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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Books | The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming







"The painting I saw that day seems to hold death back from the brink even as it acknowledges our shared human fate. [...] Because of Velázquez, these long-lost people will always be there at the heart of the Prado, always waiting for us to arrive; they will never go away, as long as we are there to hold them in sight. Las Meninas is like a chamber of the mind, a place where the dead will never die. The gratitude I feel to Velázquez for this greatest of paintings is untold: he gave me the consolation to return to my own life."
(Cumming, Laura: The Vanishing Man. In Pursuit of Velázquez, Vintage, London 2016, p.4)

"The truth of life, the mortal truth of our brief walk in the sun, has to be set down in a flash of brilliant brushstrokes that are themselves on the verge of dissolution. The picture, the person, the life: all are here now, but on the edge of disappearing. It is the very definition of the human condition."
(ibid., p.264)

Velázquez's Las Meninas is my favourite painting, so I was thrilled to see Laura Cumming (whose book A Face to the World, about self portraits, blew me away) publish this gem of a book. It is the true story of a 19th-century bookseller's obsession with a portrait that led him into ruin, and a paean to Velázquez's genius, exploring the extraordinary humanity and dignity of his paintings, his deep respect for all his subjects.

So much has been written about Las Meninas, but Cumming adds her unique vision to all the voices. I felt a particular affinity with the genesis of this book, which was triggered by grief over the author's father's death, but the way Cumming weaves the universal truth of life and death into her story of this and other paintings is bound to move anybody reading her book. Cumming's life was changed by Velázquez and so was John Snare's (the bookseller), and The Vanishing Man has a lot to say about how we are affected by art, which of course we never perceive in a vacuum.

Las Meninas isn't the painting at the heart of this story, but it is a vital part and appears throughout the book, which combines (art) history, mystery, a double-biography and psychology in an intriguing blend of non-fiction. Both the bookseller John Snare and Velázquez are elusive figures, yet Cumming manages to bring them to life, and their presence in this world, which she conjures so beautifully and with such love and empathy, continues to haunt me long after finishing the book.

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Here is a short video of Laura Cumming talking about the book.
 

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