Word: goya
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Francisco Goya acknowledged only three masters: "Nature, Velasquez and Rembrandt." His careful study of all three was made apparent last week in a fine survey of Goya's work staged by a Manhattan gallery. The show also pointed up the strength and poignancy of Goya's feelings, which set him well apart from the mainstream...
...artisan's son, born in the dirt-poor village of Fuendetodos in 1746, he had the ruthless energy that stops at nothing and that nothing stops. Goya fought bulls and men with equally savage joy; had he written his autobiography, it could have been as proud and action-packed as Benvenuto Cellini's. He lived in a time known variously as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, but, Spanish to the core, he substituted allegories for reason and sardonic darkness for enlightenment...
Naked Royalty. In art, it was a period dominated by elegance and smugness. His contemporaries, Guardi in Italy, Fragonard in France and Gainsborough in England, all devoted 'themselves to the depiction of pomp and pleasure. Goya did, too, but he painted pompous fools and smirking harlots. He was as harsh and realistic a portraitist as ever lived (and sometimes a surprisingly offhand one), but that did not prevent him from becoming Madrid's court painter. Goya's paintings of the royal family were much admired, for no one dared admit that he showed them naked...
...Wells: Prophet of Our Day appears four years after his death in 1946. Poland-born Antonina Vallentin, a naturalized Frenchwoman, has two qualifications for the job: 1) she knew Wells, 2) she is practiced in writing books about famous men (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Heinrich Heine, Gustav Stresemann, Mirabeau, Goya). With H. G. Wells, she comes to grips with her first eccentric Briton-and emerges from the struggle wearing the pained, puzzled expression of a fighter who has been repeatedly but deftly rabbit-punched...
...Spanish government building at the Paris World's Fair. The mural, done entirely in black, white and grey, symbolized the bombing of a Spanish town by German planes. Brutally ugly, it mixed classical analogies with a suggestion of crumpled newspapers and memories of the bull ring. Goya himself never painted a darker evocation of war's horror...