Word: goya
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Some say it was syphilis, a theory which accords with Goya's rakehell reputation...
Whatever the illness, it deafened him completely. While convalescing, Goya painted the first of his many hellish fantasies-only, as he wrote, "to occupy my imagination, which was troubled by the consideration of my ills." With deceptive modesty, he noted that in his new pictures he had "succeeded in making observations for which my commissioned works, in which fantasy and invention had no place, never gave the opportunity." What actually happened was far more important...
...Goya had wriggled out of his old, gregarious personality. He emerged as the dour genius the world now knows. In the fading, Baroque art of Goya's day, charm was the watchword. Goya brushed charm aside; he no longer cared to please. Throughout his career, he had listened to others' orders and carried them out amiably enough. Now he no longer heard his orders; he gradually ceased to obey, and even to reply. Except for official portraits, Goya's art stopped being a succession of answers to the world's demands and became simply statements...
Love & War. The new Goya glares with brutal clarity, like a wounded fighting bull, from the self-portrait made two years after his illness (see cut). It was at about this time that the Duchess of Alba took him on. As willful as she was lovely, the Duchess surrounded herself with the freaks, dwarfs and buffoons whom Goya loved to draw. They made a dramatic setting for her fragile, doll-like beauty. Goya drew and painted her often, sometimes with admiration and sometimes in anger at her wild flirting. Once he showed her carried away by witches and looking...
Like most Spanish intellectuals since his day, Goya was a liberal at war with himself. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Goya at first welcomed what he hoped would be a clean broom. But his patriotic heart went out to the defenders, and he finally engraved on his dagger the words: "Death to the French." Still, he lived on the fringes of the invader's court, painted French generals as well as Spanish. He also portrayed the triumphant Wellington, and finally, though with obvious distaste, the returned King Ferdinand VII. Vacillating and bad-tempered though Goya was, no ruler...