Goya [Hardcover]

Robert Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2003

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.
In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A long life and vast works make fitting subjects for the epic-minded Hughes (The Shock of the New, etc.). Born in Aragon in 1746, Goya weathered the Peninsular Wars (1808-1814) in Spain and lived to the age of 82, when he died in self-imposed exile in France. Hughes denies the popular image of the artist as a die-hard iconoclast, painting court portraits while winking behind his patrons' backs. Staying close to the visual evidence, Hughes shows Goya was not above flattering his royal subjects (aggrandizing midget count Altamira), waxing patriotic (as in the famous Third of May) and taking commissions from the Bonapartes under the French occupation. In middle age he was struck deaf by an unidentifiable illness, at which point his pictures turned darker-a bullfighter gored before eager spectators, the inmates of a madhouse clamoring for respite. His Desastres de la guerra rendered the mute, gaping horror of guerrilla combat. Under a picture of refugees fleeing the French, he inscribed, "I saw it." Whether or not this much debated act of witness really happened, for Hughes it is Goya's urgent visual economy that "invented... the illusion of being there when dreadful things happen." Given his intimate understanding of the painter, one regrets that Hughes's diligent catalogues of the Caprichos and Pinturas Negras (among the 115 color and 100 b&w illustrations) often forgo in-depth analysis for textbook thoroughness. But he compellingly insists on Goya's prophetic genius, arguing that, for an age that has produced few great paintings in response to modern terrors, Goya's pictures anticipate disasters unheard of but yet to arrive.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Australian-born Hughes, art critic for Time and the author of 10 acclaimed books, begins his expert and passionate interpretation of the life and work of the seminal artist Goya with a dramatic account of how, during his recovery from a nearly fatal car crash, he was visited by the great painter in the twilight zone of his pain. This empathic connection with Goya, who suffered his own isolating and debilitating crisis in his mid-forties when a fierce illness left him deaf, enabled Hughes to write a remarkably vital, delectably discursive, and deeply affecting study of an artist whose unique and powerful work grows more significant with each passing year. Goya, Hughes writes, "truly was a realist, one of the first and greatest," but he was also a sly and courageous social critic, creating indelible images of both earthy satire and epic tragedy. Declaring the prolific, "sanguine and ironic" Goya "the last Old Master and the first Modernist," Hughes brings eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Madrid to dynamic life and insightfully dissects every aspect of Goya's ever-evolving paintings and etchings, indelible works that grew steadily darker, more disturbing, and increasingly radical in their indictment of injustice and violence. Hughes' profound appreciation for Goya's genius and "immense humanity" will inspire readers to look to Goya's magnificent, shocking, and clarifying works as to a polestar as we grapple with the inhumanity of our times. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (November 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394580281
• ISBN-13: 978-0394580289
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #724,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Hughes was born in Australia in 1938 and has lived in Europe and the United States since 1964. Since 1970 he has worked in New York as an art critic for Time Magazine. He has twice received the Franklin Jeweer Mather Award for Distinguished Criticism from the College Art Association of America.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Paramount Artist Biography, November 18, 2003

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Goya (Hardcover)

Throughout history we have examples of biographers so committed to the works of their artist subject that the reporting of the writer seems like the visual becoming oral. Such is the case of James Lord and Giacometti, David Sylvester and Francis Bacon, and now Robert Hughes and Jose de Goya y Lucientes. Hughes new publication entitled simply GOYA is the zenith work in the line of brilliant art history writing, books that include 'The Shock of the New' and 'American Visions' as well as definitive books on artists Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud. His knowledge is both technically sophisticated and psychologically sound and he is a gifted writer in about any métier.

But there is something more to this book than biography. Goya has been important to Hughes throughout his life: his first art purchase as student in Australia was one of the etchings of Goya's `Capricho' series. It wasn't until 1999, when Hughes came close to meeting death from an accident, was in a coma, then gradually recovered through a long series of debilitating therapies, that Hughes was able to overcome his writer's block and actually set about to write the biography of the artist who had become his obsession for years. Hughes admits that it was probably this experience coupled with a vision of Goya himself that made him truly comprehend and incorporate Goya's life of reactionary to the Church, to the absurdity and viciousness of War, to the Inquisition, and to the social injustices he observed. And the interesting parallel of course is that Goya suffered physically not only due to complete deafness, but also to undiagnosed maladies that made his life a trial but did not stop his painting.

Hughes writing style is urbane and conversational, informed and witty, impeccably researched and yet related as though the reader were sitting at the feet of an old longtime acquaintance of Goya. He obviously is in awe of Goya's works, allows him the court portraits and tapestries that Goya endured for money, and makes it a point to examine each painting with fine scrutiny - finding every self portrait of the artist in paintings most other scholars have missed. Rather that writing the life of Goya from his birth chronologically through to his death and epilogue, Hughes examines a life that is inevitably destined to paint the darkness of the Black Paintings and the Caprichos with frequent asides, a style that creates incredible energy in the telling of the life of this amazing artist. Example: In 1980 Goya applied to a "proper institution" - the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and his entrance exam was a painting entitled "Crucified Christ". Hughes: "It is without much doubt the worst painting he ever did. How could a man who would emerge, some thirty years later, as the most powerful reporter of human anguish in all of Western art have produced this soapy piece of bondieuserie? The ladylike body, unmarked by torment; the absence of any kind of empathy with what real bodies underwent in the course of flogging and crucifixion; the enervated "correctness" of pose - all this combines to convey a sort of sickly, moaning piety that, if it were not for the relative liveliness of the paint and its impeccable provenance, would make you doubt it was by Goya at all." These are not damning critical flagellations: these are the responses of a writer who knows his subject well.

This richly illustrated volume (one only wishes the plates were larger) is well designed to keep pace with history, psychology, and a world timeline and it should be in the libraries of students, artists, art lovers, and scholars. In a line of important books, GOYA is most assuredly the finest product of the gifted Hughes' mind and pen. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical criticism at its finest, February 7, 2004

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Rob (Cincinnati, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Goya (Hardcover)

This book is the best to be written about Goya, placing him squarely in the modern arena, debunking most of the silly and trivial myths surrounding his life, and educating the public on one of the true masters. Hughes build-up is slow but thorough. The novice and art-historian alike are given a full historical context for Goya and his work. Hughes' payoff is a far better understanding of artist's life than any other writer as of yet has captured. With less obvious material than other biographers (letters, diaries, etc.), Hughes does a splendid job of re-piecing the cultural and political climate of Spain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Even if you disagree with him at points and find his critique a bit stuffy, you can never argue with his passion for Goya's art or the research put into the book. His eye for detail and relentless pursuit of background material, make the author's style almost incomparable; because his points are made so plainly and lucidly, he conveys an appreciation of art that few critics can match. This book seeks to educate and entertain, succeeding on both levels. I highly recommend Goya to anyone interested in Modern or European art of the last 300 years.

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars This book needed an editor, September 7, 2004

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S. Calwas - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Goya (Hardcover)

Anyone searching for a book of Goya reproductions should look elsewhere; nearly all the reproductions here are half-postcard size. But that's not a problem because the book's intent is to describe the artist's life within the context of his time. Unfortunately, it is in that area where the problems lie.

Simply put, the book is poorly written. It is rife with factual inaccuracies and contradictory conclusions. A few of the many examples are:

1) On page 120, in speaking about Goya's group royal portrait of "The Family of Carlos IV," Hughes says: "In 1787-88, when the picture was painted, family groups were distinctly uncommon in Spanish art: Velazquez, for instance, was never once called upon to paint one." In fact, group portraits of the Bourbon royalty were indeed common, such as Louis-Michel Van Loo's portrait "The Family of Philip V" in the Prado. Bourbon family portraits were an intentional departure from the traditional Habsburg royal portraits painted during Velazquez's time. In addition, the reference to Velazquez is confusing and unjustified because Velazquez painted around 150 years before Goya and nowhere near "1787-88, when the picture was painted."

2) On page 131, when conjecturing on whether or not Goya actually fought a bull in his youth, the possibility is dismissed as "a masculine boast easily made in Spain." But by page 351, Hughes has changed his mind and says that Goya "claimed, probably truthfully, that he had fought bulls in his youth."

3) On page 16, the name of Goya's house--the Quinta del Sordo or Deaf Man's Farmhouse--"drew its nickname...from the previous owner, a deaf farmer." But on page 372, he states "the property next door had been owned by a farmer who was deaf" and the name passed to Goya's house when he moved in.

4) On page 402, Hughes says that Goya was buried in the "Santa Maria de la Florida" church. In fact, he was buried in the "San Antonio de la Florida" church. This church has particular relevance to Goya and so the error is just sloppiness.

In addition, the book's timeframe unnecessarily bounces forward and backward, many events that have been described earlier in the book are repeated, and important seminal events in Goya's life are completely ignored, such as when and how did Goya rise to become the First Court Painter?

The book's good points are (1) that it contains information concerning the Bourbon monarchies that I did not know, but which I must unfortunately question because of the other inaccuracies throughout the book, and (2) the book's paper quality is first-rate--thick and glossy--the book is as heavy as lead and will last a long time. Too bad such a beautiful printing job was given to such an undeserving effort.