It rarely happens that the star painting, the one that occupies the most prominent and relevant place, does not belong to the author of the exhibition.
This is what happens in the exhibition that the Metropolitan Museum in New York dedicates to Juan de Pareja, a black man who was a slave to Diego Velázquez before becoming a free artist.
Actually, Juan de Pareja, who was born in Antequera in 1608, became famous in 1650, when the author of Las Meninas unveiled the portrait he had dedicated to him in Rome.
That painting arrived at the Met in 1971 for $5.5 million, among welcome headlines. The portrayed caused admiration for the masterful stroke of the Spanish master. But, as curator David Pullins says, “there were many questions that were there that we didn’t ask ourselves”,
These issues are in the very face of the painter who gives his name to this exhibition, Juan de Pareja, an Afro-Hispanic painter, the largest that has been dedicated to this creative in the great temple on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and that can be seen from the Next Monday, April 3.
There is more than paintings hanging on the walls or sculptures and books on display. This task involves making available to the general public that slavery existed long before America’s original sin.
“In the United States we learned about Columbus in 1492. What they did not teach us is that Isabel and Fernando (Catholic Monarchs) allowed slavery around 1501, so the history of slavery in the New World began at the beginning of the 16th century,” remarks Vanessa Valdés K.Valdés, co-curator of the sample.
“When Juan de Pareja’s time, Spain had already had 200 years of slavery, not only in the colonies, but in its own territory,” he specifies.
The display emphasizes that this exhibition examines how enslaved artisans and a multiracial society are inextricably linked with the art and cultural material of Spain’s Golden Age.
Among some 40 paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and other objects, the exhibition includes only five of the paintings painted by Juan de Pareja, the most relevant The Vocation of San Mateo (on loan from the Prado), in which he portrays himself.
His paintings are surrounded by others by Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán or Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, paintings that certify the ubiquity of enslaved workers.
Pullins stressed that many artisans or artists who worked with silver, wood or polychrome had slaves at their service. Murillo had many of them and some artists sold them to others. Not only was it an economic advantage, but with the New World they could not cope and required labor to meet the demand.
“Juan de Pareja is the most documented case, but there are many others,” he says.
This black painter spent two decades at the service of the master. In the central room, the famous portrait of the protagonist is contrasted with the one that Velázquez also made of Pope Innocent X. In the middle is a document that came from the Archives of Rome. It was in this city where the letter was signed in which the owner released Juan de Pareja. He imposed, however, a four-year wait to demonstrate good behavior.
