[ad_1]
Pareja, who was also an artist, is the subject of a small but potent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For years before Velázquez painted his portrait, Pareja was enslaved, serving Velázquez in his studio and accompanying him on his travels. Shortly after Velázquez painted the famous image of a handsome man with dark skin, Pareja was granted the promise of freedom after four more years of service. The exhibition, “Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter,” is the first gathering of the works Pareja made after 1654, when he became legally, personally and artistically independent of the man who owned him.
An expressionless face is its own kind of expression, a refusal of vulnerability, a decline of any emotional insight to the viewer. It is a mask, and in this case, it is almost certainly hiding the complicated and emotionally fraught relationship between two artists, one whose star was rising, the other who was then working anonymously, probably making copies of Velázquez’s most in-demand works. Look at this painting, and say to yourself, “He is looking at the man who owns him.” The mask makes perfect sense, but what does it cost a man to wear it every hour of every day?
The portrait was made in Rome, and its lively, humane depiction of a man with African features caused a sensation. It was a calling card for the Spanish artist among the elite of Rome, and in this exhibition it sits opposite another equally stunning Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X.
The Pareja portrait, which the Met acquired with great fanfare in 1971, very likely secured Velázquez access to paint the pope’s portrait. To see both works in the same room is an explosive experience. Both ends of the social hierarchy are represented and linked by a complex chain of associations.
Pareja’s servitude furthered Velázquez’s success, and the painting of an enslaved Black man led to the portrait of one of Europe’s ultimate power players. Pareja withholds emotion and access, while Innocent X holds nothing back, pinched lips etching a slight sneer and beady eyes almost shouting “Begone!” at both artist and viewer.
Much of this exhibition is focused on illuminating the complexity of Spain’s multiracial society in the 17th century. Slave labor and colonial exploitation of the Americas had piled up vast wealth, and slavery was embedded in Spanish economic and cultural life.
In Seville, the artisan class relied on slave labor to produce luxury goods. In Madrid, the center of political and court life, slavery was a status symbol. When Velázquez took the enslaved Pareja to Rome, where slavery was less common, the locals may have found it slightly quaint or ostentatious for an artist to swan about with human chattel.
The racialization of slavery, so deeply embedded in the United States’ ugly history, was not as strongly established in Spain. When Pareja set out as a free man and independent artist, he had considerable success in Madrid, as a Catholic man painting Catholic subjects despite the church’s acceptance of slavery. Racism and racial thinking included deep anxieties about the intermixing of Jewish, Islamic and Christian populations over centuries of Spain’s complicated history.
Unfortunately, this exhibition has been installed in the wing housing the Met’s Robert Lehman Collection, some of the least congenial and most disjointed galleries in the building. That made it impossible to juxtapose Velázquez’s aristocratic portraiture, including the portrait of Pareja, with fascinating and moving works that include people of African descent installed in a nearby hallway.
These works by various artists, including three related images of a kitchen maid by Velázquez, depict Black people of the servant class with what seems a genuine sense of insight and empathy. Like the maid in Velázquez’s images, a boy with black skin also wears an expressionless mask in Murillo’s moving “Three Boys.” There might have been some revelation had they been placed closer to the portrait of Pareja. As a man enslaved to a fashionable artist, Pareja saw Rome, which almost certainly expanded the breadth of his artistic vision; servants, whether enslaved or free, saw far less of the world.
Most of Pareja’s own works are placed in another corridor space, which is also unfortunate. In the excellent catalogue, co-curator David Pullins identifies 14 works firmly attributed to Pareja, five of which are in the exhibition.
It would be nice to have more, but this show includes two magnificent paintings that may be the most important in his oeuvre. “The Calling of Saint Matthew” (1661) and “The Baptism of Christ” (1667) put to rest any lingering idea (once more common among scholars studying Pareja) that he was a lesser Velázquez. They are grandly scaled, wonderfully idiosyncratic Baroque masterpieces with complex drama and geometry and loving attention to detail.
They underscore the larger argument of Pullins and his co-curator, Vanessa K. Valdés, that Pareja’s post-enslavement work was a break from Velázquez’s refined, sensitive and courtly aesthetic and more in sympathy with the exuberance and colors of the Madrid School painters, relatively little-known today, who were creating a new mélange of styles in Madrid in the mid-17th century.
Another Pareja work, “The Flight Into Egypt” (1658), is awkward and cloying, and perhaps an unsuccessful effort at a personal take on the works of the Madrid painters. The Saint Matthew and Baptism paintings suggest a fully complete transition to an independent vision.
There are, in fact, two portraits of Pareja in the show. The first, by Velázquez, is the most famous. The second is a self-portrait by Pareja, which he included at the far left, among the other figures, in his “The Calling of Saint Matthew.” There is no doubt they are the same man. And in the Saint Matthew canvas, Pareja depicts another painter from the Madrid School, Jose Antolinez, standing next to him — a sign that the formerly enslaved artist was now integrated into larger artistic circles.
In his self-portrait, Pareja again stares directly at the viewer, and his mouth again gives away no sense of emotion. But a patch of light above his right eyebrow suggests just a slight touch of irony, adding a note of self-confidence to the engaging intelligence of the Velázquez image. Pareja is literally in the picture, but stands apart from its drama. He and Antolinez are occupied with themselves, a bit like stage managers who have seen the show so often that they no longer need to pay it much attention.
What does it mean? Sometimes, in art, one sees things that are clearly meaningful, obviously important, powerfully resonant, yet no specific meaning emerges. The only thing I can think of is that Pareja is saying, “Look at what I have made.” But he won’t tell us whether he means the art or himself.
Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter: Through July 16 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. metmuseum.org.
[ad_2]
Source link