Twelve Years an Artist I/II
Review: Juan de Pareja at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 3rd - July 16th, 2023
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/juan-de-pareja
There’s a common theme in slave narratives of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Because the narrators show themselves to be literate, literary even, we’re encouraged to believe they’ve overcome their slave status. Their nobility of spirit will lift them—has lifted them—above their condition. In that sense we’re all slaves. We, too, in the very act of reading, identify as free or in the midst of freeing ourselves from our own metaphoric slavery. The narrator provides a mirror image to the readers who in turn can watch themselves appreciating all the fine sentiments of literature and place themselves among the select and the free. It’s the bargain the writer and the reader make, the familiar compact between those who produce and those who consume: the dream that we’re all free, each in our way.
In that rambling unpublished manuscript known as the German Ideology, Marx and Engels addressed the myth of the freedom of the artist. Far from an aspiring soul, the model of the era was Horace Vernet, the Jeff Koons of his day, who ran an efficient factory for the production of paintings, an art plantation staffed with artists yearning to be free. One may draw similar conclusions from the foundational text of political theory, L’Esprit des Loix [1748]. The author, Montesquieu, draws a distinction between slavery under despotism, which he finds to be purely coercive, and slavery in a democracy which, he imagines, rests on a compact between the slave and the master. The expression “involuntary servitude” would be redundant if it weren’t implicitly contrasted with voluntary servitude. For Marx as for Montesquieu slave labor was not the antithesis of “free” labor; it was merely its obverse.1
Juan de Pareja embodies that contradiction. He has the distinction of having been both a slave and an artist, possibly both at once. The contradiction is palpable in the fact that he’s remembered for his masterful portrait by the hand of Velázquez. There’s a pointed irony in the fact that the representation of Juan, not his own paintings, forms the centerpiece of the present show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
The portrait itself shares in that ambiguity: Juan is shown with all the requisite pride and nobility expected of a portrait painted in Rome in 1650, but he still wears the livery of a servant. Perhaps Velázquez was setting the future narrative as well, because Juan was legally freed shortly thereafter, with the proviso that he’d continue as a slave for another four years.2 Like a Baroque repoussoir or the exquisite brown stroke at the center of the painting, Parejo’s personality and status are manipulated to foreground his master’s:
The challenge of this exhibition is, that everything we know about Juan de Pareja has been bent to fit this narrative. This narrative is so deeply embedded in the traditional History of Art, that it’s doubtful one can reach anything approaching an objective view of Pareja and his times through Art History alone, witness Antonio Palomino’s El Museo pictórico, first published in Madrid in 1724, which contains the first published biography of Juan de Pareja:3
The lead reads, “Juan de Pareja, born in Seville, a Mestizo by his ancestry and of unusual color [de color estraño], was a slave to Don Diego Velázquez.” The rest is devoted to reconciling Pareja’s “unusual” situation with the morally satisfying image of the painter as a “free” “man,” a practitioner of the liberal arts. “Hidalgos,” free men, gentlemen-practitioners, were exempted from certain taxes in seventeenth-century Spain; artists were not included among their ranks until an act of Parlament in 1677. (Palomino names a number of women artists as well but it’s not clear whether they, too, constituted an estraña gender.)
From here Palomino proceeds to enumerate all that made Juan “unusual:” Juan is Black: artists are white; Juan is a slave, an artist is a gentleman; Juan is a manual worker; an artist practices liberal arts, etc. These aberrations can only be resolved in Palomino’s book by the intervention of the King, the standard deus-ex-machina of Baroque comedies who, upon discovering a painting by Juan, calls for his manumission because “que quien tiene esta habilidad, no puede ser esclavo,” because one who has such a skill cannot be a slave.
And vice versa: Palomino refers the reader back to the introductory chapter of his book, in which he had first drawn the distinction “entre los libres ó ingenuos, y los esclavos ó servios ; á estos, les permitian solamente las artes sórdidas y mecánicas,” between the free or free-born, and the slaves or servants; those were allowed only the low, mechanical arts.”4
That’s the constant in Palomino’s narrative and in Juan de Pareja narratives to this day: like any other “creative” today Juan must be made to transcend his condition as an exploited individual without modifying his relation to his own labor, que todo lo restante de su vida sirvió, y no solo a Velázquez lo que sobrevivió a este caso y, sino después a su hija que casó con don Juan Bautista del mazo: “since for the rest of his life he served not only Velázquez whom he survived, but later his daughter who married Don Juan Bautista del Mazo,” the Master’s notoriously untalented successor. Like the happy “Darkies” of post-Reconstruction America, the slave gains his freedom by abdicating his freedom of his own free will. The nature of the labor remains the same.
It was many years ago at a panel before the students at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. I was arguing with a professor there, another art historian: “We’re all lying to you,” I announced from the podium. “How are we lying,” the professor shot back. And I was looking over the audience, at a heroic canvas, and I thought: “What is the name of the person who made this? Is it the name of the people who stretched the canvas? the ones who wove the linen? Who mixed the paint?”
And I never answered the question. But I’m glad someone has.
WOID XXIII-16a. Part I of II.
Part II of II (Link)
June 4, 2023
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. Die deutsche Ideologie, Marx Engels Werke Band III (Berlin : Dietz Verlag, 1978) p. 379; Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, « Véritable origine du droit de l’esclavage », De l’Esprit des Lois Livre XV, Chapitre VI; see my review of Edward E. Baptist. The Half has never been Told: “The C*p*t*l*st in the Woodpile,” WOID XX-07 (July 10, 2015). http://theorangepress.com/woid/woid21/woidxxi07.html
Jennifer Montagu. “Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and His Illegitimate Son Antonio.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 125, no. 968, 1983, pp. 683–85.
Palomino, El museo pictórico y escala óptica : tomo secundo (Madrid : Viuda de Juan Garcia Infançon, 1724), p. 391.
Antonio Palomino, El museo pictórico, y escala óptica (Madrid: Sancha, 1795), p. 83