Spanish Realist

One of the last Austrian refugees to escape from Nazified Vienna was the Phaidon Press. The most distinguished popular-priced art book publisher in Europe, the Phaidon Press was spirited by the Oxford Press to London which now distributes Phaidon books in the U.S. In the U.S. Phaidon has issued 27 first-rate art books. Last week it added a 28th.

Velazquez ($5.50) is a big book (10 1/2 by 14 in.), solid (four pounds) with 155 reproductions (six in color), a definitive Velazquez catalogue and a scholarly essay on the 17th-Century Spanish master of realism by Madrid's Art Historian Enrique Lafuente.

To some art lovers, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez is a Spanish Titian, to others a somewhat dismal virtuoso. But Spain's Habsburg-lipped Philip IV had no doubts about Velazquez' greatness. He took one look at Velazquez' first portrait of him, thereafter refused to let anybody else paint his picture, sat for 14 portraits by the methodical, meticulous court painter.

Inspired Vacuity. The Phaidon Velazquez reproduces 13 of the painter's immortalizations of his royal master's vacuous stare, massy chin and handlebar mustachios which at night he kept in perfumed leather cases. There is also an inspired side show of infantas, royal dwarfs, idiots, buffoons and a little gallery of Velazquez' early, almost photographic genre pictures done in his precourt days when Velazquez used to brag: "I would rather be the first of the vulgar painters than the second of the refined ones." In strong contrast are a number of the passionless religious paintings of which Critic Thomas Craven once said: ". . . the only worthless things he ever did."

Born in Seville, Spain (1599), the son of a petty Portuguese nobleman, Velazquez began to study painting at the age of twelve. As a court painter he sat at a table with the royal buffoons, received the same daily allowance as the royal barbers. But his job gave him the two things he needed most, a powerful protector and a studio of his own. He painted in it for 36 years, until he died suddenly of a fever in 1660.

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