Much of our culture is tied to a straight jacket of our own fashion: in a monotonous and uniform moralism, more concerned with saying the right thing than saying something right. I believe it is rooted in fear of our own depths and what we would have to admit about ourselves if we really risked looking inside. What if you let your imagination wander? What if you just drew or wrote without fear of making mistakes? What if you found out you are a great artist, but you yourself are not so perfect?
“Goya’s Graphic Imagination,” which opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers a vital tonic of an artist with (in our eyes) all the right political commitments: horrified by violence, revolted by undeserved privileges, defending freedom and knowledge and rights for all. These commitments, however, were worthless in themselves – nothing without the free play of your unconscious, whose shadows cast all your liberal principles into doubt. Goya allowed these doubts to take any form in drawings and series of prints, especially the ironic “Caprichos” and the ferocious “Disasters of War”. Here, in the privacy of the studio, an Enlightenment faith in human progress fell into uncertainty, terror and bewilderment.
Francisco Goya (1746-1828) served as an official artist for the Spanish crown and painted the Bourbon royalty within the conventions of the time. His mature career, however, coincided with the bloodiest years in the country’s history: the Peninsular War (1807-14), pitting Napoleon’s occupying forces against the armies of three countries and bands of guerrillas. Spain would regain its independence, but under a capricious tyrant who presided over a campaign of censorship and arrests. Goya would leave the court, cover the walls of his country house with the tormented Pinturas Negras (now in the Prado de Madrid) and die in exile. The “Disasters” – his horror show of 82 engravings of the Napoleonic occupation, the greatest anti-war art ever made – remained unpublished for another three decades.
Although it arrives with a considerable catalog, “Goya’s Graphic Imagination” is an exhibition aimed at beginners. I would do a bigger show, with the whole series of “Caprichos” and “Desastres”. (The Met has complete sets of each printed series.) However, when it comes to introductions, this is the basis of Gibraltar. Met curator Mark McDonald shared Goya’s drawings and impressions in a judicious display of 100 odd sheets, suspended with plenty of air. Most importantly, it has no brought from the painting wing Goya’s portraits of the Spanish aristocracy. The paintings are daytime by Goya. Here we come to the province of the night.
We transformed Goya into a useful archetype: the liberal who speaks the truth in an autocratic Spain, defender of reason, artist of the Enlightenment. In fact, he was those things. Still, Goya saw, and portrayed with incomparable vision, that error or evil can never be purified entirely, neither of its society nor of its soul. A world of perfect justice will always be a mirage. Tyrants, idiots, swindlers, conspiracy theorists: they will always be with us. And deep in the chambers of our hearts – untouched by our rational skepticism, our faith in our own righteousness – there remains an inescapable darkness.
Goya was born in the provinces and, for years after his arrival in Madrid, he barely managed to survive. At 29, he got a daily job drawing cartoons for the king’s tapestry factory – but, simultaneously, for Madrid’s growing print market, he made etchings after Diego Velázquez’s vigorous paintings a century earlier. Goya copied the older artist’s drunken horsemen and revelers, but his eyes were already focused on the strange, the stubborn, the disconcerting. His engraving of a court dwarf, a fool of King Philip IV, retains the humanity and sympathy of Velázquez’s original painting. But look at the dense, dark crevices at the bottom. You have a foretaste of the artist that would redirect your predecessor’s naturalism to the realm of dreams.
To err is human. At the turn of the century, Goya published “Los Caprichos” (or “Os Caprichos”), a suite of satirical and fantastic prints whose velvety and haunted shades of gray show his mastery of a new technique: aquatint printing. Their ironic humor almost always comes with a sinister tone, augmented by misfit titles that make them even more enigmatic. Look at the children crying and the bogeyman their mother allows to scare them. Rue, the disgrace of two peasants, oppressed by ungrateful beasts. (Are donkeys the nobility? The clergy? Real donkeys?) While his soft paintings flattered the counts and duchesses of Madrid, in his notebooks and prints he represented Spain as a nest of madness.
The most famous of the “Caprichos” portrays a man sunk at his desk. He is exhausted, to the point of losing consciousness, and is being chased by a black cat, a lynx and bats and wrinkled owls. Written on the table is an Illuminist prime time slogan: When reason goes, superstition thrives. This exhibition, however, also brings Goya’s first drawing to this key work, borrowed by Prado – and here you can see, floating above the sleeping man, the unmistakable face of the artist himself. (At this point, he had gone deaf, the result of some undiagnosed illness that almost killed him.) Even the great liberal is not right. Your knowledge and your prejudices cannot be separated so easily. And to create a lasting work of art, you’ll have to face the monsters.
Around 1800, with the “Caprichos” behind him, Goya began to draw the cruelties of the Inquisition, which the Spanish liberals were struggling to abolish. The drawings ended up filling almost an entire album. They depict Jews, Protestants, scientists, freethinkers, single women and, in this case, a foreigner – with his back to us, but highlighted in darker ink against the washed browns of the court. The accused (who, the title suggests, does not speak Spanish) wears two robes of shame: the Crown, or conical hat, and the Sanbenito, a bib enrolled with his alleged crimes. Prisoners, victims of torture, the insane: Goya’s prints and drawings repeatedly sympathize with his situation and expose those who hide his corruption in justice. Beware of reason’s sleep; beware, too, the merchants of morality.
Goya was not a revolutionary. He remained a court painter when Napoleon planted his brother on the Spanish throne in 1808. But his heart was with resistance, and in the “Disasters”, recorded in particular, he saw an endless tide of carnage. The Met show includes a dozen of these strenuous leaves, including this one: a Spanish rebel, fallen and blindfolded, faces an indistinct death like his comrade on the ground. (Note the three rifle barrels on the right edge, detached from the severely etched sky.) Unlike his heroic “The Third of May”, his mural of an execution in Madrid, the “Disasters” have no martyrs. The dead are ragged, dishonored, mutilated, hungry. The soul is something forgotten, and we are left only with the body in pain.
Now, “The Disasters of War” are presented as images of universal suffering, still terribly relevant. But Goya was preparing a private war, waged against his country by the most powerful army in Europe. He was still working on the series when the reactionary Fernando VII returned to the throne and re-established absolute monarchy and church supremacy. In this allegory, the radiant figure of Truth heads for a shallow grave. In the shadows, a bishop and two monks rush to bury her. To fuel a war, you need a diet of lies.
The year 1814 arrives and Napoleon abdicates. Finally, the war is over. Goya turns to a subject only superficially lighter: bullfighting. He drew triumphant killers and attacking beasts, but the biggest in this “Tauromaquia” series is the worst to see and portrays a true catastrophe of a bull jumping in the stands. (Goya may have witnessed this.) Spectators crowd the initial drawing, but when he records it, Goya left three-quarters of the image blank, to highlight the pile of corpses. The bull injured a politician: another impale. It is difficult not to see these bullfights work as a coda for “Disasters”, an allegory of a country full of fear.
He was increasingly indignant at the repression and censorship of the Bourbon Restoration, even while receiving his salary to paint a king he hated. In those dark years, Goya began – although it never ended – an enigmatic series now known as “Los Disparates” or “The Follies”. Larger than “Caprices” and “Disasters”, darker, more frightening, these impressions of disorder and confusion have the appearance of semi-permanent nightmares. (He also finished the incredible “Sitting Giant”, his strangeness accentuated by the gray modulated background he produced using water-ink.) These five men in bird costumes, flapping their wings like crazy to remain in the air, are icons of human progress or human illusions: Who can say which, and if they are the same?
Finally, he can’t take it anymore. In 1824, under the pretext of health treatments, Goya obtained permission to leave Spain. Exiled in Bordeaux, he draws a street artist on his latest album, sitting upside down on a fragile table. Scattered lines of black crayons evoke the slight kick of his legs. Someone watches in a hastily sketched shadow. The one-word title, “Telegraph”, is a nuisance, but it suggests that Goya, at 78, has not given up on better things in the future. We are acrobats, leveling up through training and practice. We do great things. We are always about to fall.
Goya’s graphic imagination
Until May 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org; Advance tickets required.