Goya (Paperback)

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 later graphic works: the harrowing Disasters of War, the Tauromaquia and the Disparates. "Yo lo vi" Goya wrote beneath one of the Disasters -- "I saw it." Hughes conscientiously describes the circumstances of the Napoleonic invasion and the subsequent Peninsular War in order to sort out what Goya might have seen and what he merely imagined. But more important, he analyzes the prints themselves, offering interpretations not only of Goya's style (surprisingly incorporating neoclassic ideals of an earlier period) but also of the echoes of other artists' works, stressing the singularity of Goya's vision, so apposite to our own moment in history.

Only a few years before the Napoleonic calamity, Goya had painted his much-discussed portrait of the royal family. Hughes rehearses all the arguments surrounding this curious ensemble of not very prepossessing figures, including the tendency to think of this painting as a satire, an idea he calls the merest nonsense. Connell thinks it all depends on the viewer. In any case, the painting was clearly Goya's response to Velázquez's Las meninas, and its composition, as Hughes sees it, is almost as enigmatic:

"The surface is Goya at his most energetic, a free, spotted, impasted crust of pigment that keeps breaking into light, full of vitality with never a dull touch. Far from being an exercise in satire, this amounts to an excited defense of kingship: not its divinity, to be sure, but what later ages would call its glamour, its ability to bedazzle the commoner and the subject."

This was to be Goya's last tribute to his employers. In almost all the works that follow, he seemed to be enacting his radical belief that, as he told the Academy of San Fernando in 1792, "There are no rules in painting." Hughes is in top form when he discusses what he calls Goya's "two great propaganda pieces, the Second and Third of May." They were painted, Hughes thinks, because "Goya needed to affirm his credentials as a good, loyal anti-French Spaniard now that Fernando [VII] was back in the saddle." He calls them Goya's "climactic utterances on war." Like many other Goya commentators, Hughes is awestruck before the Third of May, almost rendered speechless (although that could obviously never happen to him) by the majesty of this revered large painting. He dutifully traces possible iconographic connections, stressing the Christ-like aspect of the central victim. This "stocky little martyr-of-the-people is one of the most vivid 'presences' in all art," he writes, and, after pointing out that the victims have faces, he notes that the killers do not. "With this painting, the modern image of war as anonymous killing is born, and a long tradition of killing as ennobled spectacle comes to its overdue end."

It is a different tone of voice that laments and thunders in the celebrated Black Paintings. Hughes fares no better than any other interpreter at offering explanations. They are utterly and eternally enigmatic. As Hughes points out, these large paintings on the walls of Goya's country house have been X-rayed, revealing that the original scheme was almost pastoral. "Why should Goya have switched from what may have been a less fearsome decorative scheme for his farmhouse to one of such surpassing pessimism as the Black Paintings?" he asks. Although both he and Connell consider the possibility that it stemmed from Goya's personal nightmare, they both discuss the immense turbulence of the 1820s and the dire fate of liberals under the restored King Fernando VII. After rebellions, foreign interventions and countless atrocities, the return of this vicious Bourbon would surely have deeply alarmed Goya, who finally fled to Bordeaux.

Hughes's accomplishment in this vastly detailed book is to lay out all the possible reasons for considering Goya the first exemplar of modernism, which, he says in his opening statement "has to do with a questioning, irreverent attitude to life; with a persistent skepticism that sees through the official structures of society." Connell, who is clearly not at ease with works of art but has a good ear for ambient gossip, never advances his reasons for writing "a life" about Goya and does not attempt the grand synthesis Hughes achieves. Both writers occasionally drop into their narratives coy and vulgar locutions, such as Connell's characterization of the Duchess of Alba as a "man killer" and his discussion of palace "hanky panky," or Hughes's irritating allusions to Goya's "cuties" and their "cute little shoes." But Hughes's lapses into silly vernacular should be overlooked. His tremendous exuberance and strong opinions sweep us into Goya's landscape, though not, finally, into Goya's deepest preoccupations or his precise meaning for us. For that, readers must turn to the magisterial study by Fred Licht. In Goya, The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art, Licht locates with precision Goya's own temper when he writes: "Living in a time that he perceived to be basically anarchic, he invented a language that conveyed the very principle of anarchy."

Reviewed by Dore Ashton

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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