Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Vogue Features 1989 – 2006    
Subject:   20th Century  

The mercurially brilliant Spanish painter, engraver and draughtsman Francesco de Goya y Lucientes (“Goya”, as he has been abbreviated by posterity) has been dead for more than one hundred and eighty years; but his influence continues to grow from beyond the grave, at an almost startling rate. His modern celebrity depends largely on the startling works of his later years: violently strange caprices, scenes of witchcraft, occultery and strange hauntings, populated by bats and a host of other creatures that fly in the night; deadpan, scarily benumbed depictions of war and its attendant horrors, rape, torture and famine; paintings of madness and disturbance, evil represented in all its polymorphous perversity. Most of these images were unsold and unexhibited in the artist’s own time, considered by his contemporaries – and perhaps by the artist himself – to be too troubling, too bizarre and too eccentric for public consumption. But it is precisely Goya’s weirdness and violence that seems to draw so many modern admirers to his work, like moths to a flame.

The most telling index of Goya’s accelerating popularity is the rising tide of books and commentaries inspired by his life and work. In the case of most long-dead painters a new biography might be expected to appear only about once in a generation. But in the case of Goya, no fewer than three have appeared (in English alone) in the last year. Hot on the heels of Julia Blackburn’s entertainingly self-deprecating biography-cum-travelogue, Old Man Goya – an accident-prone attempt at a journey to the heart of his darkness – come  Werner Hofmann’s new study and a long-awaited biography by renowned Australian art critic Robert Hughes, the last weighing in at a substantial 400-plus pages. But Goya also haunts the contemporary imagination in other ways besides, cropping up at the centre of the preoccupations of other, less art-historically minded authors and artists. He is a ghostly presence in Diary, the new novel by Chuck Palahniuk (of Fight Club fame) and his work fascinates the leading characters in Booker-Prize winning novelist Pat Barker’s latest fiction, Double Vision. And earlier this year he was at the centre of a furious controversy aroused by the appearance of a work by perennial Brit Art enfants terribles Jake and Dinos Chapman, entitled Insult to Injury. This consisted of an entire original set of Goya’s most famous engravings, The Disasters of War, which the Chapmans first purchased and then deliberately defaced, embellishing Goya’s scenes of atrocity with their own drawings, doodling clown’s heads and puppy-dog faces and other such self-consciously absurdist graffiti all over his work. It was not the first time that Goya had suffered at the hands of English iconoclasts – the Victorian art critic John Ruskin famously burned a set of his earlier sequence of engravings, the Caprichos, objecting to their presumed immorality – but it was the first time that such an act had been claimed as a form of homage. Reverence for Goya’s achievement, the Chapmans claim, inspired this manically peculiar tribute to his uneasy spirit. Their critics (Robert Hughes among the most vocal of those) remain unconvinced.

So just what is it about Goya and his work that makes him seem so present and pressing and urgent, to so many people living today? There is a clue to part of his modern appeal, perhaps, in one of the scenes in Pat Barker’s new novel. Barker’s heroine, Kate Frobisher, the widow of a war photographer killed in action, finds herself drawn to Goya above all as a compassionate witness to human misery. Standing before one of his paintings of shackled, hunched prisoners, “every tone, every line expressing despair”, she finds herself wondering whether “any photograph, however great, could prompt the same complexity of response as this painting. Photographs shock, terrify, arouse compassion, anger, even drive people to take action, but does the photograph of an atrocity ever inspire hope? This did. These men have no hope, no past, no future, and yet, seeing this scene through Goya’s steady and compassionate eye, it was impossible to feel anything as simple or as trivial as despair.”

This passage suggests something of the complexity of Goya’s appeal to the modern sensibility, which finds in him both a prophet of its own views and a reproof to its own artistic responses. On the one hand he is widely seen as the father of the modern, unflinching, eyewitness approach to war and its horrors. As Robert Hughes points out, “before Goya, no artist had taken on such subject matter at such depth. Battles had been formal affairs, with idealised heroes hacking away at one another but dying formal and even graceful deaths… Not the mindless and terrible slaughter that, Goya wanted us all to know, is the reality of war, ancient or modern.” Yet at the same time, Goya’s work, which is drawn, painted or etched rather than relayed through the impersonal mechanism of the camera’s eye, awakens nostalgia for a time when we were not bombarded by media images of man’s inhumanity to man – and when the act of visual witnessing was still something personal, handcrafted even, coloured quite literally by the human feelings of the artist. The photographer might have taken on Goya’s mantle, Hughes believes, but like Pat Barker’s heroine he too feels something has been lost in the process: “the fact that at the end of the twentieth century we had (as we still have) no person who could successfully make eloquent and morally urgent  art out of human disaster tells us something about the shrivelled expectations of what art can do.”

But if Goya reminds us of something that we feel we have lost, or mislaid, his work also feeds very directly into the modern obsession with self-revelation, confession and psychological truth-telling. His more fantastical images, particularly the Caprichos and the weird, apparently deeply disturbed pictures of his very last years, resemble a Pandora’s box of fantasy unchained. Looking at them is almost like watching some strange new example of reality television, frame by frame – seeing someone bare their soul, in all its incomparable oddity, in one image after another. This other Goya, not Goya the witness of exterior events, but Goya the witness of the workings of his own mind, also seems a prophetic figure. He is in a sense the first Surrealist, and it might be argued that Surrealism in the broadest sense – with its penchant for weird, jarring, psychologically self-revelatory imagery – is still the dominant idiom of most contemporary art.

The powerful confessional appeal of Goya’s art has its mirror in modern writing about him, which is itself unusually confessional and personal in tone – as if Goya’s own extreme openness to the images in his mind unleashes something similar in those who are attracted to him. Perhaps this is why modern Goyaphiles seem curiously compelled to tell us almost as much (perhaps more, even) about themselves than about him. Julia Blackburn is exemplary of the trend, introducing her book on Goya as an unashamedly obsessive enterprise, a long-delayed attempt to exorcise the fascination she had felt for his art since a furtive childhood encounter with a paperback edition of his etchings: “I used to steal this book from its shelf and take it quietly to my room. I would stare at the cover and try to understand what secret things had just happened and were about to happen here. I would open the pages so that the other dark and interrupted stories could play before my eyes. People becoming animals and animals becoming people. Masks to hide a face and faces turning into masks. Leathery old skin next to soft young skin and a thick blackness on all sides out of which monsters could emerge like rabbits pouring in an endless stream from a magician’s hat… Goya seemed to belong to me like a member of my own family, distant, but sharing the same blood…”

Robert Hughes’s book is written in a very different tone from Blackburn’s, less antically playful, more eminently art critical, but he too makes it clear that his work is the fruit of a long-gestated personal obsession. He confesses to having been almost terminally blocked, in his attempts to write his biography of Goya, until he himself was visited by disaster and personal tragedy – the death of his only son, Danton Hughes, at a sadly young age, and the experience of being involved in a near-fatal crash on a desert highway in Western Australia in 1999, which put the writer in a coma and required six months of hospitalisation and a dozen operations before he was back on the path to recovery. Hughes feels that the trauma of those experiences released him at last to write his book. “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.”

Ultimately it is debatable whether anybody, whether they have suffered or not, can “fully know” Goya, given that his greatest work is so profoundly ambiguous, and given that he himself left so few tangible clues – only a handful of letters, some scattered remarks, a few scraps of text – about his own true thoughts and intentions. If we really could get as close to Goya as he sometimes seem to persuade us is possible, if we really could explain away the weirdness of his imagination and the fascination of his art – then his mystery would be solved and he might actually seem less compelling than he does. Reading the recent rash of books about him is in some ways a rather unsettling experience, because the fundamental enigma at the heart of what he did, and what he was, remains curiously untouched by historical research.

Hughes’s biography, the most substantial of the new accounts of the artist’s life and times, is in many respects an exemplary work of collation, putting together the known facts about Goya and his work and knitting them into a masterly (albeit sometimes rather schoolmasterly) account of Spain during the period of the Enlightenment, the rule of the Bourbon monarchy, the Napoleonic interregnum and the Bourbon restoration. The author provides a useful set of correctives to the rather simple notion of Goya as the first “outsider” artist – the view that sees him as the first modernist, the first anti-establishment sceptic to translate a profound sense of disillusionment with monarchy, with established religion, with received ideas of any stamp, into compelling visual art. He reminds us that he was a bit of a snob, as well as a highly fashion-conscious man, who also loved the traditional Spanish macho pursuits of bullfighting and hunting (elements which all coincide in Goya’s wonderful self-portrait in matador costume, which seems to compare the act of confronting the empty canvas with that of facing the bull). But none the less Goya himself seems to recede further from view, rather than come into sharper focus, as the biography unfolds. The attempt to put him so thoroughly in context only enhances his elusiveness and his mystery.

The hardest problems in interpreting Goya are posed by the work of his later years. In engraving, that means the Caprichos, the Disasters of War and the Disparates (literally, crazinesses). In painting, it means the “cabinet pictures” showing lunatics stranded in reverberant prison-like asylums and other unusual subjects of the artist’s own choice; and it means the so-called “Black Paintings” with which Goya decorated the walls of the house he shared in old age with his housekeeper-cum-mistress: perplexingly dark depictions of fighting men, screaming crowds and yowling animals; the famous image of a cannibalistic Saturn biting bloody gobbets from the bodies of his own children. Goya was the first artist to create such a mass of imagery primarily at the urgings of his own temperament and needs but he left almost nothing in the way of explanations for it. The unleashing of this strain of fantasy seems to have coincided with the sudden illness that struck him down in 1793, leaving him deaf as a post for the rest of his life. But precisely how Goya’s deafness shaped his art remains, like so much else, a mystery.

It has often been argued that Goya’s later work stems from his disillusionment with the political and social realities of Spain – the disappointment of the hopes of its intellectually enlightened minority (with whom the artist had close links), and the gradual darkening of the country’s horizons during the bleak years of Napoleonic invasion and occupation. According to this interpretation, to which Hughes himself seems partly if not totally to subscribe, Goya is the first truly significant artist of the modern, politically liberal conscience. But it is very hard to make such an argument stick to his wilder fantasies, which seem to spiral off into realms of mental anguish (or playfulness) very far removed from the expression of conscience, or morality, or almost any firm and fixed system of values. And even in the case of his most overtly “political” work, the Disasters of War, Goya’s images have a way of evading such capsule definition. It is often difficult, peering into the murk of his landscape of atrocities, with its rapes and summary executions, its tortures and degradations, to distinguish who is doing what to whom, to sort out oppressor from oppressed. It is also often hard to be sure about the artist’s own attitudes to the violence that he depicts.

This eloquent ambiguity, say the Chapman brothers, is what first drew them to Goya. “He’s impossible to pin down, and one of the great examples of the basic uncontrollability of art,” says Jake Chapman. “I can imagine that he maybe began certain images from a sense of moral outrage, but if you look at the images that come out of that supposed ambition, well they’re madly in excess of it – they’re morbid, spectacular, voyeuristic. They’re as dodgy as fuck, really. When you look at Great Deeds Against the Dead, for example, which is an image that we have used a lot in our reworkings of Goya, this image of three mutilated bodies hung on a tree, he seems to have become fascinated by the mutilation and castration that he depicts – almost to revel in it, as if he’s become part of the energy that led to these acts. Then again in other images other things come through. You can’t say Goya is this or that because he contains so much, it’s as if he doesn’t allow himself to have any values in the end because he’s always seeing through himself.” Scribbling all over his work, defacing it with their own deliberate fatuities, is perhaps the Chapmans’ attempt to take a Goyaesque approach of irreverence to Goya’s own work, to laugh in the dark, as he himself might have done, at the idea of him as a monument to anything as grand as The Liberal Conscience.

Goya continues to fascinate not just because his art is so powerful, and so powerful in so many different ways, but because it remains unfathomable - and therefore perpetually intriguing. At the end of his book Robert Hughes recounts the story that some years after Goya had died, at the grand old age of 83, in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux, the decision was taken to exhume his body in order to rebury it with greater honours. This event that might be said to mark the start of the rehabilitation of his reputation from eccentric to genius. But when his body was dug up, it seems that his head had quite disappeared. This seems a ghoulishly appropriate twist to the tale, a darkly Goyaesque joke played on posterity. Although we might sometimes fancy we know him, in the end we can’t truly get inside his head. We don’t even know where his head is.