The Case of "Las Meninas" 1957
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Diego Velazquez
Las Meninas
1656
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Pablo Picasso
Las Meninas (after Velazquez)
1957
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From 17 August to 30 December 1957, Picasso did a series of 58 very
different large-scale oils related to "Las Meninas",
painted by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez in 1656 and so titled
after the two maids at court included in it. Picasso took an interest
in this famous work for various reasons. Velazquez was and still is
considered one of the major figures in European art. Picasso had
considered himself one of this company too ever since (at the very
latest) the directors of the Louvre invited him, shortly after the
Second World War, to hang works of his own alongside major works in
the collection, for a single day, in order to establish the stature of
his art through the comparison.
Being Spanish, Velazquez might in that respect be seen as a
precursor of Picasso. The modern artist had seen "Las Meninas" in the
original when he was in Madrid, studying at the Royal Academy of Art.
At that time, the works of Velazquez were his preferred objects of
study. In the 1950s, furthermore, the work of
Velazquez underwent a revival thanks to Francis Bacon's variations on
the portrait of Pope Innocent X. The English painter's series is one
of the outstanding accomplishments of figural art since the Second
World War. But Picasso was especially attracted to "Las Meninas"
because it dealt with his central theme of painter and model.
Velazquez's painting is incomparable in its meditation upon the
historical and societal preconditions of artistic activity.
The vertical-format rectangular picture shows a gloomy room lit
only from windows at the side: the artist's studio. Ten figures are in
this space, making a somewhat lost impression, all in the lower half
of the composition, with dark vacancy above them. They are positioned
at three points of depth: in the foreground, as if in a frieze, are a
Spanish princess and her retinue, consisting of two maids-of-honour,
two court dwarfs, and a peaceful dog. At left, somewhat behind this
group, stands the painter himself at his easel, at work on a huge
canvas, his brush at his palette. In the middle-ground there are two
servants. And at the very rear, through an open door, we can see the
chamberlain of the court, in glaring light.
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Different though the postures and attitudes of these people are,
they are almost all giving their attention to the same place, to some
vis-a-vis. The mirror at the rear reveals that this is the king and
queen. Thus the painting unambiguously, albeit subtly, expresses the
facts of everyday life for Velazquez, painter at court. Life at court
was strictly hierarchical. The composition preserves that hierarchy,
and marginalizes the painter. While at work he is giving his attention
to those people who are at the heart of court life and determine his
activity as artist. The other figures are also subordinate to the king
and queen, most strikingly the Infanta, second to them in rank, whose
gaze is fixed on them. If the boy at right departs from the norm,
absorbed in a world of his own and kicking the dog, it is because, as
a court dwarf, he has a certain licence: he is one of those fools
whose presence at court was traditionally tolerated. In other words,
Velazquez's painting is a portrait of social relations. The subtle
darks and lights and graded colour values serve to strengthen the
message. Velazquez showed himself in this work to be the "true painter
of reality", as Picasso put it. That was what constituted his
attraction for the modern artist.
Picasso now set about restructuring that reality. In contrast to
his previous procedure when paraphrasing Delacroix's "Women of
Algiers", the largest full-scale composition came first this time, and
not last. It was conceived programmatically, as an expose of the new
subject. The nature of the transformation is clear from two changes:
the format has been revised, and the status of the painter has been
upgraded. Now the format is a broad horizontal, the picture itself
more narrative in flavour. Though the painter is still at left,
off-centre, he and his easel now occupy a good third of the canvas
breadth and almost its entire height. The painter and easel are done
in the "Picasso style", as if Picasso were deliberately contrasting
his own style with that of the 17th-century painter. On the other
hand, the dwarf and dog are in the infant style Picasso had evolved
for "Guernica". The chamberlain at rear, the maids-of-honour and
servants, and the king and queen in the mirror, are all crudely and
hastily established in a manner also reminiscent of children's
drawings. The colour and light, crucial factors in the original, have
undergone a total change: the new work is a grisaille based on
contrasts of white and grey, and the greys, unlike the colours in
Velazquez's painting, do not reflect the light.
Everything in this new version has become unambiguous. The figures
are frontally positioned or in clear profile. One will has borne all
before it: Picasso's. He is lord of his world, empowered to do
whatsoever he chooses. The rival royal power has ceased to matter.
Picasso is free to treat his subject as he wishes. In this, he has not
only established the parameters for his treatment of "Las Meninas";
the subject seems in fact well-nigh exhausted. The paintings that
followed the large-scale opening version of 17 August either deal with
parts and details or produce variations on the horizontal format.
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First, from 20 August to 4 September, there were eleven pictures
which, with a single exception, focussed on the Infanta, the central
figure in Velazquez's composition. What attracted Picasso most was the
girl's bright dress. In Velazquez it was the brightest element of
light in the picture, countering the glare from the open door at the
rear. In his own paraphrases, Picasso tended to use a monochrome
composition that revised the light and shadow and the figure. In the
full-figure picture of the Infanta done on 21 August ( no. 4)
the brightness from the open door affords a kind of touchstone for the
princess's dress, while the colour studies that followed (nos. 5 to
12) concentrated on the face. Picasso's aim was plainly to transmute
Velazquez's subtly tonal work not only in terms of style, composition
and motifs but also in terms of colour.
There followed an intermezzo of nine brightly colourful pictures
done from 6 to 12 September. At first sight they seem to have nothing
at all to do with the picture by Velazquez. Picasso had been giving
all his concentration to the paraphrases and had quit the studio at La
Califorme for the purpose, moving up to the loft. There, undisturbed
by the everyday life of the household, he was alone with a view of the
Mediterranean and with his sole companions, the pigeons. Taking the
loft window as frame and backdrop, he now painted the pigeons a number
of times, in fluent, alia prima work that recalled both the Fauves and
the relaxed manner of Raoul Dufy. These paintings
record both the artist's independence and his engagement with colour.
Picasso deliberately turned aside from his main route in order to
study the expressive power of pure, bright colour. What this study
produced may be seen in a further portrait of the Infanta done on 14
September (no. 27). This picture set the tone for everything
else that followed.
Picasso now tried to render the chiaroscuro factor in the original
Velazquez through contrasts of darker and lighter shades of colour, in
dissected, complex patterns; and from 18 September on he attempted to
transfer this principle to the whole composition (no. 31). But
the result was not convincing, and on 9 October he embarked on a small
set of detail studies (nos. 35 to 39) - essentially, he was back at
square one. He tested colour combinations on the Infanta, her maid,
and the figures at right. The major departure in this new series came
when he transformed the dwarf into a piano player (no. 40), a motif
from the Picasso repertoire.
A further series of studies of the maid to the right of the Infanta
in the Velazquez tested the potential of expressionist modes. Once
again Picasso detoured into a different subject, this time three
landscapes and a portrait of Jacqueline. Not till 30 December did he
return to the motifs Velazquez offered, with a study of the right-hand
maid (p. 6to, no. 58). This not only marked a return to the tonal
values of the original but also tried to render those values in
relaxed brushwork such as is sometimes characteristic of Velazquez's
own style. But here the entire series suddenlv breaks off.
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Towards the end, Picasso's work on the series was slow, and it
finally stagnated. And in December 1957, after all, he was already
busy with preliminary work for the Paris UNESCO building mural.
So Picasso's variations on "Las Meninas" finally came to nothing.
It is true that he succeeded in articulating the core idea of his new
version: that the artist occupies a new, changed position in modern,
liberal society. The large composition that opened the series
expressed this idea powerfully. The Picasso style is in a sense the
very definition of modern art, providing the contemporary artist with
an entire range of available approaches. And Picasso, revising the
original in colour terms too, was aiming to outdo his illustrious
forerunner. He tackled the task with furious energy, and even
interposed sequences of works devoted to particular problems (the
pigeons) into the "Meninas" series. And with these experiments behind
him he painted a lovely figure portrait of the Infanta (no. 27) which
can be considered a success in its own right.
But to transfer his colourist concepts to the overall composition
was a more complex undertaking. And in the end Picasso conceded
defeat. Limits constrained the autonomy of colour; and the
compositions of 18 September and 2 and 3 October (nos. 31, 33 and 34)
all illustrate the same dilemma - colour was still of secondary
importance, subordinated to form. Interestingly, Picasso scarcely went
further than simple colour contrasts or the deployment of one or two
glowing colours in a monochrome structure. He was the prisoner of his
own lifelong principles. For Picasso, who saw visual form from a
draughtsman's point of view, colour was always secondary. The series
of pigeon paintings interposed in the "Meninas" paraphrases highlight
the shortcoming this imposed on him: though he was painting the
pictures with the aim of composing in pure colour, he nowhere attained
that aim with any fullness. Only the picture of 11 September (no. 23)
articulates the effects of a specific colour scale, systematically
placing violet against blue and green. But the structure is a simple
one, confined to a clearly defined area within the composition. There
is no fundamental orchestration of colour such as might use a scale of
gradations to highlight certain tonalities and climactic colour values
at vital points in the composition - nor does Picasso achieve this in
his "Meninas" variations. Thus the last series too, which begins in
crude colour polarities and then moves through mixed shades in quest
of subtler nuances, produces no satisfying result in the end.
Ultimately, Picasso's variations on Velazquez's "Las Meninas", viewed
in terms of a working method, and judged with Picasso's own vast
ambitions in mind, must be considered a record of failure.
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1 Las Meninas (after Velazquez)
2 Infanta Margarita Maria
3 Maria Augustina Sarmiento
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4 Infanta Margarita Maria
5 Infanta Margarita Maria
6 Infanta Margarita Maria
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7 Infanta Margarita Maria
8 Infanta Margarita Maria
9 infanta Margarita Maria
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10 Infanta Margarita Maria
1 1 Infanta Margarita Maria
1 2 Infanta Margarita Maria
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1 3 Central Group
14 The Whole Group
15 Infanta Margarita Maria
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16 Infanta Margarita Maria
17 Infanta Margarita Maria
18 The Pigeons
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19 The Pigeons
20 The Pigeons
21 The Pigeons
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22 The Pigeons
23 The Pigeons
24 The Pigeons
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25 The Pigeons
26 The Pigeons
27 Infanta Margarita Maria
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28 The Whole Group
29 Maria Augustina Sarmiento and Infanta Margarita Maria
30 The Whole Group
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31 The Whole Group
32 The Whole Group
33 The Whole Group
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34 The Whole Group
35 Isabel de Velasco
36 Maria Augustina Sarmicnto
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37 Maria Augustina Sarmiento and Infanta Margarita Maria
38 Maria Augustina Sarmiento
39 Maria Augustina Sarmiento
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40 The Piano
41 Nicolasico Pertusato
42 Isabel de Velasco, Maria Barbola, Nicolasico Pertusato and the
Dog
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43 Isabel dc Velasco, Maria Barbola, Nicolasico Pertusato and the
Dog
44 Isabel de Velasco, Maria Barbola, Nicolasico Pertusato and the
Dog
45 Isabel de Velasco and Maria Barbola
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46 Infanta Margarita Maria and Isabel de Velasco
47 The Whole Group
48 The Whole Group
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49 Maria Augustina Sarmiento
50 Isabel de Velasco
51 Isabel de Velasco
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52 Isabel de Velasco
53 Isabel de Velasco and Nicolasico Pertusato
54 Landscape
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55 Landscape
56 Landscape
57 Portrait of Jacqueline
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58 Isabel de Velasco
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