Word: goya
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...come the mourners: six catalog essayists, rending their garments and mangling their syntax. Their rhetoric is sublime, beyond parody. "Since slavery and oppression under white supremacy are visible subtexts in Basquiat's work," intones one, "he is as close to a Goya as American painting has ever produced." "The paintings are alive and speak for themselves," cries another, "while Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of Immortality." A third, between decorative quotes from Michel Foucault, extols Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse asceticism to which...
...this is the first comprehensive exhibition of his work ever held in America, or for that matter in Europe (it was previously shown in Naples and Madrid). It rounds off the series of shows by Spanish artists of the 17th and 18th centuries -- Murillo, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Goya and now lo Spagnoletto, "the Little Spaniard," as Ribera was known to his Italian admirers -- designed to close gaping holes in our collective art-historical knowledge, and to make concrete sense of the pictorial achievements of what imperial Spain called its siglo de oro, its golden century...
Their gods were Manet, Daumier, Goya and Hals; among Americans, Homer and Eakins. None were more direct than Bellows, who in the peak years of his youth became the entranced recorder of New York, the "real" city of tough mudlarking kids, of crowded tenements and teeming icy streets, of big bridges and sudden breaks in the wall of buildings that revealed tugboats and a dragging tide...
...bodies starkly gleaming under the carbide lights, locked in a triangle, the strain of muscles so assimilated into the physical life of the paintstrokes that the pigment runs over their contours. Bellows' contemporaries found such images "Hogarthian," but the closer ancestor of Stag at Sharkey's is late Goya. In particular the frieze of spectators' heads, yelling, gaping, sly, stupefied, brings to mind the faces in Goya's Witches' Sabbath or his Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of San Isidro...
Tanned and trim at 63, Fuentes proves an amiable and erudite video guide, equally at ease critiquing a painting by Goya, sipping coffee in a smoky tango club in Buenos Aires, or pointing out the erotic audacity of the Spanish torerillos ("Where else can the male strike such provocative poses except in the bull ring...