Word: madrid
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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...
...what they do not possess -- especially not the Caprichos and the Disasters of War -- is the sense of intellectual decorum and poise that the well-born, French-reading illuminati of Madrid preferred the discourse of images to have. Goya was not good at optimistic allegory. His large painting of the adoption of the liberal constitution of 1812 -- the constitution as a maiden in white presented by Father Time while pretty Clio, the muse of history, takes notes -- is one of his few real pictorial failures...
...Carlos III and, by 1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon, pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty white mass of sprigged muslin, to the level, sagacious gaze of his friend the art collector Sebastian Martinez, Goya left on record an extraordinary sequence of human presences...
...portrait of the Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty...
Dark Habits: a chanteuse brings her boyfriend to her Madrid apartment, where he ODs on heroin and dies. What Have I Done to Deserve This?: an illiterate woman has quickie sex with a muscular student in the shower stall of the kendo academy where she scrubs floors. Matador: a beyond-gorgeous woman picks up a stranger, makes violent love, then stabs him to death with her hatpin. Law of Desire: a young stud is directed through some steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem designed to shock...