Picasso once said it was “painted with curses”. Andrea Hotere talks to Joanna Wane about the famous — and famously controversial — artwork at the heart of her first novel.
Andrea Hotere will be retelling this story over and over again in the next few weeks after her debut novel, based on a 17th-century art mystery, comes out on Thursday. But it’s a great yarn and I’m getting in first.
In the late 70s, when Hotere was 8 or 9, she spent a few days at the Prado in Madrid with her parents, artist Ralph Hotere and poet Cilla McQueen. Already accustomed to spending hours in museums and art galleries, she took along a book to read when she got bored.
The memory of it is shadowy now, but she settled herself down on a seat opposite a large painting by Diego Velazquez, a 17th-century master in the court of King Philip IV of Spain. A golden age of art and literature, it was also a time when the feared Spanish Inquisition still held sway.
That particular artwork, Las Meninas (The Ladies in Waiting), was one of her father’s favourite paintings. The scene, depicting Philip’s daughter, the Infanta Margarita, and her entourage, intrigued Hotere. Just a few years younger than she was, the princess was bathed in a glow of light, with a giant mastiff half-asleep near her feet.
But Hotere’s attention soon turned to her book and the absorbing saga of Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and the roguish Rhett Butler in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, a precocious choice of reading material for a girl of her age.
“Fast forward to Grey Lynn, not too far from here,” she says, over a cup of tea with Canvas at her stunning family home, designed by architect husband Richard Naish and filled with her father’s art.
“We had a couple of young kids at the time [the oldest of their three children is 22 now] and I was half listening to the radio in the living room, as you do, when this interview with someone in the art world began to intrigue me. It was the descriptions of people looking out at you from the canvas as if they were the viewer and a figure standing in the doorway that made me go ‘Aha, I know this painting!’”
It would take another decade and more before an outline turned into a draft, but that was the moment when her book, The Vanishing Point, laid down its roots.
The haunting image at the heart of the story has been described as Velazquez’s most mysterious and most controversial work.
Picasso, who became obsessed with Las Meninas after first seeing it at the age of 14 — “he famously said that was what made him want to become an artist” — called it a picture painted with curses. In 1734, the canvas narrowly survived a fire that destroyed the Alcazar, the Royal Palace in Madrid, after being sliced from its frame and tossed out the window.
In another of the many tangled tales that surround it, Picasso met his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, in Rome where she was dancing in a ballet based on Las Meninas, and he later created a series of 58 canvases referencing the original work. An Oscar Wilde short story was inspired by the painting, written from the point of view of the dwarf Maribarbola, one of the Infanta’s attendants.
The title of Hotere’s novel refers to how the viewer’s eye is drawn into the painting to a vanishing point where a dark figure stands in the doorway at the back of the room. Jose De Nieto, the Queen’s chamberlain and head of the royal tapestry works, emerges as a key presence in the book, giving the title a more sinister meaning.
The story is told in parallel storylines, moving between 17th-century Spain and London in the early 1990s, where Alex, a trainee art intern, finds herself in danger as she tries to unravel the painting’s closely guarded secrets. We won’t give away any spoilers here, but it’s a tale of treachery, murder and intrigue that suggests Velazquez coded the scandals of the royal court into his masterpiece.
Hotere began developing the idea in 2010 at a Creative Hub writing course, where she was mentored by Fiona Kidman. A journalist with a history degree and television experience in researching and producing documentaries, Hotere had spent time in London during the 90s herself and deliberately set the contemporary part of her story in that pre-internet era, so Alex had to do the physical legwork required to piece the mystery together. On a later trip, Hotere attended an auction at Christie’s, which forms the basis of a crucial scene.
Las Meninas is considered quite radical for its time because the King and Queen are relegated to bystanders as mere reflections in a mirror, rather than taking centre stage. It also shows Velazquez himself working on a large canvas and looking outwards, so the subject of his painting is ambiguous.
At first, Hotere’s research focused on the Infanta Margarita, as the central figure in the painting. The daughter of King Philip IV and his emotionally distant second wife, Queen Mariana of Austria, she’s remembered as a minor footnote in history, a political pawn with little control over her destiny. However, the limited references that do exist suggest she brought a spark of life to the palace, with its stifling protocol, and her relationship with Velazquez as reimagined by Hotere is charmingly drawn.
“I was intrigued initially by the story of the Infanta Margarita,” she says. “Velazquez foregrounds her, so she was my first port of call, but there’s so much to follow in that painting. I did investigate a lot of it and you can get lost in the labyrinth. There’s the history of what actually happened, there’s the historical layer of what people have written about what happened, and then there’s the painting itself and how people have interpreted it.”
An author’s note and a bibliography at the back of the book go some way to distinguishing fact from fiction in Hotere’s attempts to decipher the riddle of the artwork but broadly, she’s followed the advice of Wolf Hall novelist Hilary Mantel: Don’t rearrange history to suit your plot.
“For people who were known and recognised, I felt I had to be true to the facts of their lives,” she says. “Some of those events in the past may, from certain perspectives, be considered contentious, but the fact that a whole lot of other people had also responded [to the painting] gave me some courage that it was okay for me to walk on this hallowed ground — because it is very revered.
“I also wanted to be brave in that. When something becomes iconic as an artwork, you’re told what it means and that is the received view. I wanted to go to it fresh and have an honest response of my own. Velazquez was a keen observer of what was going on around him and I think he had a critical mind. Yeah, I do believe that thread is there.”
Her rich attention to detail is a feature of the novel, from the bell-shaped wooden guardainfante that supported the young princess’s heavy skirts, hobbling her movement, to the extreme torture practised by the powerful Spanish Inquisition.
“That’s a name that sends chills down your spine,” says Hotere, who includes a reference in the story to a woman who had the soles burnt from her feet and was dumped in the countryside after being turned in by her husband for cooking a chicken too late at night. “I also began to learn how dangerous it was for Velazquez himself. If he had Jewish heritage [as has been speculated], that would have put him in an extremely vulnerable position.”
The relationship between the royal artist and his king is depicted warmly, despite their difference in status. Philip appears to have been devastated by the artist’s death, writing “I am crushed,” in the margin of his letters. In another unexpected layer, a supernatural element is woven through, drawing on Spanish folklore and Hotere’s bicultural upbringing.
“My sensibility in terms of te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā, having a foot in both worlds, has certainly influenced me — a sense that wairua and the mauri life force can be transmitted or almost be embedded in art,” she says. “So I feel Dad is here with me through his paintings.”
Hotere was a preschooler when her mother married Ralph Hotere and the artist legally adopted her, becoming the only father she’s really known. The couple met when McQueen (a future New Zealand poet laureate) was doing her master’s in French at Otago University, where he’d been on a Frances Hodgkins Fellowship.
Their home in Carey’s Bay, near Port Chalmers, was a workspace for both her parents and she remembers running in and out of her father’s studio. “Dad’s art was a huge factor in our lives from the start and part of the domestic life, not removed from it,” says Hotere, who co-authored with Priscilla Pitts a book about the first 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, Undreamed Of, in 2018.
A large wooden dollshouse with stained-glass windows made by her father was handed down to her own kids and although he rarely painted portraits, there’s a framed pencil sketch he did of her hanging in the hallway. Her parents parted when she was in her late teens (he later married artist Mary McFarlane) but Hotere remained close to her father, who died in 2013 at the age of 81. McQueen, who is still writing poetry, now lives in Bluff.
Hotere declines to be drawn on the recent controversy over access to her father’s collection, which is controlled by the Hotere Foundation Trust. “Dad made art for it to be seen,” is all she’s prepared to say on the matter.
After such a long gestation period for her first novel, she’s already started work on her second one, which again has a painting at the centre of the story and will feature some of the same characters. Not a sequel to The Vanishing Point, but definitely connected. “I’ve realised through doing this book that my heroes are artists and writers. That would be an influence from my parents. I mean, they were both quite heroic figures creatively. That takes great commitment and dedication and passion. It’s not an easy path.”
- The Vanishing Point by Andrea Hotere (Ultimo Press) is out on October 12.