attached to this painting a couplet from the poem The Fallacies of Hope :
Hope, hope, fallacious hope,
Where is thy marker now?
Ruskin, the foremost English art critic of his day, was a booster of Turner. And then something happened around 1846 and he turned against Turner, saying one of his pictures was “indicative of mental disease.”
JP
Luis de Góngora y Argote (1622)
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)
(1599–1660)
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez), Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1622
Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 40.6 cm
Maria Antoinette Evans Fund (32.79)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
There are not many Velázquez paintings in the Americas, but there’s an extraordinarily good one here, painted when he was very young, only on the cusp of success, in 1622. It’s a portrait of Luis de Góngora, the greatest Spanish poet of the time.
Góngora came to Madrid to court fame and clients. He oozed his way through a grovelling time, creating enemies and self-hatred. The young Velázquez cottoned on to the bitterness in skeptical eyes and pursed mouth. The head shows intelligence, the downturned lips mirror disappointment.
Góngora’s sonnet to El Greco captures his florid style:
Inscription for El Greco’s Tomb
O pilgrim, this enduring enclosure,
Of shining porphyry in gracious form,
Denies the world the most subtle brush
That ever gave wood soul, or canvas life.
His name deserving a greater voice
Than rises from the clarions of fame,
Ennobles this field of sombre marble;
Revere it; before you go your way.
Here lies El Greco; Nature inherited
His art; Art his skill; Iris his colours,
Phoebus his light — else Morpheus his shade —
May this urn, despite its solid nature,
Drink tears, and whatever odours ooze
From the Sabean tree’s funereal bark.
Cervantes was an admirer.
Góngora, however, also had enemies. He feuded with Francisco de Quevedo, a rival poet. Quevedo knew how to hand it out, attacking Góngora’s large nose and accusing him of sodomy, a capital offence. Góngora’s card-playing led to his ruin. Francisco de Quevedo bought his house so he could evict him.
It was not until his portrait of Innocent X in 1650 that Velázquez again turned a merciless eye on a sitter.
JP
Chapter 2
Buffalo, New York
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
13. Gotham News (1955)
Willem de Kooning (1904–97)
Willem de Kooning, Gotham News, 1955
Oil on canvas, framed: 181.61 x 208.3 x 7 cm; support: 175.3 x 200.7 cm
Gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr., 1955
Albright-Knox Gallery, New York
© 2017 The Willem de Kooning Foundation /ARS, New York / SODRAC, Montreal
Photo credit: Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY
Willem de Kooning calls to mind Kurtz’s final lines in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , “The horror, the horror,” such is the sheer, transgressive power of his work. Yet the resolution ultimately becomes reflective and resonant, offering the viewer sublime enjoyment for her efforts.
Born in the Netherlands, de Kooning eventually found his way to New York, stopping in New Jersey on the way. There he worked as a house painter! Once in Manhattan, he engaged in a few projects in commercial art, designing fashion advertisements.
His prodigious output alone leaves many of his contemporaries in the dust. The critical feature of de Kooning’s work — that which sets him apart from most artists, except perhaps Picasso — is his juxtaposition of abstraction with forms and shapes. He merged Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism into one form, always playing with figure and the background, distorting and diffusing the figure on the canvas, best seen in his Woman series.
De Kooning worked on the Woman series on and off for thirty years. His form of Abstract Expressionist painting was unlike anything on the current art scene. Woman was also a departure for de Kooning in his use of colour. As the Woman series continued throughout his career, viewers can observe the progression of de Kooning’s melding of abstraction and form. In Woman (1950–1952), the figure is contorted and manipulated to force a blending into the background and become indistinct from the canvas, leaving critics to suggest a certain misogyny, given its violence of form. Whether this is so, he had an open and tumultuous marriage to the artist Elaine de Kooning from 1943 until his death, including a twenty-year hiatus in the middle.
Here, Gotham News reflects the action and frisson of a large urban centre, featuring reportage in the form of newsprint in the lower left corner. Yes, this concatenation of colour might prove frightening to the naïve or uninitiated but might this be a nod toward the superhero Batman at the rescue? Perhaps.
De Kooning’s work is found at major museums across North America, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art — home to seven of his works — as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago.
SG
14. Six in Vermilion with Red in Red (1970)
Patrick Heron (1920–99)
Patrick Heron, Six in Vermilion with Red in Red, 1970
Screen print, 59/100, sheet: 72.4 x 101.6 cm
Gift of Robert Borns, 1980
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York
© Estate of Patrick Heron / SODRAC
