6 of the Greatest Painters

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Las Meninas: This is sometimesd mentioned as the world’s best painting. There are about a dozen versions of it  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Meninas,_by_Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg, and it is impossible to know which comes closest to the original. — Notice the way they covered their walls with large paintings as if these were like tapestries meant as insulators against the cold.

Diego Velazquez  1599-1660

He is so objective that  everything —   the royal pet, the princess, the furniture, the clothes and even the surrounding air –  all received  the same silent attention.

The women beside the princess are her servants.

In the Prado museum there are always  crowds collecting in front of Las Meninas; the  photo is at the New York Times :

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Photo from the Prado collection online at http://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/

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And his mustache was successfully imitated by Salvador Dalí.

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He painted the little princess and all the other royals and their clothes many times over.

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But he also painted the clowns and court jesters. There is a large Wikipedia collection of his work at Wikipedia Velázquez

Meanwhile, his real aim in life seems to have been to  obtain some hereditary  title, no matter how small, and become  a member of the aristocracy.

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That is a court jester, not easy to forget.

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El Greco 1541-1614

He is more difficult to accept because  his figures  seem distorted. He must have been in love with colours flowing like big rivers all down a large painting, and so  there are rivers of gold or green representing the robes of his Saints, priests, angels, and dignitaries.

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El Greco painted this view of the city of Toledo more than 400 years ago, and it looks modern.

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Francisco Goya 1746-1828

Did he paint posters?

There were civil uprisings against Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Goya painted the tortures.

This drawing is called “Enhanced interrogation”.

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A beggar with his little dog that seems to share the man’s humiliation :

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But Goya wasn’t born somber. He painted the Duchess of Alba and her little dog, both in white and wearing similar red ribbons :

Aren’t the Spanish painters more different from each other than painters elsewhere? A child about eleven years old would see these once and tell them apart ever after.

Here is the beautiful naked Maja. It was a sensation in its time and for some reason it is  more suggestive than what you could find now:

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Goya was a contemporary of Heine’s. There was the same  ironical distance in his sense of tragedy and of beauty.

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And Goya’s Bullfight series are considered the best.

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Next come  Picasso, Miró, and Salvador Dalí :

This is Picasso, after Einstein’s the 20th century’s most famous name.

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The painting and the preparatory sketches , lots of them, are all at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. These are  samples:

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The photos are by ghD

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Many of his drawings are breathtaking in their ease and perfection:

Quote Pablo Picasso: And the less they understand, the more they admire it

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“Nocturno” by Joan Miró and, below, one of his floor tiles.

There is a little girl with her skipping rope and in her hair a red ribbon. Another artist, Klee, once said that a line is a dot that went for a walk, and in many of Miró’s picture you can actually see the dot walk or even dance :

“Constellation” is its name….. which you wouldn’t have guessed :-D, but remember you can’t  always tell a wine by its label either.

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Miró is also known for the long story-like titles of his paintings.

I thought that was a great idea to reduce widespread gallery fatigue by giving story titles to abstract paintings. This would help the clueless viewers, and we are very many, believe me. However, the idea is not catching on.

Quote Joan Miró:  You can look at a painting for a whole week and then never think about it again.  You can also look at a painting for a second and think about it for the rest of your life.

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One of Miró’s civil war posters

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These paintings are at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. They specialize in modern art, and their selection is immense but mindless.

Just as in many other places, you will get lost unless you know what you are looking for:

This seems to have been called Stairway of Evasion according to El País http://www.elpais.com/fotogaleria/Miro/experimentador/Tate/Modern/elpgal/20110412elpepucul_1/Zes/7.

The original is at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

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” Woman at the Window” and a fragment of “Christ on the Cross” by Dalí.

Below is Dalí’s father, a lawyer and notary public, by Dalí. This painting, like the one above, is at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, and the photo is by ghD.

You can see why Dalí and his dad did not get along:

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Dalí clowned around for the photo, but he was only partly a clown :

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The Simpsons did their own version of  the famous clock meltdown, but it came out a little flat because it is difficult to play pranks on a prankster.

The original painting  is called The Persistence of Memory.

Quote Salvador Dalí: When I paint, the ocean roars.

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