Everything is Happening

Book excerpt: A fascinating journey through a single painting’s history, meanings and associations by “one of the great non-fiction writers of this and the last century” (Simon Schama, Financial Times). Acclaimed travel author and art historian Michael Jacobs was haunted by Velázquez’s enigmatic masterpiece Las Meninas from first encountering it in the Prado as a teenager. In Everything is Happening Jacobs searches for the ultimate significance of the painting by following the many associations suggested by each of its characters, as well as his own relationship to the work. From Jacobs’ first trip to Spain to the politics of Golden Age Madrid, to his meeting with the man who saved Las Meninas during the Spanish Civil war, to his experiences in the sunless world of the art history academy, Jacobs delivers a brilliantly discursive meditation on art and life that dissolves the barriers between the past and the present, the real and the illusory. Cut short by Jacobs’ death in 2014, and completed with an introduction and coda by his friend and fellow art lover, the journalist Ed Vulliamy, this visionary and often very funny book is a passionate, personal manifesto for the liberation of how we look at painting.