Word: mena
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Questions about the painting's attribution have been around for more than a decade, but voicing them has proven difficult. "At a certain point, an artist becomes a mythic national hero, and a painting takes on a life of it's own - it becomes sacred," says Manuela Mena, the Prado's chief curator of 18th-century painting and of Goya's work. "When you challenge that, you might as well be challenging religion - you're seen as a heretic, and you fall into the hands of the inquisition...
...Never more so, perhaps, than when you're dealing with Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, seen by many as a founding figure of modern art, and by most Spaniards as an icon of nationalism and revolutionary politics. Mena speaks from personal experience. When she was asked to write the catalog description for The Colossus for a Prado's exhibition in 1989, she already had doubts, but she knew that the painting was an untouchable part of Goya's oeuvre. "Less was known about Goya then," says Mena, "and what was known was not to be questioned...
...Four years later, while helping curate the Prado's Goya: Fact and Fantasy exhibition, Mena's doubts grew when the painting was cleaned. "When we looked at it closely, free of its lofty presentation in a museum," she says, "it was obvious - this painting could not have been done by Goya." Mena and her colleagues removed The Colossus from the 1993 exhibition, but they didn't dare raise the matter in public. "It was too soon," says Mena. "The Colossus was a mythic painting in the academic world, written about by established scholars. To challenge that you have to check...
...British expert Juliet Bareau-Wilson, who had also helped with the painting's restoration, reaped the whirlwind when she told an interviewer that "The Colossus was not Goya's work. "We were attacked by the press," says Mena, "by academics defending traditional interpretations, by nationalists for whom Goya was Spain's somber bullfighter, by political liberals for whom Goya was a revolutionary who stood against Napoleon. I understood something of what religious persecution is like...
...Middle East” are emblematic of the politicization and division of our present geographic world-view. The “Middle East” is itself a relational term: middle to what? Clearly, the Middle East, or the region commonly referred to as Middle East-North Africa (MENA), is defined by contemporary politics rather than a geographic relationship. In scholarship, the term is often clarified with a list of included countries—something unnecessary for conventional continents such as Asia. Yet the media, policymakers, and military strategists alike use the term as is, relying on an assumed contiguity...