Goya always signed himself “Goya,
Pinturo” - “Goya, Painter”. And well he should have; he was the Painter to the
King. In his official capacity he painted many portraits of the royal family,
the members of the court and their families, members of the government and
their families, and members of the church. He painted cartoons for tapestries
to decorate the royal residences, and on his own he painted still lifes and
historic paintings expressing his rage at the times in which he lived. Despite
this great output I have always known him primarily as a print maker an
activity that seems to have occupied a large part of his late years. And indeed
the prints, the aquatint prints, are magnificent…no artist ever loved black so
much or worked so well with it as did Goya. He made the claim that he could
make you see any color in a black and white drawing.
One
reason for this distorted image, I suspect, is that one doesn’t see many Goya
Paintings here in the USA .
Having lived in NYC for over 50 years I am of course familiar with The Duchess
of Alba from the Hispanic Society. I have seen some of the portraits at the
Metropolitan Museum but which ones I could not say, I have seen the Self
Portrait with Dr. Arrieta in Minneapolis, and at the McNay Museum in San
Antonio I saw the remnant of a painting from the Meadows Museum at SMU
featuring eight or so students of a professor (since cut away) and considered
it probably the greatest painting ever depicting the adolescent male. I went to
Houston a few
years ago to see paintings from The Prado and while I did see many paintings I
only remember seeing Goya prints. (They were superb!).In the last few years I
have visited over 100 American art museums and where it concerns Goya the
results are always the same.
Another reason may be that there don’t
seem to be many iconic masterpieces …The Third of May and the Naked Maja come
to mind …but a greater number of iconic images from prints come to mind more than
from paintings. I did see The Last Works of Goya at the Frick Museum
Why, then, do the paintings not
stand out, why do so few of them resonate or become iconic in the mind? In a
way I suppose it is because so many of them are portraits of persons long gone
and of no interest to us nowadays. They were Spanish persons and I suspect that
Americans know less about Spain
than of any other European country. (And at that they probably know more than
they want to know.) These are certainly really fine portraits …Maria Antonia
Gonzaga, Antonia Zarate y Aguirre, and Maria Luisa de Borbon and the two old
ladies, “Time (Old Women)”, well past both their prime and their bedtime! In all of his work the execution of the
paintings is remarkable: while they have the surface appearance of paintings
and a lively energy that results from the way of their having been made, there
is at the same time no sense that these had actually been “made”…so natural and
right do they appear to be. What the painter has done is so well done as to
escape our notice.
This is not to say that they are so
photographically correct. Quite the contrary. Few painters are as honestly “painterly”
as is Goya …a brush loaded with dark chrome yellow dragged over the subject’s
chest suggests a gold chain, a brush load of vermillion reads, even up close,
as a red ribbon. Eyes thickly outlined in vermillion read as perfectly natural.
This is especially true of the still
lifes: the subjects here are so “wrought” in paint, with little or no regard
for the finess of the setting in which they will be exhibited. They are what
they are: and they are so indicative of the artist’s state of mind when they
were made as to suggest that they were the inspiration for the much later
Expressionist movement. Compare these to the two meticulous tromp l’oeil
Melendez still life paintings in the corridor outside the Scarf Center
I think it might be that the
paintings, the portraits, made for clients, are, aside from their masterly
execution, nothing more than great portraits…and unfortunately the world is
full of great portraits. But the prints and the drawings …and Goya is the only
artist whose prints I like better than his drawings …the prints are engrossing
because of their finish and because they tell a story. Picasso explained why he
made so many etchings by saying that he was always telling himself stories.
Goya seems to have been telling us stories and they were stories that had to be
told.
What the exhibition does present beautifully
but which is hardly commented on is the opportunity to address a very common
problem in painting: what is fine art painting and what is mere decoration?
There are many oil sketches in the exhibition and many cartoons (full size) to
be turned into tapestries. Many of the tapestries are included. In these the
world is orderly and calm and The People presented as if living an Edenic Idle.
Hanging between them are the aforementioned still lifes with dead rabbits and
dead fish looking very, very dead indeed. Clearly the tapestries with their
superficial present, their happy people, their lively colors, and their sunny
days are nothing more than decoration. But what is it about the dead fish and
dead rabbits that elevates those paintings to the realm of fine art. Looking
from one to the other, from still life to sketch to cartoon to tapestry and
back again, what can we learn from this wonderful juxtaposition of paintings
about the art of painting? It’s all right there in front of us. And what other
paintings in this exhibition achieve the same stature?
As for the curators’ perspective,
Order and Disorder, I can understand it as an attempt to make Goya more
accessible, to make him more popular with the general public. But I suspect it
will be unsuccessful. Goya lived in such harsh and troubled times …The Spanish
Inquisition, the Peninsular War, the swing of the political pendulum because of
changes of regime, and amongst such a wide array of public faces …royalty, aristocrats, soldiers, merchants,
commoners, peasants, harlots, and madmen… and he had such personal losses
during his lifetime …his many children, his wife, his hearing, his health… that
the choice is a logical one but without much resonance here. Didn’t we know all
this before we arrived at the museum? Was
not enough made of it to make the theme seem newly insightful?
Or
is there something too very Spanish in this work, let’s say the ever present
Spanish Tragedy aspect of life’s peccadilloes, that we also get in abundance
with Picasso, that puts the appeal of the work beyond our desire for
comprehension because of our cultural prejudices.
Despite
the events of the day or of the prolonged events of many days Goya was a person
in the king’s employ who had a job to do and who got the job done come what
may. He left a huge body of work, truly excellent work, work that he loved
making, and he worked until the very end. That body of work puts him in the
company of Shakespeare …he had a profound experience of life and of all those
around him. It seems that to Goya it was beside the point if life was orderly
or chaotic; there was work to do and he got it done. He went with the flow…and
shared with us all his experiences in perfectly comprehensible feelings and
images.
If
our American lack of appreciation for his achievement is a fault, the fault
lies not in the stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.
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