Works by these painters who are in New York are now exhibited at the Prado Museum
Powerful, arrogant, inflexible, capable of condemning hundreds of families to starvation and the most cruel needs, as long as they do not bow to the just demands of their workers or to the agreements with the American steel unions. And at the same time sensitive to art, touching in his gaze in front of the great masters, greedy and hungry to be part of one of the painting collections stronger than the United States assembled in the intercentury period.
Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) traveled to Europe in search of the best art history paintings of all time. He paid well in excess of what buyers demanded and had the fabrics loaded with obsessive security measures onto the fastest ocean liners in order to unload his valuable merchandise on NY and accommodate his precious treasure in the mansion that the architect Thomas Hastings -the author of the NY Public Library- built for him on Fifth Avenue, at 70th Street.
Frick, who did not embark on the maiden voyage of the Titanic because his wife Adelaide Howard Childs sprained an ankle, bought in Spain the nine works that until July 2 hang in the Prado Museuma loan that The Frick Collection has approved due to the works that these months are carried out in the New York palace located in front of Central Park.
The paintings are exhibited in the Villanueva building, the exhibition has been curated by Javier Portús and on the white walls hang three the Greeks -the Italian military Vincent Anastagi (1575), The expulsion of the merchants from the temple (1600) y St Geronimo (1590)- and four goyas –Peter of Alcantara and Téllez-Giron, ninth Duke of Osuna (1790), portrait of an officer (1804), woman portrait (1824) y Forge (1815)-. Next to them stand out trails of works by Diego Velazquez y Bartolome Murillo titled Felipe IV in Fraga (1644) y self portrait (1650), respectively. The portrait of Felipe IV is contemporary with the jester the cousinone of the masterpieces of the baroque painter that reveals the character, the dignity, the concern for the psychological depth of Sebastian de Morra.
Murillo, for his part, once again takes a self-portrait, seeking that whoever contemplates him venerate the mastery of someone who is capable of turning water into wine, canvas into art.
The work of Velázquez and Murillo is not represented only in the great New York collection. Fundamental works of both careers are exhibited in the National Gallery From london. there it hangs the venus in the mirrorby Don Diego, among his works, and a new self-portrait by Bartolomé Murillo, where he returns to his obsession with showing whoever contemplates him the respect that every great artist should arouse.
The cruel Henry Frick knew that collecting brought his humble origins closer to the European aristocracy, owner of the great pages of art history. Then Poe I had already written The barrel of amontillado, Thoreau had stood up Walden y Emily Dickinson his poems (all three in Massachusetts, the state that builds the history of the country). But between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the great North American plutocrats were aware that their country needed to create an epiphany of art, to bring the great works of European painting here -in the Frick hangs, for example, the polish horseman of Rembrandt-, decorate and show off in their mansions and their new museums the artistic chronicle of the old continent from where their ancestors left, download from the Mayflower the grammar of oil and canvas that relates them to the other side of the ocean from which they do not want to be separated out of admiration and memory.
According to the criteria of
