Velázquez October 3, 1989 - January 7, 1990 NEW kk

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art , 1989. Demy folio, [31.25cm/12.5inches], full gilt-embossed orange cloth with mylar-protected dust jacket, pp. xi, 286, indexed. Illustrated with 225 b-w halftones, colour plates &ct. Please feel free to ask for particulars and/or additional photographs. ... The Met's blurb notes: "In 1865 Édouard Manet first saw the great collection of paintings by Velázquez in Madrid's Museo del Prado. Enraptured, he wrote to a friend, "He is the painter of painters ... He has astonished me, he has ravished me." Velázquez, the preeminent Spanish artist of the seventeenth century, continues to enthrall viewers. His sublime works express the very essence of the painter's art—they join an immense intelligence and extraordinary psychological acuity to a matchless technical facility. His images are deeply rooted in the physical world, yet their complex stillness transcends time, pointing toward a truth that exists beyond the ephemeral. Velázquez's intense concern with empirical experience and his distaste for idealization lend an exquisite tension to his ceremonial portraits of Philip IV, his wives and children, and the members of his court. A highly placed courtier as well as an artist, the painter confirmed the elevated birth and powerful station of his royal subjects, but his portraits move beyond iconography into the shadowy area where individual identity and public role meet. From his earliest works, such as The Waterseller of Seville, to his last portraits of the royal children, Velázquez demonstrates both truth to objective reality and poignant compassion."