Everything is Happening by Michael Jacobs

Author:Michael Jacobs [Michael Jacobs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847088093
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

As a teenager faced for the first time with Las Meninas, I had the arrogance to want to paint more than ever. I now remembered this as I remained recumbent on the couch, waiting for the energy to wander off into Madrid’s streets, and gradually realizing that the deeper I delved into Las Meninas’s past, the more I was uncovering my own.

Buried beneath all my years as an art historian, and then as a writer, was a child whose first and strongest ambition in life was to paint. My whole outlook on the world was once a predominantly visual one. My art teacher at prep school was convinced my future lay in painting, and made me promise always to keep her informed of my life’s progress (I never did). By the time I was at Westminster, under pressure to study at Oxford or Cambridge, I was determined to go to art school. I did sketches wherever I went, and had a whole sketchbook of the people, places and paintings I had observed in the spring of 1969, during that first trip alone to Spain. My thumbnail version of Las Meninas looked crudely and unintentionally like a Picasso.

It was only on my return to Spain the following year that I discovered that Picasso had been obsessed by the same painting. My knowledge of art had increased vastly in the meantime, and my plans to become an artist, wholly disapproved of by my parents, had been tempered by a more realistic scheme to learn art history. I became the first person at my school to do an A level in this then widely maligned subject, for which I was obliged to write a miniature thesis. I chose, pretentiously, to do one on Hispano-Flemish painting of the fifteenth century. This gave me an opportunity to travel to parts of Spain I had always wanted to see, including Barcelona, where I went to the city’s recently opened Picasso Museum.

With Las Meninas still fresh in my mind, I was able to enjoy even more this museum’s display of Picasso’s fifty-seven variants of the picture. But I was puzzled as to why Picasso had chosen greatly to accentuate the light source on the left-hand side of Velázquez’s painting. Until I put my developing art historical skills to work and discovered that Picasso had last seen the picture in 1902, when it had hung in its special room where light had flooded in from a window on this side. Picasso’s paintings were heavily influenced by memories of a room last viewed by him over fifty-five years earlier.

I also found out something else: that Picasso had seen the painting once before, as a fifteen-year-old on a visit from Málaga with his parents. This was in 1895, when Las Meninas still hung in the Prado’s Long Gallery, when the child Picasso could have unwittingly brushed shoulders with many of the work’s Impressionist and neo-Impressionist admirers. Even perhaps with the man who had come to fascinate me since my previous

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