Robert Hughes'
Goya
 |
Goya: Self-portrait, 1815,
oil on panel, 51 x 46 cm; image held here |
There's a lot
of disability in this new biography of the Spanish painter
Francisco Goya y Lucientes,
now known to us simply and immediately as Goya. Written
by well-known international art critic Robert Hughes,
the genesis of the book was as dramatic as it gets. Following
a near-fatal car crash in western Australia, which left
his body "smashed like a toad's" Hughes spent months in
hospitals under-going painful, restorative surgery, and
in his drug-induced dreaming he dreamt he was set upon
by Goya and a gang of roughs. Prompted by his own experience
of pain, suffering and enforced disability, he resolved
to get inside the head of Goya- "it was through the accident
that I came to know extreme pain, fear and despair; and
it may be that the writer who does not know fear, despair
and pain cannot fully know Goya."
Goya started out
as a minor painter, painting portraits of the Spanish
nobility from the 1760s onwards, but it was his apprenticeship
to the court, beginning in 1775, that made his name and
fortune.
In the early 1780s
Goya had became court painter to the remarkably stupid
Carlos IV and his remarkably stupid family, and also figures
such as the beautiful but enigmatic Duchess of Alba, the
vainglorious Duke of Godoy and others. In 1792 he
was struck down by a mysterious and dangerous illness.
Even his friends despaired - "Since the nature of his
malady is of the most fearful, I am forced to think with
melancholy about his recuperation." Posthumous attempts
to diagnose the illness that transformed Goya's life are
pretty much pointless (Hughes thinks it was polio; others
have pointed the finger at syphilitic meningitis), but
what we do know is that it left him permanently and
completely deaf - and victim to the consequences of such
a traumatic, life-changing event. For depression followed
deafness: "sometimes raving with a mood that I myself
cannot stand," as he himself put it.
And yet this personal
disaster brought with it a period of intense artistic
invention. As Goya became withdrawn from the world - physically
and emotionally distanced from those around him - his
eye became wilder, deeper, and more subversive. Deafness
created a wall between him and the world, and so he tried
to communicate vividly the ferocity of creatures trying
to make themselves heard from the other side of a sealed
glass, as Hughes puts it.
 |
Goya, El
sueño de la razón produce monstruos
('the sleep of reason produces monsters', plate
43 from Los caprichos, c.1799. Image held
here. |
Feeling himself
mad, Goya was drawn to paint the inside of madhouses,
and to dwell on macabre subjects - witchcraft, banditry
and cannibalism. He published Los caprichos, his
series of fantastic, grotesque, disturbing engravings,
whose definitive image is of a man slumped over his abandoned
drawings, with owls, bats and an evil cat surrounding
his unconscious form in the dark. This became the most
powerful epitaph for the Enlightenment: El sueño
de la razón produce monstruos ("the sleep of
reason produces monsters').
 |
Goya: from Los desastres de
la guerra ('the disasters of war'); Image held
here |
But it was during
the War of Independence against Napoleon, beginning in
1808, that Goya produced his most disturbing and powerful
images. Los desastres de la guerra ('the
disasters of war') records many of the most gruesome incidents
of this savage and gruesome war fought between Spanish
guerrillas and French regulars. Corpses hanging
from trees by their entrails was a not-uncommon sight.
Probably Goya's best painting, 3rd May 1808, commemorates
a mass execution of Spanish partisans by the French. His
work from this period, with its blood-spattered realism
and semi-pornographic depictions
of brutality, have made Goya a patron saint among
war photographers and documentary makers. His attitude
is best summed up by his saying "yo lo vi' ("I saw it').
 |
Goya, 3rd
May 1808. Image held here |
Goya's deafness
meant for him a harsh isolation from the world and indeed
from all human contact. The situation, as Hughes
concedes, is not that different today, even with all our
gadgetry. But it also developed his skills as an artist,
deepening his sensitivity to body language, facial tics,
and the minutiae of bodily expression. The change is abrupt.
Hughes presents two very different versions of the same
event, the feast of San Isidro, painted by Goya with a
thirty-year interval. The first painting is a pleasant,
brightly coloured rural scene, filled with young maids.
The second comes from his later period of
"pinturas negras' or black paintings, and depicts a very
different scene of dark colours where a black-clad crowd
of ugly, distorted faces rush towards the viewer. It's
the difference between Goya, the eighteenth-century romantic
artist and Goya the modernist and expressionist.
 |
| Goya: La Pradera de San
Isidro, 1788; image held here |
 |
| Goya: The Pilgrims of San
Isidro, 1820-23; image held here |
Although Goya
himself lived to eighty-two years of age, his last decade
was spent in Bordeaux in far-off France, not in
his native Spain, a common fate, alas, for exiles then
and since.
Robert Hughes
has produced what will become the most popular and accessible
portrait of Goya for our times. Written in his own inimitable
style the book is a delight to read. It's worth remembering
that Hughes is a professional historian as well as art
critic, and the book is as much a history of Goya's turbulent
times in a Spain racked by war and revolution as it is
of Goya the painter. Hughes' attempts to contemporarize
his text with asides to Cher and "that patron saint of
kitsch sentiment Lady Di" sometimes go off-target, but
in general the writing is faultless. This superb volume
is fully illustrated throughout with both colour and black-and-white
plates.
Goya by
Robert Hughes published by the Harvill press, 2003, price
£20.00
Michael Morgan
is a freelance writer and arts journalist from Belfast,
specialising in arts and disability issues.
