Paintings are delicate things that don’t much like fire, floods, wars, or general mayhem. Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas, which shows the infanta of Spain with her entourage of ladies-in-waiting, her dwarves, and her calf-size mastiff, certainly has had its share of close calls. To save it from a fire on Christmas Eve 1734 monks had to throw it out of a second-story window of the Royal Alcázar of Madrid. Miraculously, it suffered only light damage in the fall.
More hair-raising moments occurred during the Spanish civil war when the Nationalists bombed the Prado in November 1936. The Republican leadership decided to evacuate the Prado’s main works, first to Valencia, then to the Catalan castle La Peralada. Throughout, the convoys had to dodge Franco’s bombs: On the way to La Peralada, a low-hanging balcony caused a nasty gash in Goya’s The Second of May 1808, which shows Napoleon’s imperial guard charging Spanish rioters; but Las Meninas escaped unharmed.
When it became La Peralada’s turn to come under Nationalist attack, the Republican president Manuel Azana—who, before the war, had stated that all Spain’s churches were not worth a single Republican life—apparently had a change of heart about his country’s national heritage. Noting that the contents of the Prado meant more to Spain than “the Republic and the monarchy put together,” he decided to whisk the collection off to neutral Switzerland in 1939, just before the collapse of the Republican cause.
By the time Generalissimo Franco’s victorious regime had arranged for the collection’s return, World War II had broken out and Las Meninas found itself on the last nonmilitary train to leave Geneva. On the journey, two cases—containing Goya’s portrait of Charles IV and Las Meninas—split open, leaving the paintings hanging precariously over the train’s side. A tunnel would have torn them to shreds. A hurried halt was made on a siding to secure them.
Las Meninas‘s brushes with disaster are vividly recounted in Everything Is Happening. The idea for the book came three years ago when Michael Jacobs, a travel writer and art historian, received a jigsaw puzzle of Las Meninas from an old schoolmate. This was the first painting the author had fallen in love with on a 1969 visit to Madrid. At the time, he was attending Westminster School in London, where tables were made of oak timber from the Spanish Armada.
Retracing that first journey to Madrid, Jacobs intended his book to be “a manifesto for the liberation of how we look at a painting” and to explain Las Meninas in the way one would explain it to a friend, not as some dreary academic exercise. He wanted to get across the “quintessential Spanishness of the work, its exotic and surreal character, its mix of somberness and sensuality, its element of the grotesque, as well as its place in the twilight of Spain’s golden age. . . . The deeper I delved into Las Meninas‘s past, the more I was uncovering my own.” Unfortunately, Jacobs died of cancer in 2014, leaving just a series of fragments, and the work was taken over by Ed Vulliamy, based on conversation with Jacobs and on Jacobs’s earlier writings.
“Few other works,” writes Jacobs, are “open to so many interpretations that have mirrored to such an extent the changing preoccupations of each succeeding era.” He ascribes its aura of mystery to its sense of suspended animation, its “evocation of a world in which everything is about to happen.” Thus, Las Meninas is open-ended in ways that, say, many Victorian paintings are not. Once we have decoded their stories, we tend to lose interest; not so with Las Meninas.
Tracing its reception through the centuries, Jacobs found that while 18th-century connoisseurs thought that including dwarves was in poor taste—court inventories of the time assign it a lower value than some other Velázquez paintings—a reassessment took place in the 19th century. Courbet praised Velázquez’s naturalism while impressionists such as Manet and Whistler admired its spontaneity and capacity to capture a moment in time. On seeing Las Meninas in 1881, Renoir was so overwhelmed that he considered choosing a different line of work.
Trust the 20th century to complicate things. Where Las Meninas had been seen as a straightforward example of naturalism, Michel Foucault broke new ground in 1966 by pronouncing it a meta-painting, a painting about the art of painting, making it what one observer has called “the first self-conscious work of modern art.” Foucault focused on the “gaze” with which Velázquez pins the viewer and makes him part of the painting. This was a trick much employed by early Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca and Fillipino Lippi, making the spectator a kind of peeping Tom, witness to a scene he is not supposed to see. The mirror, notes Jacobs, has attracted much attention. Is what we see in the mirror a reflection of the painting on the easel, showing the king and queen, or the actual royal couple come to see how the painting progresses?
Foucault launched a torrent of learned treatises on vanishing points and paradoxes. Meanwhile, Marxists banged on about Spain’s exploitation of her colonies.
“Sunless expertise” is how Jacobs characterizes such academic drudgery. Recalling his own student days at the Courtauld Institute—where he was repeatedly admonished to remember you are “an art historian and not an art critic“—he became disillusioned with his chosen discipline, which left no room “for too much emotion or imagination.” But the institute’s director, and his supervisor, Anthony Blunt, persuaded him to tough it out and finish his doctorate. Blunt, notes Ed Vulliamy, was “the inspiration, not only for Michael, but a generation of Velázquez enthusiasts.” Blunt was also, of course, a Soviet spy, belonging to the Cambridge circle of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess. Jacobs, who had intended Blunt’s story to form part of this study, vigorously defended his mentor at the time of his public exposure, complaining that Blunt had been subject to a “baying maelstrom of indignation and bullying” and, in a letter to the Times, dismissing his espionage as “a minor and ultimately irrelevant aspect of his life.” While one can only dismiss Jacobs’s political views as naïve, and while some of his interpretations may seem overly personal, his accusations against much art writing as needlessly complicated and uninspired ring true.
Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.
