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The First Postmodern Painting?
How Diego Velázquez invented irony, unstable reality, and the collapse of high and low culture three centuries too early
The art historian T.J. Clark once called Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) the first work of modernist art, even though it predated the onset of Modernism by at least five decades. Clark’s argument was convincing, but I won’t convey it here since The Death of Marat is not the topic of this particular essay. But if this is to be said, it would only go to reason that Diego Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus (1628–29), which came a whopping three centuries before Postmodernism first officially reared its head, is in fact the earliest postmodern painting.
Calling The Triumph of Bacchus (also known as The Drinkers or Los Borrachos) the first postmodern painting is obviously anachronistic. But it’s a surprisingly productive argument. Velázquez does several things that would become central to postmodern art: he mixes “high” and “low” culture, destabilizes the boundary between representation and reality, undermines heroic mythology, makes the viewer aware of artistic conventions, and refuses to tell us exactly how seriously we should take the image.
