What a life of hellish contradiction was that of the great Spanish painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. Subject of a huge new show here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Goya (1746-1828) was long the official painter to the grand and haughty court of Spain–perhaps the last such painter to flourish in Europe.
Yet he was also a seething, burning, radical liberal who identified with the long-suffering common people of his nation and Europe in an explosively revolutionary time.
Goya was a master and genius who could produce the most exquisite portrayals of elegant and youthful innocence, such as his luminous “Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga,” or “The Little Boy in Red.” Yet the same hand and eye could record the most nightmarishly brutal examples of military oppression–drawings and prints to rival any modern photograph in depicting the carnal gruesomeness and horror of war, especially as visited upon civilian populations. He acquired fame, riches, social position, a good wife and family, fine friends and fabulous mistresses. Yet, with what might seem as almost biblical retribution, he was afflicted by painful recurring illnesses that made a torment of his life and attempts to sleep–and destroyed his hearing at age 46.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hung all this up to see–every Goya painting, drawing, etching and lithograph it owns, 350 pieces in all–the first time it has ever put its entire Goya collection on view.
Furthering the theme of contradiction is that, of the 17 major Goya paintings the Met has in this show, nine are identified as false Goyas or works that rigorous modern-day scholarship and science have found to be of suspicious authenticity.
“The Little Boy in Red” is here–absolutely authentic, and absolutely wonderful. This small boy–dressed very regally in the manner of a man and surrounded by an inimical assemblage of pet cats and birds–is emblematic of both childhood and an aristocracy portrayed in gentleness.
Also hanging here is the genuine Goya portrait of the boy’s mother and sister, “The Countess of Altamira and Her Daughter.” Earl A. Powell III, director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art, recently noted that Goya made subtle attempts to satirize the royal court in some of these grand portraits and there’s a touch of that here.
The countess’ face is worldly, yet blank and doll-like. Her daughter seems a doll as well. The portrait is one of stiff, empty-headed formality. Far more animated, coy, and broodingly Spanish is Goya’s famous balcony grouping of two seductive ladies and two dark, macabre male background figures in “Majas on a Balcony.” Yet, side by side, the Metropolitan displays two versions of this painting. One is the “Majas” the museum acquired from the H.O. Havemeyer Goya collection in 1929, and which contemporary scholarship now finds suspect. The other is a more vividly rendered balcony scene in which the mysterious male figures are less visible and thus more mysterious. The latter is of unquestioned authenticity, yet they are so much alike.
Also in the show, which runs through Dec. 31, are two definitely authentic Goya masterpieces that exemplify what he could do when he felt some genuine affection and admiration for his portrait subject. One is of the architect “Don Tiburcio Perez y Cuervo,” shown in thoughtful and happy contemplation in shirtsleeves and holding a pair spectacles, and, in breeches and wig, his friend “Don Sebastian Martinez y Perez.” But the great wealth of this show is in the drawings and etchings.
Goya was made official painter to the Spanish royal court in 1789–just a few months before neighboring France erupted in revolution. He remained court painter for more than 40 years–decades which saw the French upheaval turn into the Napoleonic wars and oppression of Spain, as well as revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe that would continue off and on through much of the 19th Century.
Goya’s group portrait of smug, moronic, festooned royals, “Family of Carlos IV,” seems almost an invitation to revolution. While continuing his flattering trade among the royals and nobles, however, Goya worked as well among the common people, especially with his drawings and sketches. They show the pleasures of ordinary life, and its sufferings. Most particularly, they touch the veins of passion, cruelty and violence that seem to run so close to the Spanish sense of being. And in the war drawings, they embrace horror without flinching.
The drawings include two charming self portraits of the artist, as well as works bearing such self explanatory titles as “Three Washerwomen” and “They Are Getting Drunk.”
Many of the drawings are dark and sardonic, such as “Family Vengeance,” in which “her brothers kill her lover, afterward she kills herself.” In “The Swing,” a smiling senorita reveals perhaps too much of her petticoats to an astonished young gentleman. Much less romantic is “Out Hunting for Teeth,” in which a raggedly dressed young woman averts her eyes as she reaches into the corpse’s mouth of a hanged man for booty.
“The Garroted Man” sits suffering in his cell, bound tightly at neck and hands, awaiting the mercy of such a fate. One perhaps implied self portrait, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” shows a seated gentleman in difficult slumber as a flock of demonic owls and Harpies descends upon him.
The worst monsters are to be found in Goya’s series of etchings, “Los Desastres de la Guerra, 1810-23,” (“The Disasters of War”). These monsters are human. So many of Goya’s contemporaries portrayed the events of the Napoleonic Wars as grand, glorious tableaux. In these etchings, Goya shows a harsher truth of naked, dismembered, decapitated and otherwise mutilated corpses nailed to trees or hung from them. He shows women attacked with bayonets. He shows innocents suffering from almost every quarter. This is a fulfilling and useful show–to learn about Goya, to learn about the mysteries of art’s provenance and to learn about the nature of man.
