Word: goya
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There has never been a complete retrospective of Goya's work, but the next best thing may be the exhibition "Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment," which was shown at the Prado in Madrid last fall, opened last week at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and will be seen from May 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Organized by Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, director of the Prado, and Eleanor A. Sayre, the eminent Goya scholar who is curator emeritus of drawings, prints and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, the show...
...difficulty with Goya is that for the past hundred years and more, he has been somewhat obscured by the Goyaesque. Our idea of him has been so much shaped by the Romantic sensibility that pervaded Europe after his death that we still like to see him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his - temperament against his times -- the first skeptic of art, the titanic ancestor of surrealism. "It is when Goya abandons himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable," wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in making black clouds, filled...
There is a case for Goya as the first great modern artist, because of his fascination with the irrational and his critical rage against church and class. Indeed, the inscriptions on two of his prints -- Y no hai remedio (And there is no remedy), referring to the shooting of bound prisoners in the series titled Disasters of War, and El sueno de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason brings forth monsters), the title page of his Caprichos -- seem as fixed above the wars, pogroms and massacres of the 20th century as Dante's words "Abandon hope...
...only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho...
...been asked, amid the intellectual and political convulsions that tore Spain asunder between 1790 and 1815, "Whose side are you on?", he would have answered, "Reason's." For Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the gilder's son from Aragon, did not have the education of a Diderot or a Rousseau, but he was completely a figure of the Enlightenment; his paintings and prints, with their obsessive imagery of the conflict of light and darkness, are perhaps its supreme metaphorical expression in European art outside of the classically formalized work of Jacques-Louis David...