‘This is an ecstasy machine’: The internet’s favorite art critic walks through the Prado Museum

If it weren’t for his New Yorker’s gait — hurrying along, pushing his way through the crowd — our man would look like just another visitor at Madrid’s Prado Museum on a Wednesday morning. Bald, clean-shaven, wearing round glasses and barely over five feet tall, he barrels down the ground floor of the Villanueva building. But once he reaches Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross, we realize that this man isn’t just any ordinary visitor.

He kneels before the painting and joins his hands together, in a theatrical gesture of prayer. It’s an extraordinary pose within these walls, but hundreds of thousands of people will recognize it. This is because Pulitzer Prize-winning, Chicago-born Jerry Saltz, 74, is one of the most widely-read art critics in the world, and he regularly adopts this pose on Instagram when he encounters an undeniable masterpiece.

“Reality ends here. That’s what it should say on the front of the museum,” Saltz sighs. And, beneath that sign, there should be another one: “Reality begins here,” he declares, very much in the style that has made him famous. His ideas sound improvised, expressed in short sentences, yet they contain wisdom in their own way. “This is reality. Inside the most unreal things ever made.”

“What is a painting?,” he adds. “A painting is nothing other than itself. Everything in it is fake. Nothing in it is real. All of it is invented, [crafted], out of oils. And it’s in there that I live the most. Painting is my first language.”

Saltz, who belongs to that lineage of celebrity writers from the streets of Manhattan, like Fran Lebowitz and André Leon Talley, was recently in the Spanish capital to participate in talks at the Prado. He accepted EL PAÍS’s proposal to show us the artworks that most move him. As he guides us at full speed (one would think he’s the visitor, not the tour leader) to room 64 — where Goya’s The Third of May 1808 in Madrid, or The Executions awaits us — Saltz recalls the journey that led him to this point.

“I never went to school. I have no degrees. No education. I was a [long-haul] truck driver — the only Jewish one [in the United States] — until I was 40 years old. In the trucks, I got so miserable. I thought that anything in life would be better than what [I was] doing… and I thought, ‘I’m an art lover, what could I do to be in the art world?‘”

“I called myself an art critic and taught myself to write. I had never written a word in my life.”

In fact, before becoming a truck driver, Saltz had been an artist — and a relatively successful one — until the insecurity caused by his humble origins led him to take refuge in a more traditional job. And, in reality, he didn’t learn to write on his own. Rather, he learned thanks to every journalist’s greatest ally and worst enemy: deadlines. He had to think and deliver his critiques so quickly that he couldn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t. “That’s what the secret is. You have no time to lie. No time to be brilliant. No time to pontificate with bullshit. As you know, you have to say the artist’s name in the first line, get to the point and get out. And I’ve never missed a deadline.”

His critiques are direct, didactic, clear, informal and unpretentious, just like he is. Anyone can understand them. Snobs despise him because he doesn’t connect with what the elites think, while the elites detest him because he doesn’t care what they think. Someone who doesn’t lie can’t be manipulated: if they’re not useful for inflating phenomena, naming new gods, or crushing enemies, they’re of no interest to the top 1%. Saltz does something totally alien: describing what he sees. He’s the eye of the working class in the most exclusive world of Manhattan.

We’re heading somewhere. Room 61, room 62…

“We’re walking among masterpieces,” he reflects. “85% — and I’m being generous — of the art you see in galleries is crap. I see 25 or 30 shows a week in New York. I’m 74. I still do that. I’m one of the last ones, along with my wife. We’re the last two people. I’m married to the greatest art critic alive, Roberta Smith, the former chief critic at The New York Times. We go to galleries together, then split up. [Afterwards], we meet for a slice of pizza at a little crappy place while the rest of [the critics go to] parties, dinners and after-parties. We — over our pizza, on a paper plate — talk about the art we saw.”

Room 64. Goya. Saltz raises his arms.

“What amazes me about these Goyas is that [The Second of May 1808] precedes [The Third of May 1808] by just 24 hours. During [Napoleon’s era], Goya lived to see madness, like a mad ship piloted by a mad captain. That’s something that I can relate to coming from America, because that’s where I live. In a country that’s an idea… and the idea seems to be changing, or disappearing. The place is the same. Lives are the same. The idea is what’s changed. In a sense, Goya captures all of that, because he shows a world that’s turning itself inside out, going through enormous pain. And he brings on the dawn of a new consciousness of modern art.

He points to the pool of blood under one of the executed victims in The Third of May 1808.

“Look how he blurs the forms: he goes like this (Saltz shakes his hand, miming rough brushstrokes) wherever he wants. He learned from Velázquez and the other Spanish masters that you don’t have to hide your brushstrokes. The Italian and Flemish Renaissance artists depict everything to the millimeter. It’s perfect. The Spanish believed in oil paint, in flesh, in process. Ugliness is a purely subjective idea that can be seen… let’s go to the Black Paintings.”

Suddenly, we find ourselves watching Saturn devour his children.

“Is this a beautiful image? Obviously not. It’s horrific. It’s beyond human. It’s cannibalism. It’s [the act of] eating your own children. This giant Saturn — in order to never be supplanted by his male heirs — has to eat all of his children. And yet, this is a new idea of beauty. It’s a visionary, romantic idea of what beauty can be. Beauty is a way of painting, a way of thinking, a way of being. A consciousness that’s born in this unbelievably sophisticated image.”

Goya’s Fight with Cudgels is on display a few feet to the side. “Everything looks unfinished,” he notes. “It looks messed up. ‘Oh no, his legs are in the ground.’ And there are a thousand interpretations of [this]. There’s no one right answer. And the same way when we listen to Mozart, nobody asks, ‘what does Mozart mean?’ That’s a ridiculous question. The question is: ‘what does Mozart do?’ Mozart, Goya… great art is a verb, not a noun. It isn’t a thing. It’s something that does something to you.

He takes off again, but after a few feet, he suddenly stops. He’s seen something at the threshold of the room. Goya painted a self-portrait in 1815, Self-Portrait at 69 Years, just 13 years before his death. He looks disheveled. He also looks older, but not because he’s old: rather, because of the tiredness he conveys.

“It strikes me as important that Goya is deaf. I’m hard of hearing and I’m losing my hearing. I’m old, it’s fine… but losing your hearing slowly cuts you off from the world. And you become more and more isolated and alone. When I’m with my wife, I don’t hear everything she says. In bed, if she’s talking to me, I can’t hear. So, one of the most intimate forms of communication — small talk in bed — is gone.”

Saltz walks past La Leocadia, or The Seductress. A woman in mourning, formed by hundreds of desperate brushstrokes, leaning on a mound of earth. “This is, in a way, my wife looking at me, waiting for me in bed, unable to actually communicate with me,” Saltz says quietly.

Upon being asked what he feels when he looks at the painting, he replies: “Isolation and loss, but a profound courage and love and need to record that experience. To not just sit and watch your world collapse. To bear witness. To stand up and say, ‘This is what I see. It doesn’t have any historical precedent. I don’t fit in any movement anymore. Nobody likes me, except for the king. [He loves] everything I paint. But nobody paints like me. I’m on my own. And I’m compelled to do what I’m doing.‘”

He suddenly raises his finger, and something lights up in his eyes. “Adam and Eve,” he mutters. “Our first parents: mom and dad.” So, we’re off to see Dürer.

On the way, we get him to talk about politics (“I hope that [Trump’s] voters get everything they want, good and hard. They wanted it.”) and about the ineffable: Saltz’s work as an artist was markedly spiritual, very much like what the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint produced.

Some people look at art, read books and watch movies, all the while searching for a spiritual resonance. Others, however, do so as one watches a sport: focused on what’s happening, on the plot. Would Saltz be lumped into the former category?

“I’m afraid so. Yeah, I get bottomlessness, endlessness, deathlessness. [I enjoy entering] a realm of thinking and seeing what I would never get from a film. I hate films. They’re all about beginning, middle, end. Plot, plot, plot. Who doesn’t love plot? But plot seems, to me, [like a] noisy and almost a cheap device. I’m interested in having communion with a work of art.”

With this, he points to Adam and Eve (1507). “Two young, beautiful, precious, naked human bodies, which come to us through centuries of Gothic, Byzantine, medieval, unreal, symbolic art. And Dürer comes to us from Germany and travels and lives in Italy and learns about the Renaissance. And here’s a German version,” he explains. “You can see their shadows are just beginning to form, because God has said: ‘You are out, you’re cast out of the Garden of Eden.‘”

He begins with Eve: “I have a theory that Eve is very brave. She eats the apple after encountering the serpent. She wakes up. And she does what no man would ever do. If a man had eaten the apple before, he would have gone to Eve and said, ‘yo.’ But Eve takes a second apple and offers it to Adam. That’s how he attains his knowledge.”

“What’s interesting about Adam is that he seems instantly, almost innocently, head over heels, smitten with this new idea of beauty. For him, beauty has become this visual thing, utterly, totally visual. [But Eve] possesses an inner knowledge, a self-awareness.”

Saltz takes a step back, as if to point out that the beauty that’s seen and the beauty that’s internalized is what surrounds us this morning. The contemporary American art critic isn’t immune to the Spanish masterpieces in the Prado Museum. Saltz sees a thousand exhibitions a year, certainly… but what one sees in galleries is not what one finds in a museum like this.

“Museums are like ecstasy machines,” he declares. “But to me, nothing like this exists,” Saltz gushes, describing the Prado Museum.

“Oscar Wilde once said: ‘When we’re reading a book, we’re reading ourselves.’ We’re not reading anybody else. When I’m in front of a painting, I have to ask myself: ‘how am I seeing, how am I thinking, how is my world changing?’ What you’re doing is talking to yourself. The painting is talking to you. It’s making you know more than you knew. It’s telling you things you didn’t know you needed to know, [or] that you may have already known somewhere deep inside. Paintings are things that change the way you are.”

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