Word: goya
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Three prints--which Goya titles simply, "No Quieren" (They Don't Want To), "Tampoco" (Nor Those), and "Ni Por Esas" (Neither Do These)--show the brutality with which the victorious French raped the Spanish women. Figures in the shadows only hint at the viciousness, but an arc of Goya's light illuminates a half-naked woman being dragged by a French soldier away from the body of her screaming child...
...GOYA'S CAPRICHOS expressed the vacuity of life without reason, his Desastres de la Guerra brought out the impossibility of life without reason. The most piercing and disturbing part of the MFA's exhibition is the room devoted to the Desastres. Built on Goya's own experience during the six-year war between Spain and Napoleon's France, the Desastres show the carnage, the stench--the actuality of war. Goya shows no heroes and no villains. No supernatural forces are at work here--the agony and suffering are inflicted by people onto other people, and no one is spared...
...Goya shows that the civilians suffered in many ways: in "Para Eso Habeis Nacido" (This Is What You Were Born For), a man vomits on a pile of typhoid-ridden corpses, against a background of mottled, dark blotches. In "Enterrary Callar" (Bury Them and Be Quiet), Goya shows a mound of bodies, topped by a weeping woman and a man covering his mouth at the sheer horror of the smell. "When the French entered the city," reports an 18th century English journalist (quoted in the excellent catalogue by Eleanor Sayre) "6000 bodies were lying in the streets and trenches...
...horror of scene after scene is too much to be endured, for Goya uses man as the measure of every single, brutal atrocity, and grinds the agony into the viewer...
This show has brought together prints from Boston, Madrid, Paris, Berlin and London to form the most comprehensive Goya show ever seen in America. It is impressive just to see the Disparates and the Desastres de la Guerra in Goya's working proofs, for these two series were published after his death, and the formal prints have been altered from what Goya meant them to be. But to have these juxtaposed with the Caprichos, and to see how Goya changed his images of human folly over 19 years is an unforgettable experience...