Word: goya
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...know who some of the women were, and it is a remarkable fact that although Goya and his wife, Josefa Bayeu, lived together in apparent harmony for decades, there is no known painting of her. But whatever their names, everything about them is observed with delighted accuracy--the way they stand and move, how they gesture, their makeup and coiffure and jewelry, and above all what they wear. Goya was an enraptured connoisseur of clothes and knew exactly what political and social meanings costume in Spain could have...
...work, and in this show, is his portrait of the Duchess of Osuna with her husband and family, 1787-88. Related to half the noblest clans in Spain, she was the most cultivated, educated and liberal woman of her age: patron of writers and artists (including, notably, Goya), with her own theater where new plays by the leading dramatists of the day were given, her own chamber orchestra to play Haydn and Boccherini to her guests, and a deep involvement with issues of women's rights and education. She gazes at us with an expression of limitless composure, looking neither...
...Goya was connected to the Enlightenment too. Yet a whole side of his imagination was stirred only by the old black Spain, the country of witches, the Inquisition, absolutism and night terrors, and this too shows with sublime force in some of his depictions of women. One of the things that lends such power to Goya's women is simply that he viewed some of them with a degree of fear, as anyone might. He could not, even if he had tried, make them out to be little pink rococo sex dolls, as was so often the custom in France...
...also saw what nice, respectable girls can do. This is the message carried by many of the etchings known as the Caprichos, and even by his early decorative tapestry designs of the 1770s and 1780s, before illness and deafness turned him into the stricken, black Goya, haunted by death and disaster, who speaks with such appalled and appalling clarity to our century. The Straw Mannikin, his tapestry design of 1791-92, can be read as a country amusement--four girls tossing a straw-stuffed mannequin of a petimetre, a male dandy dressed in the French fashion, up and down...
...part of the magic and the grip of his work: its unrelenting vitality. His figures, men or women, may be mad or bad. They may be full of life, or they may just have been spitted on a French saber. But they are never limp, wooden or uninteresting. Goya's immense appetite for life always keeps rasping through their imagined breathing. That is why one can never get bored in front of them, and why every Spanish painter since has seen him, with a mixture of delight and despair, as the man against whom no comparison...