Hispanic Society

We went to the Hispanic Society yesterday, Sunday. Quite impressive, and, gladly, not at all crowded. Hamilton Heights is not a popular destination for many; they don't know what they're missing (let's keep it that way).

Most impressive was the art work of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. Aside from three canvases in the main room, there is a series in its own large room.


The 14 paintings that make up Sorolla's ambitious and overwhelming "Visions of Spain" (1913-1919), which were originally commissioned by Mr. Huntington for the Hispanic Society, are newly installed in their own large gallery after returning from a tour of six Spanish museums. Both a tour de force and a tour of Spain, the paintings are especially persuasive thanks to extensive conservation work that has restored their brilliance. The sailors, fishermen and fish in the post-Impressionist "Ayamonte" (1919) are all in tones of white, yet poles apart from those of the gauchos and cattle in "Andalucía, The Round-Up" (1914)—reflecting the variations in light in different parts of Spain. It's easy to be put-off by clichéd images of local color and ceremonies, folk costumes and dances, but Sorolla manages to draw you into these settings, conveying an authenticity that also speaks to a moment in time, because the scenes were developed from the artist's travel sketches.

The paintings are very large, and it is only because the room is so large that one can get enough perspective to see them properly. Ayamonte is one of them. 

http://museosorolla.mcu.es/

Upper Broadway's buried treasures

Standing on what was once the estate of the bird painter John James Audubon, known today as Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street, is an assemblage of elegant Beaux-Arts structures built during the first three decades of the 20th century. Some of the original tenants—including the American Indian-Heye Foundation, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society—have moved out, but fortunately the Hispanic Society of America remains firmly planted.
In fact, it is taking over some of the vacated spaces. Now that the Hispanic Society has completed the first phase, at a cost of about $5.5 million, of its continuing renovation under the direction of architect Maria C. Romañach and with the aid of Spain's Ministry of Culture, New Yorkers no longer have any excuse to disregard its jaw-dropping collections.

One of our walking tours a few years back covered exactly this area; I remember Trinity cemetery across 155th Street. We walked around the area.

Upon entering the Society's elegant courtyard, the first work one encounters is the magnificent and commanding portrait by Francisco Goya of "The Duchess of Alba" (1797). Several other Goyas are on the balcony above, which serves as a venue for a quick survey in Spanish painting from the late Renaissance to the late 19th century.

 I don't think of a Goya anywhere outside a museum.

 The Hispanic Society of America
Joaquín Sorolla's 'Ayamonte'

 The Hispanic Society of America
Diego Velázquez's 'Portrait of a Little Girl'

El Greco in . . . Greece

The stunning 1983 discovery of the signature of Domenikos Theotokopoulos on an exquisite Byzantine icon dramatically enlarged our knowledge of the enigmatic painter far better known as El Greco (1541-1614). This small egg tempera on wood panel depicting the Dormition of the Virgin has long been owned by the archdiocese of the Greek island of Syros but was rarely seen. It had suffered passages of overpainting and minor abrasions, and these were delicately removed or restored in the wake of its new acclaim. Yet even with some of its decorative surface effaced, it bears the markings of what would be El Greco's richly synthetic career. The panel follows the traditional, stylized format of the popular Byzantine subject, and embodies the deeply emotive character of Greek icon painting as a whole. But it reflects as well a burgeoning interest in the depiction of real space and of animated, sculptural figures, and so suggests the artist's early exposure to the naturalistic painting of Italy even before he sailed from his native Crete for Venice around 1567.

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The Onassis Cultural Center in New York

Federico Garcia Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

In reading Ian Gibson's biography, Federico García Lorca : a life, I came across metnion of a Lorca poem, Ode to Walt Whitman.


Federico Garcia Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the huge leaves
or the shoreline's blue tongue.

By the East River and the Queensboro
boys were battling with industry
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision,
and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied
herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused,
none of them wanted to be a cloud,
none of them looked for ferns
or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises
the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;
a border of needles will besiege memory
and the coffins will bear away those who don't work.

New York, mire,
New York, mire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?
Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo's,
nor your voice like a column of ash,
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you moaned like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth...

Not for a moment, virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would place in your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because on penthouse roofs,
gathered at bars,
emerging in bunches from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,
or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

He's one, too! That's right! And they land
on your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowds of howls and gestures,
like cats or like snakes,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,
clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,
the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

He's one, too! That's right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.

But you didn't look for scratched eyes,
nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,
nor frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad's belly
that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

You looked for a naked body like a river.
Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

Because it's all right if a man doesn't look for his delight
in tomorrow morning's jungle of blood.
The sky has shores where life is avoided
and there are bodies that shouldn't repeat themselves in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.
Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time
a breeze that drowses in the branches.

That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the little boy who writes
the name of a girl on his pillow,
nor against the boy who dresses as a bride
in the darkness of the wardrobe,
nor against the solitary men in casinos
who drink prostitution's water with revulsion,
nor against the men with that green look in their eyes
who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

But yes against you, urban faggots,
tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.
Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

Always against you, who give boys
drops of foul death with bitter poison.
Always against you,
Fairies of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cádiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!
Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.
Opening in public squares like feverish fans
or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

No quarter given! Death
spills from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the mire's edge.
No quarter given! Attention!
Let the confused, the pure,
the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants
close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson's banks
with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.
Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for
comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

Sleep on, nothing remains.
Dancing walls stir the prairies
and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.
I want the powerful air from the deepest night
to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,
and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites
that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

Las Meninas

A picture of an artist's studio is an invitation to enter his private realm, to ponder his perception of the creative process and to marvel at the extent to which art, at its most profound, can transcend the limits of its historic moment and constructed space. Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656)—marked by a massive scale, unremitting technical virtuosity and centuries of critical analysis—is a tour-de-force studio painting and one against which legions of later artists, including Goya and Picasso, have measured themselves. Countless writers have debated the work's seductive visual riddles: its transparent naturalism yet strangely inaccessible subject, its striking combination of a captured moment and staged studio portrait, its meticulously wrought but, in the end, ambiguous perspective. Perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the Golden Age of Spanish art, it has been heralded as a summation of the painter's illustrious career and enduring quest for nobility in an age and culture that did not sufficiently esteem its native artists. In the waning decades of the Hapsburg empire in Spain, Velázquez's "Las Meninas" also offered a telling glimpse of the world of the aging Philip IV, where artifice and illusion often masked, to dazzling effect, an increasingly dismal reality.





Velázquez's first biographer, Palomino, identified the painting's cast of characters, all of them part of the royal household. At center stands the exquisite Infanta Margarita, whose radiant innocence is captured in sheer, scintillating strokes and framed by the solicitous handmaidens (or meninas) who attend her. To the right appear two dwarfs who served, in keeping with court custom, as playmates to the princess; one of them, Nicolasito, teases a sleepy mastiff. Just behind, a lady-in-waiting to the queen chats with an unnamed gentleman, while beyond and silhouetted in a luminous doorway, the queen's chamberlain pauses to look back. And poised at left before his easel, with palette lowered and paintbrush frozen in midair, the artist himself gazes intently out, most likely at Philip IV and his wife, Marianna of Austria, whose likenesses are captured in a shimmering, distant looking glass. It is here that the painter's paradoxes begin.

In the far back, above La Infanta's head, is the mirrored image of the royals.