Sunday, January 28, 2018

Diet and Serotonin



Serotonin is a chemical messenger that’s believed to act as a mood stabilizer. It’s said to help produce healthy sleeping patterns as well as boost your mood. Studies show that serotonin levels can have an effect on mood and behavior, and the chemical is commonly linked to feeling good and living longer. Supplements can increase your serotonin levels via the amino acid tryptophan. Serotonin is synthesized from tryptophan.

For a more natural approach to possibly increasing your serotonin levels -- you can try eating foods that contain tryptophan. While research is ongoing to determine how much tryptophan-containing foods can affect serotonin levels in the brain, it is known that tryptophan depletion is seen in those with mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. Research has also shown that when a low-tryptophan diet is followed, brain serotonin levels drop. Here are some foods that might help.

Eggs

The protein in eggs can significantly boost your blood plasma levels of tryptophan, according to recent research. Pro cooking tip: Don’t leave out the yolks. They’re extremely rich in tryptophan and tyrosine, choline, biotin, omega-3 fatty acids, and other nutrients that are major contributors to the health benefits and antioxidant properties of eggs.

Cheese

Cheese is another great source of tryptophan. A yummy favorite you could make is mac and cheese that combines cheddar cheese with eggs and milk, which are also good sources of tryptophan.

Pineapples

Pineapples are a major source of bromelain, a protein that can reduce the side effects of chemotherapy as well as help suppress coughs, according to some research. Combine pineapples and coconut with chicken for this delicious piña colada chicken recipe.

Tofu

Soy products are rich sources of tryptophan. You can substitute tofu for pretty much any protein, in pretty much any recipe, making it an excellent source of tryptophan for vegetarians and vegans. Some tofu is calcium-set, which provides a great calcium boost.

Salmon

It’s hard to go wrong with salmon, which -- as you may have guessed -- is also rich in tryptophan. Combine it with eggs and milk to make a smoked salmon frittata. Salmon also has other nutritional benefits like helping balance cholesterol, lowering blood pressure, and being a source of omega-3 fatty acids.

Nuts and Seeds

Pick and choose your faves, because all nuts and seeds contain tryptophan. Studies show that eating a handful of nuts a day can lower your risk for cancer, heart disease, and respiratory problems. They’re also good sources of fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants. For dessert, try some no-bake peanut butter oatmeal cookies.

Turkey

There’s a reason why the Thanksgiving meal is usually followed by a siesta on the couch -- turkey is essentially stuffed tryptophan.
















































Beware: The Ten Stages of Genocide


























































Friday, January 26, 2018

Everett Raymond Kinstler: Algur H. Meadows Portrait

Portrait of Algur H. Meadows by Everett Raymond Kinstler



Everett Raymond Kinstler



Everett Raymond Kinstler



Everett Raymond Kinstler

The art philanthropy of Algur H. Meadows and his foundation is just the best. He has added so much to the SMU and Dallas arts scene, even long after his passing. 

Here is a posthumous portrait of the great man by comic book artist-turned-portrait painter, Everett Raymond Kinstler. I suspect that Kinstler may have told our family friend -- watercolorist legend Edmond J. Fitzgerald -- about the SMU art program, and that's why Jim recommended it to dad. The two were artist-friends in NYC. For many years Kinstler was a protege-caregiver of the great illustrator-cartoonist, James Montgomery Flagg. 

The six degrees of separation are always at work in my life. I am constantly seeing the connections in the web...

In the fall of 1928 Algur H. Meadows and a friend, Ralph G. Trippett, founded a loan company, the General Finance Company, which became the General American Finance System in 1930. In the summer of 1936 Meadows and Trippett united with J. W. Gilliland, a petroleum expert, to form the General American Oil Company, the headquarters of which were moved from Shreveport to Dallas in 1937

The new company experienced a phenomenal expansion in operations, due to an ingenious method of acquiring oil-producing properties that Meadows developed. The scheme, which Meadows dubbed the "ABC plan," involved three parties in the purchase transaction to minimize tax liability and the use of interest-bearing oil payments to meet a large percentage of the purchase price. Meadows became the president and major stockholder of the General American Oil Company in 1941 and was elected chairman of the board in 1950. By 1959 his company had acquired 2,990 oil wells in fifteen states and Canada and was drilling for oil in Spain.

On business trips to Madrid in the 1950s, Meadows visited the Prado museum, which inspired an interest in Spanish Old Masters. He began acquiring paintings attributed to artists such as El Greco and Goya. Following the death of his wife in 1961, he donated his collection and a million-dollar endowment to Southern Methodist University in order to establish a museum of Spanish art in her memory. He subsequently donated a collection of contemporary Italian sculpture to SMU in order to found an outdoor sculpture garden in honor of his second wife, Elizabeth Boggs Bartholow, whom he married in 1962. In recognition of Meadows' multiple gifts, exceeding $34 million, the SMU trustees named the University's School of Arts in his honor in 1969, Meadows School of the Arts .

In 1964 Meadows, with the encouragement of his second wife, began collecting paintings by French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Three years later, in a widely publicized discovery, he learned that thirty-eight of the fifty-eight works in his private collection were forgeries and that many of the earlier works in SMU's Meadows Museum collection were falsely attributed. With characteristic generosity, Meadows immediately gave the museum a million dollars to replace the questionable works and began rebuilding his private collection, much of which was donated to the Dallas Museum of Art after his death.

Meadows generously benefitted programs throughout Texas in health, education, visual arts, and social services, under the auspices of the Meadows Foundation, which he and his first wife established in 1948. He was on the board of directors of Republic National Bank of Dallas, a trustee of SMU, and on the board of directors at St. Mark's School, Presbyterian Hospital, Children's Medical Center, Hope Cottage, and the Wadley Research Center. Meadows was a Presbyterian, a Mason, and a member of numerous professional, civic, and social organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute, Independent Petroleum Association, Dallas Petroleum Club, Dallas Art Association, Dallas Citizens Council, and Sigma Nu fraternity. 

He received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from SMU in 1965 and an honorary doctor of laws degree from Centenary College in 1969. He was killed in an auto accident on June 10, 1978.

His legacy of generosity to the public lives on in the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College, and the Meadows Museum at SMU -- now considered to be the finest collection of Spanish art outside of Spain -- and through the beneficence of the Meadows Foundation, which by the end of 2013 had donated more than one- billion dollars to charitable organizations in Texas.


William B. Jordan and Algur H. Meadows in the first Meadows Museum at SMU


Antonio Damasio: New Book -- The Strange Order of Things

Antonio Damasio


Your Biology Runs on Feelings: Think feelings are important? You’re more right than you know.

By Antonio Damasio

I have long been interested in human affect -- the world of emotions and feelings -- and have spent many years investigating it -- why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct ourselves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and how brains interact with the body to support such functions.

As for the idea, it is very simple -- feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, negotiators of human cultural endeavors. Humans have distinguished themselves from all other beings by creating a spectacular collection of objects, practices, and ideas, collectively known as cultures. The collection includes the arts, philosophical inquiry, moral systems and religious beliefs, justice, governance, economic institutions, and technology and science. Why and how did this process begin?

A frequent answer invokes an important faculty of the human mind -- verbal language -- along with distinctive features such as intense sociality and superior intellect. For those who are biologically inclined the answer also includes natural selection operating at the level of genes. I have no doubt that intellect, sociality, and language have played key roles in the process, and it goes without saying that the organisms capable of cultural invention, along with the specific faculties used in the invention, are present in humans by the grace of natural selection and genetic transmission. The idea is that something else was required to jump-start the saga of human cultures. That something else was a motive. I am referring specifically to feelings.

To understand the origin and construction of feelings, and appreciate the contribution they make to the human mind, we need to set them in the panorama of homeostasis. The traditional concept of homeostasis refers to the ability, present in all living organisms, to continuously and automatically maintain their functional operations, chemical and general physiological, within a range of values compatible with survival. For numerous living creatures, however, and certainly for humans, this narrow usage of the term “homeostasis” is inadequate.

It is true that humans still make good use and greatly benefit from automatic controls: The value of glucose in the bloodstream can be automatically corrected to an optimal range by a set of complex operations that do not require any conscious interference on the part of the individual. The secretion of insulin from pancreatic cells, for example, adjusts the level of glucose. In humans and in numerous other species endowed with a complex nervous system, however, there is a supplementary mechanism that involves mental experiences that express a value. The key to the mechanism is feelings.

Nature could have evolved in another way and not stumbled upon feelings. But it didn’t.

Importantly, feelings are not an independent fabrication of the brain. They are the result of a cooperative partnership of body and brain, interacting by way of free-ranging chemical molecules and nerve pathways.

The alignment of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with, respectively, positive and negative ranges of homeostasis is a verified fact. Homeostasis in good or even optimal ranges expresses itself as well-being and even joy, while the happiness caused by love and friendship contributes to more efficient homeostasis and promotes health. The negative examples are just as clear. The stress associated with sadness is caused by calling into action the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and by releasing molecules whose consequence is reducing homeostasis and actually damaging countless body parts such as blood vessels and muscular structures. Interestingly, the homeostatic burden of physical disease can activate the same hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cause release of dynorphin, a molecule that induces dysphoria.

The circularity of these operations is remarkable. On the face of it, mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind. They are merely two aspects of the very same being.

Whether feelings correspond to positive or negative ranges of homeostasis, the varied chemical signaling involved in their processing and the accompanying visceral states have the power to alter the regular mental flow, subtly and not so subtly. Attention, learning, recall, and imagination can be disrupted and the approach to tasks and situations, trivial and not, disturbed. It is often difficult to ignore the mental perturbation caused by emotional feelings, especially in regard to the negative variety, but even the positive feelings of peaceful, harmonious existence prefer not to be ignored.

The roots for the alignment between life processes and quality of feeling can be traced to the workings of homeostasis within the common ancestors to endocrine systems, immune systems, and nervous systems. They go back in the mists of early life. The part of the nervous system responsible for surveying and responding to the interior, especially the old interior, has always worked cooperatively with the immune and endocrine systems within that same interior.

When a wound occurs, caused, for example, by an internally originated disease process or by an external cut, the usual result is an experience of pain. In the former case, the pain results from signals conveyed by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers, and its localization can be vague; in the latter case, it uses myelinated fibers that are evolutionarily more recent and that contribute to a sharp and well-localized pain.

Even humble nervous systems probably allow some measure of feeling.

However, the feeling of pain, vague or sharp, is only a part of what actually goes on in the organism and, from an evolutionary point of view, the most recent part of it. What else goes on? What constitutes the hidden part of the process?

The answer is that both immune and neural responses are engaged locally by the wound. These responses include inflammatory changes such as local vasodilation and a surge of leucocytes (white blood cells) toward the area. The leucocytes are called for to assist in combating or preventing infection and removing the debris of damaged tissue. They do the latter by engaging in phagocytosis—surrounding, incorporating, and destroying pathogens—and the former by releasing certain molecules. An evolutionarily old molecule—proenkephalin, an ancestral molecule and the first of its kind—can be cleaved, resulting in two active compounds that are released locally.

One compound is an antibacterial agent; the other is an analgesic opioid that will act on a special class of opioid receptors—the δ class—located in the peripheral nerve terminals present at the site. The many signs of local disruption and reconfiguration of the state of the flesh are made locally available to the nervous system and gradually mapped, thus contributing their part to the multilayered substrate of the feeling of pain. But simultaneously, the local release and uptake of the opioid molecule helps numb the pain and reduces inflammation. Thanks to this neuro-immune cooperation, homeostasis is hard at work attempting to protect us from infection and trying to minimize the inconvenience, too.

But there is more to tell. The wound provokes an emotive response that engages its own suite of actions; for example, a muscular contraction that one might describe as flinching. Such responses and the ensuing altered configuration of the organism are also mapped and thus “imaged” by the nervous system as part of the same event. Creating images for the motor reaction helps guarantee that the situation does not go unnoticed. Curiously, such motor responses appeared in evolution long before there were nervous systems. Simple organisms recoil, cower, and fight when the integrity of their body is compromised.

In brief, the package of reactions to a wound that I have been describing for humans -- antibacterial and analgesic chemicals, flinching and evading actions -- is an ancient and well-structured response resulting from interactions of the body proper and the nervous system. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were imageable. The mental experience we call “feeling pain” is based on this multidimensional image.

The point to be made is that feeling pain is fully supported by an ensemble of older biological phenomena whose goals are transparently useful from the standpoint of homeostasis. To say that simple life-forms without nervous systems have pain is unnecessary and probably not correct. They certainly have some of the elements required to construct feelings of pain, but it is reasonable to hypothesize that for pain itself to emerge, as a mental experience, the organism needed to have a mind and that for that to pass, the organism needed a nervous system capable of mapping structures and events. I suspect that life-forms without nervous systems or minds had and have elaborate emotive processes, defensive and adaptive action programs, but not feelings. Once nervous systems entered the scene, the path for feelings was open. That is why even humble nervous systems probably allow some measure of feeling.

Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motivators of human culture.

It is often asked, not unreasonably, why feelings should feel like anything at all, pleasant or unpleasant, tolerably quiet or like an uncontainable storm. The reason should now be clear: When the full constellation of physiological events that constitutes feelings began to appear in evolution and provided mental experiences, it made a difference. Feelings made lives better. They prolonged and saved lives. Feelings conformed to the goals of the homeostatic imperative and helped implement them by making them matter mentally to their owner as, for example, the phenomenon of conditioned place aversion appears to demonstrate. The presence of feelings is closely related to another development: consciousness and, more specifically, subjectivity.

The value of the knowledge provided by feelings to the organism in which they occur is the likely reason why evolution contrived to hold on to them. Feelings influence the mental process from within and are compelling because of their obligate positivity or negativity, their origin in actions that are conducive to health or death, and their ability to grip and jolt the owner of the feeling and force attention on the situation.

This distinctive account of feelings illustrates the fact that mental experiences do not arise from plain mapping of an object or event in neural tissue. Instead, they arise from the multidimensional mapping of body-proper phenomena woven interactively with neural phenomena. Mental experiences are not “instant pictures” but processes in time, narratives of several micro events in the body proper and the brain.

It is conceivable, of course, that nature could have evolved in another way and not stumbled upon feelings. But it didn’t. The fundamentals behind feelings are so integral a part of the maintenance of life that they were already in place. All that was needed in addition was the presence of mind-making nervous systems.

Ultimately, feelings can annoy us or delight us, but that is not what they are for. Feelings are for life regulation, providers of information concerning basic homeostasis or the social conditions of our lives. Feelings tell us about risks, dangers, and ongoing crises that need to be averted. On the nice side of the coin, they can inform us about opportunities. They can guide us toward behaviors that will improve our overall homeostasis and, in the process, make us better human beings, more responsible for our own future and the future of others.



Antonio Damasio is a university professor; David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy; and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Awards he has received include the Prince of Asturias Prize in Science and Technology, the Grawemeyer Award, the Honda Prize, and the Pessoa and Signoret prizes. In 2017 he received the Freud Medal from the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. Damasio is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of "Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens," "Looking for Spinoza" and "Self Comes to Mind," all of which have been published in translation and are taught in universities throughout the world.


Thursday, January 25, 2018

Louis H. Sullivan: System of Architectural Ornament

Louis Sullivan




Louis Sullivan




Louis Sullivan



Louis Sullivan




Louis Sullivan



Louis Sullivan



Louis Sullivan



Louis Sullivan


ARCHITECTURE VIEW; HOW A GENIUS FUSED ADORNMENT AND MODERNITY
By Paul Goldberger

It was Louis Sullivan's sad fate not only to have been insufficiently appreciated in his time - he died in 1924, broke and without work -- but also to have been misunderstood later on. For even when there was no doubt about his status as one of the greatest architects America has ever produced, Sullivan was too often thought of as having had one crucial flaw -- he was a brilliant modern polemicist who filled his buildings with lavish ornament. 

A generation ago, Sullivan tended to be revered almost in spite of his ornament; though no scholar dared put it so crassly, there was a sense that Sullivan's tall buildings, like the Wainwright in St. Louis or the Guaranty in Buffalo, which were truly the beginning of the mature American skyscraper esthetic, would have been better still had they only been simpler, starker, free of so many curls and swirls.

It says much about the sensibility of today that we see Sullivan's ornament not as a frivolous error, but as a starting point for an understanding of his work. 

And so it is with ''Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament,'' a splendid exhibition on view at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 2 East 91st Street. Happily, the exhibition, its title notwithstanding, does not make the error opposite to that committed by modernist scholars, and assume that ornament is everything. The curators here understood that Sullivan's idea was to integrate ornament with modernist structural expression, not to see it as a thing apart, applied after the fact, like the decoration on a cake. To Sullivan, ornament was a means to heighten perception of a building's fundamental structural and sensual aspects, and the exhibition acknowledges this viewpoint.

Sullivan's passionate quest was to evolve a fundamentally American architecture, freed from the constraints of historical, European style which so bound most of his contemporaries. He is known to readers of Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography as the architect whom Wright called his master. But the sad decline of Sullivan's career and his relatively limited output have left him -- at least in the layman's eye -- very much in his protege's shadow. 

The exception may be in Chicago, where Sullivan lived for most of his life and where he has always occupied his deserved position in the pantheon of architecture. In most other cities, unfortunately, despite the enormity of Sullivan's reputation among architects, his work is too little known to the public.

So this exhibition is particularly welcome, both as a general introduction to Sullivan and as a way of correcting the all-too-frequent misreading of him as a modernist whose career was compromised by a weak spot for decoration, which to some modernist historians was akin to having a weakness for alcohol.

The exhibition, which was organized by the Chicago Historical Society and the St. Louis Art Museum and assembled by Wim de Wit of the historical society, begins by tracing the origins of Sullivan's highly personal ornamental style in French Neo-Grec and English Victorian Gothic architecture. Sullivan added to this the critical ingredient of his own deep fascination with natural forms and his commitment to the idea of seeing buildings as metaphors for natural processes. But the sources of Sullivan's style are only the beginning of this exhibition, which moves quickly to Sullivan's own efforts. This work is presented in a spectacular array of actual architectural fragments, drawings, color photographs and several models built specifically for the exhibition.

Here it is worth digressing for a moment to say something about the manner in which this collection of some 180 pieces of material is presented. Sullivan's architecture deals in surface more than space, which means that it should translate well into the form of an exhibition. But it did not look particularly good at the Chicago Historical Society, where the exhibition was first presented last autumn; indeed, I found the exhibition then a major disappointment. Mr. de Wit, who is curator of the architecture collections at the historical society, did a heroic job in gathering material, but the dreary galleries and pedestrian installation at the historical society prevented most of the show from coming across even half as well as it should have. The ornamental fragments tended to be hung forlornly like little decorations in themselves, some of them floating disconnectedly, far too high on the walls.

As a result the excellent color photographs by Cervin Robinson, which were intended to supplement the rare, original material, virtually overwhelmed it. The installation lacked a sense that these fragments of architectural ornament were part of something larger. There was no suggestion of their relationship to the buildings.

The Cooper-Hewitt, however, has managed to capture the crucial fact of Sullivan's architecture, which is not the existence of ornament but its integration into structure. Dealing with the same material as the Chicago exhibition - there is a piece or two omitted and a piece or two added, but it is essentially the same - the Cooper-Hewitt's own curator, Dorothy Twining Globus, and its designer, Todd Zwigard of UKZ Architects, have transformed this show into one of the best architectural exhibitions of the year. ''Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament'' could be a textbook lesson in museology - I have rarely seen installation make so dramatic a difference in the quality of an exhibition.

At the Cooper-Hewitt, fragments do not float by themselves on the wall. They are set into new, wooden frames that place each piece precisely as it would have been seen in its original form. A teller's cage from a Sullivan bank, for example, is set within a wooden framework that echoes the shape of the original counter and overhead structure of the tellers' area; a balustrade is set into a mock-stairway on the wall; a piece of terra-cotta molding from around a window is set into a new window frame of wood. In each case the added structures are of stark, unfinished wood, so that there is no possibility that they could be considered anything but tools of display. But their presence makes all of this material seem sharper, crisper, richer and more handsome.

It is a question of appropriateness, of understanding the essential qualities of an architectural object and letting these qualities determine the nature of an installation. One of the triumphs of Mr. de Wit's curatorial effort was his assembling, from pieces owned by 11 separate collections, a full pair of elevator cages from Sullivan's great Chicago Stock Exchange, demolished in 1972. But in Chicago this splendid re-assemblage was placed right on an axis with the entrance to the exhibition, like an altar, whereas at the Cooper-Hewitt it is in a small room by itself, designed to resemble much more closely the tight little space of the actual elevator lobbies in the stock exchange.

These ornamental pieces and architectural fragments are but the beginning; the exhibition is rich in drawings, Mr. Robinson's photographs, and good models of three skyscrapers: Sullivan's beloved Wainwright and Guaranty buildings and a model of his never-built Fraternity Temple for Chicago. This last structure, in which a slender central tower rises from a complex base, was hitherto known only through sketches. Now, thanks to this model, it can be clearly understood in its mass and shape, and it is easy to see that this would have been a key structure in the history of the skyscraper.

Virtually everything here is worth seeing. There is only one mystery amid this wealth of material - a very bizarre portrait of Sullivan, in which the suited, bespectacled architect looks for all the world like a banker. This is not the intense, driven Sullivan one sees elsewhere or, indeed, the presence one expects to see by looking about the galleries of the Cooper-Hewitt, where everything bespeaks passion and artistic genius.














Dr. William B. Jordan (1940-2018)

William B. Jordan



William B. Jordan



William B. Jordan



William B. Jordan



William B. Jordan



William B. Jordan


Another one of my first-rate art mentors at SMU has passed away. I had no idea that Dr. Jordan had passed when I posted my earlier piece about his gift to the Prado. He was always very nice to me and the other studio majors of my era.

"William B. Jordan, one of the most significant museum professionals in North Texas' history, died Monday in Dallas after a short illness, according to the Dallas Museum of Art. He was 77.  

His legacy began when, as a newly minted Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York -- and a long-haired native of San Antonio -- he arrived in Dallas to help Algur Meadows form a new collection of Spanish paintings for Southern Methodist University. 

His combination of charm, knowledge, modesty, and guts endeared him to his new employer, and the fabled collection of the Meadows Museum was not just begun, but given a level of quality and a range that became the envy of Old Master curators worldwide. 

From that start, there were few museums in North Texas that he didn't transform. He was curator at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum and, eventually, a trustee of the Nasher Sculpture Center and the DMA. 

His taste was unerring, his eye secure and his gambler's instinct unwavering. A simple list of the acquisitions made with his leadership is unrivaled among American curators of his generation. 

Perhaps his crowning achievement was the discovery and subsequent personal gift to the Prado Museum in Madrid of the Portrait of Philip III by the greatest Spanish painter of the Golden Age, Diego Velázquez. Jordan donated the work (estimated at $6 million) to the Prado on Dec. 17, 2016, and was consequently made a trustee of the most significant museum of Spanish art in the world.

The Dallas Museum of Art acknowledge Jordan's death in an email to trustees Monday night from director Agustín Arteaga, museum president Catherine Marcus Rose and chairman Melissa Foster Fetter: 'We hope all of you will remember him as the great scholar and gentleman that he was; the passionate, brilliant curator who left his imprint upon so many distinguished institutions, in Dallas and abroad; and the cherished friend who placed art at the very center of his life.'"








Bill Jordan and his unpublished painting of Phillip III, attributed to Diego Velazquez.

Dr. William B. Jordan has had a lengthy career devoted to museums. He obtained his doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1967. That same year he was appointed the first director of the Meadows Museum of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He spent fourteen years there, working closely with the late Algur H. Meadows then with the foundation that Meadows left on his death for the creation of what is now one of the most important collections of Spanish painting outside Europe.

Between 1981-1990 Dr. Jordan was deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, where he built up an important collection that represents all periods and artistic schools, in addition to creating an influential programme of exhibitions and research. 

In addition to curating exhibitions on El Greco and Ribera, Dr. Jordan is one of the leading experts on Spanish still-life painting and has curated a number of exhibitions on this subject in museums, including the Museo del Prado, the National Gallery in London, the Royal Palace in Madrid, the Kimbell Art Museum and the Meadows Museum in Dallas. 

During the course of his career he has handled the acquisition of four works by Diego Velázquez. Now retired, he continues to be active in research and is also a collector and a member of several art museum boards in the United States.

Portrait of Philip III by Velázquez

The painting was acquired by Dr. Jordan on the London art market, where it was catalogued as a "Portrait of a Gentleman." Following its restoration, Dr. Jordan studied the painting, leading him to consider the idea that it is a work by Velázquez, specifically a preparatory painting for the face of Philip III in "The Expulsion of the Moriscos."

Among the reasons that have led Dr. Jordan to defend this attribution are:

Philip III appears to be aged around 40 in the painting, his age in 1609 when the moriscos were expelled from Spain.

Stylistically, the work necessarily dates from later than 1609. It may have been produced between 1623, when Velázquez arrived at court and introduced a new style of royal portrait that corresponds to that of this work, and 1631, when he returned from Italy and adopted a notably different portrait style.

The fact that Philip III is in near-profile and looking up indicates that this is not a portrait (in which the sitter normally looks straight ahead) but an image to be included in a narrative scene.

The fact that the work’s characteristics are not comparable to the styles of the other portraitists working at the court in the 1620s, such as Van der Hamen, Maíno, Diricksen, etc.

A study of written descriptions of "The Expulsion of the Moriscos" suggest that the portrait of Philip III in that scene had a similar expression to this one and was looking in the same direction.

A study of those descriptions led Dr. Jordan to consider the idea that "The Expulsion of the Moriscos" was conceived as a pendant to Titian’s painting of "Philip II Offering the Infante don Fernando to Victory" (Museo del Prado), which hung in the same room (the Salón Nuevo in the Alcázar) for which Velázquez’s work was painted. This idea led him to compare the portrait of Philip II in Titian’s work with that of Philip III in the present painting -- a comparison that revealed numerous points of comparison with regard to the size and pose of the portraits.


William B. Jordan