What the fuck Picasso.

~

Pablo Picasso

Man and Woman, 1969

(Source: collections.lacma.org)

hyperallergic:

Tourists Line Up to Visit Beast Jesus

This makes me so happy you have no idea.

I know as an art historian this should make me sad because someone painted over a historic painting but I just can’t stop looking at it. Its… its just so AWESOME like this.

~

Elias Garcia Martinez

Ecce Homo, n.d.

free-parking:

Picasso’s bulls

The shrinking bull wiener is more mesmerizing to me than it should be. 

(via essentz-deactivated20130117)

This painting shows Apollo informing Vulcan, blacksmith to the gods, of his wife Venus’ affair with Mars. Note how unlike other artists of his era, Velázquez makes the gods look like they could almost be ordinary people. The only thing that tells you this is a mythological scene is the halo over Apollo’s head. 

~

Diego Velázquez

Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan, 1630 

This painting was one of 58 he did for the Las Meninas series, completed over five months. He said about the project, 

“If anyone were to try and copy Las Meninas in complete good faith, and for example got a certain point - and if I were the copier - would say to myself, ‘and if I just put this a little more to the right or left?’ I would try to do it in my own way, forgetting about Velázquez. The challenge would surely make me modify or change the light, due to having changed the position of a character. In this way, little by little, I would paint Meninas who would seem detestable to a pure copyist - they would not be what he thought he saw on Velázquez’s canvas, but they would be my Meninas.”

~

Diego Velázquez, Infanta Margarita (detail), 1653

Pablo Picasso, Infanta Margarita (detail), 1957

This is another painting that I am looking at in my research of 17th century court dwarfs. This is a portrait of Don Diego de Acedo, sometimes lovingly referred to as “El Primo” (“The Cousin” in English). Don Diego held the prestigious position as Undersecretary and Keeper of the Seal to King Philip IV of Spain. He was well loved in the court and was close to the king’ adviser, the Count-Duke Olivares. This close relationship brought him into harms way when he was accidentally shot while travelling with the Duke by the King’s honour guard, who were firing off celebratory rounds. Luckily, his injuries were minor.

~

Diego Velázquez

Don Diego de Acedo (El Primo), c.1645

I am writing a paper on court dwarfs in art so I figured I’d share some of my research. What we have here is Archduchess Isabella and her attendant dwarf, Magdalena Ruiz. Philip II refers to Ruiz in a letter written to his daughters, “I do not think Magdalena is so angry with me, but she has been sick for some days, and has taken a laxative and remains in a very bad mood. Yesterday she came here and looked very spiritless, and thin and old and deaf and half-senile. I think it is all from drinking…”

~

Alonso Sánchez Coello

Portrait of Isabel Clara Eugenia and Magdalena Ruiz, c.1586

Velázquez’s painting was the target of perhaps the most famous art vandalism case of all time when it was attacked with a butcher’s knife by Mary Richardson in 1914 in protest against the arrest of another suffragist. She released this statement to the press, “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.”

The picture of the slashed painting is almost art in and of itself.

~

Diego Velázquez

Venus at her Mirror, c.1647-51