Word: goya
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...familiarity, if we think we have some, is false. There is infinitely more to tell. Women pervade Goya's work. He was fascinated, obsessed with them and recorded all their aspects, actual and mythic, typified and individual. His subjects come from all classes. They appear as demonic witches and country sweethearts, as closely human or icily remote aristocrats, star actresses of theater-crazy Madrid, ordinary bulb-nosed wives, allegorical personifications of history, gap-jawed crones, alluring and cheeky majas, cute and not-so-cute whores, blond angels with diaphanous wings on the walls of the Church of San Antonio...
Francisco Goya is one of those artists who seem both to transcend their time and to epitomize it. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto (I hold nothing alien from me that has to do with human nature), wrote the Roman poet Terence. This motto was lived out to the fullest degree by certain 19th century geniuses. Charles Dickens, with his insatiable interest in character and narrative, was one. In a more abstract way--music being an abstract art anyway--so was Beethoven, in his creation of equivalents for the human passions. And so, in the domain of the visual...
Going through "Goya: Images of Women," the exhibition presented at the National Gallery of Art in Washington by the leading American Goya scholar Janis Tomlinson--it is a somewhat truncated version of a large show that was seen at the Prado in Madrid last winter--one realizes what depth and intensity Goya brought to seeing his world. The late 18th and early 19th century in Europe had portraitists who could extract gripping narratives of sympathy and experience from the individual human face and body. Delacroix, Ingres, David--it is a long and glorious list. But the most fascinating of them...
Most of the Goyas that we rightly regard as his masterpieces were not seen by the public in the artist's lifetime. The Goya we know today is a rounded, far-reaching, almost encyclopedic painter, truly Shakespearean in his range; but the Goya Spaniards knew was largely a portraitist, and that is one of the most pressing reasons for the present show...
...Goya and images of women? We may suppose we know something about that, having seen The Naked Maja, 1797-1800, one of the most famous woman images in art next to the Mona Lisa: the second most famous nude in Spain after Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, and the first with pubic hair. She was not, by the way, the Duchess of Alba, with whom--contrary to legend--Goya almost certainly had no sexual affair. She, like her companion piece The Clothed Maja, 1800-05, was most probably a Malagan cutie named Pepita Tudo, the mistress of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy...