"Live!: A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers" week 2 - Lecture 6
THOMAS LAWSON ON DIEGO VELAZQUEZ'S LAS MENINAS
This course is about the kinds of uses that artists make of art history.
So each week, we will be visiting with a different artist to learn about a work of art that has been important to their thinking.
This week, we met with Thomas Lawson, Dean of the School of Art, and Jill and Peter Kraus Distinguished Chair in Art, at Calarts.
There's more biographical information on Tom at the end of this video.
Now, let's turn our attention to the work that he chose: Diego Velezquez's "Las Meninas", from 1656.
So, Tom, maybe you'll tell us a little bit about how you think the painting works.
>> Right.
>> And why it interests you.
>> Sure.
Almost everyone who's invested in painting, in one way or another, has to think about this work at some point in their lives.
But every now and again, a painter makes something that is something of a summation of his or her thoughts, and "Las Meninas" is that kind of painting.
So that's why it's such a significant one.
Because it's comes at the end of his life and career, so in some way it is a summation of what he'd been thinking, or what he'd learned.
I mean, his entire career he was working for the King of Spain.
I mean, that was his place-- a lot of it, making portraits of the Royal Family.
But he was a painter, and he was a thinker and an intellectual.
And so, as he was doing his job, he was also thinking about what it meant to do that, and what it meant to make representations of the world that he lived in.
So one of the things about this painting, the Las Meninas well, it's a very large painting.
And it depicts an interior space in a way that both opens into, kind of, infinity, but also is very sort of self-enclosed.
There's sort of the implication of there being a window on one side, with the light coming in, and there's a kind of cold light.
On the other side of the canvas from where the light is coming in, there's this weird blockage to our view, which is the painted rendition of the back of a painting.
Already, you get a sense of this sort of extreme self-consciousness-- that this is a painting that refers to painting.
The subject of the painting is the infanta, a young little girl who's a princess, and her entourage.
It seems like she's being prepared to be looked at.
The ladies in waiting are kind of fixing up the last details of her costuming and everybody is kind of looking out of the picture at us-- the people who are looking at it.
Slightly behind them, there's a kind a of cavalier-looking figure, with his mustache and beard, peering out from behind this canvas. And as you look at him, you realize he's holding a palette and a brush.
I mean, he's the artist, and so he's looking-- in the way that an artist might be looking-- at us. You know, he's sort of looking seriously out of the picture-- again, sort of at us.
On the back wall of the room, there are these dark paintings. And then there's this one that seems to have a kind of slightly interior light-- it kind of glows.
In that little rectangle, there are these sort of shadowy representations of two people.
You can infer, from the whole rest of the situation, that it's probably the parents of this little girl.
It's the King and Queen of Spain.
The disquieting part of that is that that circuit of, sort of, gazes and representations short-circuits the reality of the person standing in front of the painting.
Because if you're standing there, looking into this view, you would expect-- and there's a mirror in the back-- you would expect to see yourself.
The power relation of the monarchy eliminates you.
>> You can't be the king or queen, so you can't be there.
>> You cannot, you certainly cannot be the king and queen.
And of course, after all these centuries, you can't even be there, so there's another kind of layer of temporality that becomes quite interesting.
For me, this painting manages to do all these terrific mind games about what you're looking at as you're looking at a painting.
And, as a painter, that is a tremendously invigorating sort of notion, that you could build into your work at that level of self-conscious examination of
the process in which you're engaged.
Which makes it, in many ways, one of the earliest Modern paintings, because the Modern period, which I'm sure we'll get to plenty, is all about that kind of self-consciousness.
And I think, even more than circuitive gazes, that vast blank canvas-- >> Mm-hm.
>> is such a weird barrier to entry.
This canvas, right in our faces here, is telling us that we cannot access everything.
That there's a kind of a limit to what can be seen and understood, that there's something between you and a full comprehension of what's going on.
>> There's the strangeness of spending so much time, as a painter, rendering the back of the canvas.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And how we're to understand the kind of investment of that, in relationship to the investment in rendering the garments of the infanta.
>> Painters like Velezquez, and like Titian and others developed these techniques to represent satin and silk and different kinds of materialities-- and fur.
So then, as you said, to devote so much time and care on representing untouched linen that is dirty and a little dusty because that's what happens to the back of a painting.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And the raw wood of the stretchers-- I mean, these are base materials.
These are not the fine materials of the painted world.
>> And it's why, in fact, even though we're kind of looking at a reproduction now, to crib while we're talking, >> Yeah.
>> it's just so important to go to see works of art in person.
And it actually doesn't matter if they're masterpieces or not,
it's having an understanding of the materiality of making.
>> Yes, it's important, I think, to-- absolutely-- to see paintings.
And, you know, to go back to "Las Meninas" again, it is a very large thing.
I mean, it's a significant...
>> A machine.
>> Yes.
I mean, it's intended to really take up your attention.
I mean, you're not supposed to just walk past it.
You are supposed to come and stand and look and consider all these various elements that are being presented.
>> Almost immediately, this painting began to be written about and obsessed over, as you said, by legions of art historians, critics, artists, philosophers-- including Michel Foucault-- and over the centuries, too, artists have interrogated it, and taken it apart, and taken their measure in relationship to it, in various ways.
>> I actually think that the, the "Demoiselles d'Avignon"
>> That's interesting, yeah.
>> Has a relationship to this that's not explicit, but just that it's using the conventions of a certain kind of figurative painting, that was prevalent when he was a student, to deconstruct the entire idea of representation and push painting into a whole new kind of realm.
>> I agree with you.
I do think there's a strong relation to the -- that Picasso obviously had this multifigure, complicated spatial composition in mind. But as an art historian, I couldn't really make that argument very well without being able to trace a kind of documented lineage of it.
And as artists, we can say, 'I can see the conversation.'
>> Right.
Part of the job of being an artist is looking at other art.
And when you're confronting older art, you're-- I mean, you're really looking at it in a contemporary point of view. You're not a historian.
What's interesting to artists are particular problems that are confronted and solved, or not solved, or-- you know, things that succeed and things that fail. I mean, because we all like to look at failure as much as success, actually-- maybe, in some cases,
>> Even more.
>> More.
Right.
The Demoiselles d'Avignon thing is-- you know, it's a group of women who are looking at their viewer in different degrees of agression-- but there's absolutely no verifiable, historical connection to that.
Yeah.
>> There's just the long chain of conversations--
>> A long chain of conversations and, actually, the knowledge that VelГЎzquez was in the conversation in the latter part of the 19th century.
Manet was a big fan.
>> Oh, a huge Velezquez fan.
>> Picasso looked at Manet, so we know that there's some kind of chain of custody of thought, but it's not point-by-point.
>> Right.
>> Right.