“Animation of the Infanta”, a 12-works “coupled” series by a NY-based artist, Leo Kundas, depicting a young Infanta Margarita from Velazquez’ famous 1656 painting, “Las Meninas”, offers a continuation of the artistic dialogue with the Old Masters that has been so relevant in the late 20th century and is coming up again in the digitized universe of the 21st century, with its deconstructivist, replica-driven twist.

“Las Meninas” is one of the world’s most famous and thus most cliché-attached works, torn and sewn into popular culture in its various interpretations. One might name, along with Salvador Dali’s experiments, the 58 Picasso’s paintings, recreating and analyzing Las Meninas, that were later donated to a museum in Barcelona as a non-divisible series. Picasso is quoted to have said of this cycle: “If someone wants to copy Las Meninas, entirely in good faith, for example, upon reaching a certain point and if that one was me, I would say… what if you put them a little more to the right or left? I’ll try to do it my way, forgetting about Velázquez. The test would surely bring me to modify or change the light because of having changed the position of a character. So, little by little, that would be a detestable Meninas for a traditional painter, but would be my Meninas.”

Such deconstruction of the famous painting, evidently, awards both the painter/student and the viewer with an artistic estrangement, with a distance and a twist, needed for better or rather newer understanding and eventually aimed at a series of dialogues – between the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’ culture, between the ‘old’ and the ‘modern’, between the master’s worldview and the new reality.

Kundas studies Infanta Margarita with 6 pairs of works that offer the same scale of the figure (48×40 in. of the Kundas’s canvas would occupy about the same space in Velasques’s big 125×105 in. scene as the main character of the work) – however, the paintings utilize a more dull, almost monochromic, palette, and bolder, thicker brush, characteristic of Kundas’s manner.

The “animated” infantas of Kundas are assuming the same posture and head turn as in the original, but are dramatically changing their position in relation to the viewer and the painter, appearing slightly tilted or in ¾ and even from behind, their eyes sometimes closed, as if offering the glance of the old master contemplating their subject from all positions.

It is an interesting and an eye-opening take, considering a complex composition of the original painting where the effect of the mirrors is used, and the painter appears to stand at the back of his model, contemplating her in the mirror at the moment that is captured by the painting.

Kundas’s paired infantas, thus, offer a rare insight into the vision of the Old Master, making the viewer to dissociate themselves from the all-too-known cliche of an original painting, and bringing forward a fresh glance while maintaining a meaningful dialogue.

Minimalist repetition of the subject and the sharp loneliness of the figure that is taken out of its rich context (as opposed to the original that is crowded with mirrored and real characters and textures) makes one think of another genre that is so successfully dealing with ‘recomposing’ the old masters – minimalist music. The famous Max Richter’s “Vivaldi Recomposed” (2012), for example, brilliantly offers exactly the same attention to details of the original, and their satisfying repetition that brings out the immense, intolerable beauty of the old masters that are often too much for our sensual and informational overload. “I fell in love with Vivaldi as a kid: six or seven perfect, bite-size chunks of beautiful tunes. For a child it was a perfect introduction to a whole language. As I got older I started to hear it everywhere and I started to hate it. It stopped being a great piece of music and became an irritant. At the same time, intellectually, I knew it was a fantastic piece of music, and I thought about reclaiming it,” – writes Richter about his experience. Both Kundas and Richter, thus, force us to estrange our senses from the all-too-known flatness of the overshared old masterpiece, and to concentrate on the repetition of the details taken under such estranged aspects that they start shining through centuries as a newly-minted coin, making us happy, crying, alive.

Anna Dergacheva
MA in History,
Central European University