Keith Broadfoot

Velázquez’s Dwarfs and the Modern Uncanny

Abstract In this article I focus on a “set” of four paintings by Diego Velázquez that form part of his contribution to the interior decoration of the Torre de la Parada. Developing upon Lacan’s response to Foucault’s famous commentary on Las Meninas I argue that Velázquez’s modernity is nowhere more marked than in this set of paintings in which an unprecedented focus is directed towards the liminal figure of the court dwarf. Reading these works as displaced portraits of the King, I suggest that with them Velázquez encountered a certain impossibility in the process of representation. In following Lacan on the uncanny, and by drawing attention to the significance of Velázquez’s depiction of his subjects’ hands in these paintings, I propose that the uncanny presence of these dwarfs should be understood via Lacan’s concept of the objet a: an impossible object that has no place in given reality and that arises from the failure of the painter’s act of inscription.

Australian Art on the Move: Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Coast

On the initiative of John Kaldor, Christo and Jeanne-Claude visited Australia in 1969 where they realised three new artworks, the most famous of which was Wrapped Coast, or, to give it its full tit...

Abstraction and Aura

ion and Aura When did the desire to paint the last painting begin? By the time of Ad Reinhardt and his series of Ultimate Paintings, he could already be said to be following a well-established modernist tradition. What did arrive with Ad Reinhardt, however, was a rather intriguing coupling of the very old with the very new. In the attempt to escape from what he saw as the limitations of an avant-garde position, Reinhardt was drawn back to quite distant and, for the time, rather obscure religious texts that formed part of a mystical tradition that found illumination through the celebration of all things ‘‘oxymoronic.’’ In his notes on his final series of ‘‘ultimate’’ or ‘‘black’’ paintings, Reinhardt quotes under the category of ‘‘mystical ascent,’’ ‘‘ ‘the divine dark’— ‘luminous darkness.’ ’’1 To serve as a kind of summation of his artistic career Reinhardt also offers this quotation from Nicholas of Cusa: ‘‘How needful it is to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites—to seek the truth where impossibility meets us.’’2 In this article I consider what coincidence of opposites it was that was sought in modernist painting, what kind of impossibility it was that The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Summer . Copyright

Las Meninas and the king's two bodies

Abstract Las Meninas is a remarkable painting because it conforms to no genre; as critics still say today, there is no other painting like it (figure I). It was painted in 1656 by Diego Vélazquez, who at the time was Court painter to Philip IV of Spain. The predominant duty of this position was to paint the Royal portraits. Is Las Meninas, perhaps therefore, to be placed under the category of a Royal Portrait? This seems unlikely for the painting does not correspond to any standard depiction of Royalty. Where, one might initially wonder, in so far as the painting was originally titled The Royal Family, is the King himself? Generic convention would dictate his foregrounding, yet this is not followed in Las Meninas. Yet, at the same time, he is not completely absent from the depiction, for his presence can be discovered, his image found, in a mirror in the background. Would this distant image of the King constitute a Royal portrait? How would such a question be relevant to the purpose for which Las Meninas was painted?