickle on Picasso’s chest.

I think it’s fairly poetic that Hamilton, like Velazquez, managed to insert himself into the painting – that too in the focal point of the original painting – thereby paying homage through the etching not just to Picasso, but to Velazquez as well.

(Sources: pablopicasso.org. Tate Britain, Museo Picasso, Musée d’art moderne, Museum of Modern Art).

Seeing or Being Seen?

We are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross. And yet, this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject.

No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their role to infinity. And the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established. The opaque fixity that it establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the center between spectator and model.

As soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable, levy their luminous and visible tribute from him, and project it upon the inaccessible surface of the canvas within the picture. He sees his invisibility made visible to the painter and transposed into an image forever invisible to himself.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966).