Word: goya
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When Francisco de Goya created his series, "The Black Paintings," he was expressing his despair over human nature and war in 19th century Europe. But his "Duel with Cudgels" might as well have been painted to capture the craziness of the situation in the Middle East today. It depicts two figures inflicting blows on each other while they sink in quicksand...
...works in this exhibition do not shout like the colors in a Kandinsky or the eyes in a Goya. In fact, a lot about the art is very passive in presentation and needs to be closely examined. It is all about quiet line in these classy, unobtrusive artworks...
...precipitator of the accident, Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal), is an angel-faced punk who's successfully fighting Cofi, the family dog, in illegal arenas and using the winnings to tempt his brother's pregnant wife into running off with him. Then there's the supermodel Valeria (Goya Toledo), whose smart car and lithe body he almost totals just minutes after she has moved in with her latest lover. Finally, there's the witness, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), who has been a college professor and a guerrilla leader, and is now a street person with a cynical sideline as a killer...
...darker notes--sometimes literally so, in the enveloping blackness of their backgrounds, against which the voluptuous white petals of a peony stand out like the skirts of a dying ballerina. In a late painting of lilac blossoms in a vase, you can feel the thick darkness--the darkness of Goya, whose work Manet adored--closing implacably on the fragile white blooms. This may have been as near to deliberate allegory as Manet, the arch-Realist, would go. Or it may not: one can't be quite sure...
What were Manet's influences? Like any great painter, he had a whole museum locked in memory. He paid particular attention to Spanish painters--Velazquez, Goya--whose work he mainly knew from prints, until he made the journey to Spain (no picnic for a traveler then) in 1865. Clearly he was much taken by the Spanish still-life painter Sanchez Cotan, and by the tradition of the vanitas--images of objects gathered together to symbolize the transience of pleasure and earthly life. And then, particularly, there was Chardin, the 18th century French master of still life, whose benign and composed...