Goya (Hardcover)

by Robert Hughes (Author)

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 The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

When Jean-Paul Sartre thought about the Disasters of War, the Disparates and the so-called Black Paintings (Pinturas negras) of Goya's later years, he concluded that what Goya was really depicting was the horror of being Goya. Like the two authors of these most recent biographies, Sartre had charged himself with finding the true Goya behind the oeuvre that had challenged so many thoughtful moderns. But also like them, he was inevitably thrust back upon his own interpretation since, other than the works themselves, there is scant documentary material (such as Goya's letters or written remarks) to support any conclusions. What almost all commentators agree upon is that somehow Goya stood at the beginning of the tendencies that we call "modern," particularly in the visual arts, since painters from Delacroix to Manet to Guston have been visibly haunted by his imagery.

Robert Hughes, whose passionate diction gives his rendering the force of a tidal wave, tries to keep close to the work, but he, like every other recent writer on Goya, cannot resist trying to get inside Goya's persona in order to assert his personal view of who Goya really was. Hughes's accent of the events in Goya's life is always dramatic and, as he insistently admits, based on his own terrifying nightmares after he almost perished following a frightful automobile accident. He therefore places too much emphasis on a single episode in Goya's life: the long, mysterious illness at the age of 47 that struck him down for months, and from which he emerged totally deaf. Others have understood Goya's emphatic turn into the dark realm of rapine, murder and witchcraft as at least partially circumstantial: He lived in one of the most tumultuous and agonizing periods in Spanish history.

Both Hughes and Evan S. Connell offer well-informed outlines of the astoundingly rapid public disasters that punctuated the lives of everyone at the time, commoners and courtiers (as Goya was for some forty years) alike. By the time Goya, a boy from the provinces, had definitively arrived in Madrid, after completing the obligatory artistic sojourn in Italy and church commissions in Saragossa, he was almost 30 and ambitious for worldly success. With the help of Francisco Bayeu, his brother-in-law and a figure already well established in Carlos III's court, Goya was soon at work in the royal tapestry industry designing cartoons. The Bourbon king, skillfully described by Connell and faintly praised by Hughes for his occasional notice of the vast social problems in Spain -- a devastated country in the grip of a triangle of exploiters: the powerful Church, the idle upper nobility and the Crown itself -- was, it seemed, chiefly concerned with hunting, as was his successor Carlos IV, Goya's patron. Both kings feared the increasing influence of enlighteners in France and mistrusted the small but forceful group of noble families that insisted on being informed about events there. Goya, as both authors relate, was clearly one of the afrancesados -- those who admired forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau and other Enlightenment French authors -- although he successfully, most of the time, ingratiated himself with his royal employers.

From the outbreak of the French Revolution, when Goya was in his mid-forties and had reached the pinnacle of his career as painter to the royal chamber, the Bourbons, like other monarchs in Europe, had become increasingly nervous. Their response was to heighten official repression, empower anew the Inquisition and cower in their palaces, oblivious to the increasing chaos in Spanish life. It was probably the pressures of perilous political events, rather than his deafness, that provoked the keen observer Goya to turn to darker subjects in the late 1790s. He no doubt genuinely believed, as one of his legends for an etching declared, that "Devils are those who do evil, or prevent others from doing good, or who do nothing at all."

He was obviously a complex man. Hughes tries to reveal all of Goya's idiosyncrasies and obsessions through close readings of his work. Connell dwells more on the milieu in which he navigated. He speaks of the intellectuals, playwrights, philosophers and cultured women who were the artist's friends. If we want to know the setting and menu for a noblewoman's dinner party, or which fashionable toreadors they cultivated, or the reactions of travelers such as Casanova, Theophile Gautier or Lady Holland (and they are valuable), it is to Connell we must turn. But if we want to know how Goya worked as a printmaker, a medium in which he was both an aesthetic innovator and a deviser of new techniques, then we must listen to Hughes. Similarly, if we want to know about the two duchesses who clearly intrigued Goya -- the Duchess of Osuna, an exceptionally intelligent presence in intellectual circles, and the Duchess of Alba, more noted for other propensities -- we can find them as described by various contemporaries in Connell, and as perceived by Goya, with brush in hand, by Hughes. Naturally, both authors speculate about the nature of Goya's relationship with la Alba, as he called her, as has every other commentator for two centuries. Hughes, with his usual aplomb, judges that there was nothing sexual between them, while Connell is not so sure. What is certain is that Goya's great critical cycle on the mores and grotesqueries of contemporary Spain began as he was working at her country estate. Called Caprichos, ("caprices"), this series was briefly marketed, then prudently withdrawn after only 27 sets of some 300 were sold, probably (although Hughes doesn't seem to think so) because the long arm of the Inquisition loomed and because Queen María Luisa's favorite (and perhaps lover), Manuel Godoy, was not pleased.

Beginning with the Caprichos, Goya's work requires the kind of close inspection that Hughes, with his background as an art student and his long experience as an art critic, is better equipped to handle than Connell. Here we may argue with his judgments, but only after entering, with him, Goya's tenebrous world as he went from the Caprichos to his