Pope Innocent X no. 4
A monumental oil painting by Yan Pei-Ming that reinterprets Velázquez's iconic portrait of Pope Innocent X through the artist's signature gestural and expressive brushwork. The figure emerges from a turbulent, heavily worked surface of smoldering reds and blacks, rendering the papal subject with raw, almost violent energy. Ming's bold, fluid strokes dissolve the traditional authority of the source image, transforming it into a meditation on power, memory, and the act of painting itself.
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Location
- Phillips, Salt Lake City, UT
- Spotted At
- Auction House · PhillipsView on map
🔨 Auction Lot
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale
June 28, 2016
Artists in conversation
Francis Bacon
Irish · b. 1909
Bacon's screaming popes series directly engages the same Velázquez source image with similarly tortured brushwork and smoldering dark tones, transforming papal authority into raw psychological anguish through expressive distortion.
Luc Tuymans
Belgian · b. 1958
Tuymans shares the approach of reinterpreting historical and politically charged imagery through a deliberately unsettling painterly surface, meditating on power and memory with a dark restrained palette and gestural economy.
Neo Rauch
German · b. 1960
Rauch creates monumental figurative oil paintings that draw on historical visual sources and transform them with turbulent expressive brushwork and brooding tonal contrasts, producing a similarly haunted meditation on authority and cultural memory.
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