Word: prado
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Deep in the Prado Museum's massive new Goya exhibition hangs a muted watercolor titled One Can't Look. Completed some time in the years before 1815, it depicts a prisoner, his torso draped in cloth, with ropes dangling from his tensed limbs. There is no hood over his head, no box beneath his feet, and what initially appear to be outstretched arms turn out, upon closer inspection, to be tattered folds of cloth. Yet it is almost impossible to look at this small work and not be reminded of the more recent image of a hooded prisoner...
...foreshadow the atrocities to come. If earlier generations have found in the Spanish painter's work clues to their own iconography of despair (The Third of May as a precursor of Picasso's Guernica, the Black Paintings as preparation for images of Auschwitz), the Prado's "Goya in Times of War" is an exhibition for us, the Abu Ghraib generation...
...show, which runs from April 15 through mid-July in Madrid, is the Prado's first major Goya retrospective since 1996. It includes nearly 200 paintings, etchings and drawings, many of which come from private collections and have never been publicly displayed. In fact, although the Prado holds the world's largest trove of works by Goya, only a fifth of the pieces in this exhibition come from its collection. All were completed between 1794 and 1820, the period that begins with Goya's recovery from a grave illness that left him deaf, and traverses the bloody years of Spain...
...four new painting galleries will be used solely for temporary exhibits. The first of these, "The Prado's 19th Century Masters," which opens to the public on Oct. 31 and runs through April 2008, gives the museum a good opportunity to reveal another of its closely kept secrets: it holds important paintings created after 1828, the year of Goya's death, which has until now marked the chronological endpoint of its permanent collection. This exhibition of over 100 works opens with portraits from Goya's age - including one by him of a voluptuous Marquesa de Santa Cruz, and another...
Once this temporary exhibition closes, many of its works will find their way onto the walls of the Prado's original Villanueva building; now that the main galleries no longer have to house traveling shows, there's more room to show works that have tended to languish in storage. "In 1819, the museum had a gallery of contemporary drawings where Goya's work was on display," says Zugaza. "The museum's founders thought that the collection would keep extending, but our chronic problem with insufficient space prevented that. Now, we have the opportunity to stretch to our full range...