Date: 10-12-1991
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   18th Century  20th Century      

The image is striking, but so simple, composed from so little, that it draws you in. You want to get close, almost to hold a magnifying glass to it, because it seems incomprehensible that there isn't more to the marks of which it consists. What do you see? A void, interrupted by gathered clusters of lines. The lines are black, the void simply the colour of the paper on which the image appears (cream), made darker or lighter in places by dilute washes of grey.

The artist's patient dedication to a process is apparent throughout, although it is a dedication of a kind that seems hard to define. Focusing on those areas where the lines in the image are most thickly concentrated, where, say, a sequence of horizontal marks has been set down most insistently, they seem entirely abstract: a gesture has been repeated many times (each time slightly differently) - not, it would appear, obsessively, but almost absent- mindedly, as if doodled.

Pull back from close focus, however, and you note the figurative precision that has resulted from the sum of all these tiny repeated marks. They combine to create a picture, which is easily read. A toreador, swathed in his cloak so that he cannot move his arms, dodges a charging bull; an audience watches.

The 14th plate in Goya's series of prints, the Tauromaquia, is a moving, desolate image. It is more than a picture of a man in combat with a bull. It looks dreamed, and carries with it that sense of undeclared meaning which dreams often possess. The image's effectiveness derives, no doubt, from Goya's mastery of printmaking - but that takes us little closer to understanding how and why it works.

Goya's Tauromaquia (the whole sequence can currently be seen at the Blason Gallery) was first advertised for sale in October 1816 as ''Thirty-three prints which represent different suertes manoeuvres and positions in the art of bullfighting.'' This description was probably written by Goya's partner, who may have wanted to make his friend's prints sound more saleable, more popular and appealing than they really were (in fact the Tauromaquia sold very badly). Goya stuck to a vaguely historical scheme but, in reality, the Tauromaquia is not historical, or picturesque, or even particularly informative about bullfighting.

Looking at Goya's sequence unfold, you witness that process of artistic osmosis by which an image becomes a symbol, and by which a series of such images becomes a vision. The Tauromaquia's mystery inheres in how such grandeur of intent could come to be realised in the form of such small, dark things.

It may be that the strength of these prints lies as much in what Goya found in the etching medium, and its possibilities, as in what he wished to express. What he had to say seems evident now. The Tauromaquia presents a sequence of strangely tawdry images, of butchery, of the violent deaths of both animals and men. The bullfight becomes an emblem: it is a game whose forms (the bare arena, the endless deaths enacted according to precise but ultimately meaningless regulations) are figures for life itself as Goya saw it. Everything you see, here, seems freighted with allegorical intent. Everything, in other words, is a sign for something else. And the print, as Goya realised, suited his purposes exactly.

The print, more than the painting, demands a mental act on the part of the viewer close to that suspension of disbelief required of the audience in the theatre. It demands (for example) that the viewer be prepared to accept that a mass of scratched lines be read as a shadow when, rationally, the viewer knows that real shadows look very little like this. The etching is also without that whole seductive apparatus of illusion which colour brings with it.

Images, of course, are never simply likenesses of things; they are semantic constructions, employing a fantastic variety of complicated visual codes, more or less deceptively, in the service of their illusions. While the etching's mimetic codes are, perhaps, no more coded than their equivalents in painting, they are more honestly presented as codes for things. The print requires a willing acceptance of what are, absolutely evidently, conventional representations of reality. While the drawing, with its tradition as a preparatory medium, has always had an alibi for the imperfectness of its illusions, this is not true of the print - a finished work in its own right.

Part of Goya's audacity in the Tauromaquia lies in the sheer perfunctoriness with which he flourishes his use of visual codes as codes: that void will do for the ground, that mass of curling lines for the haunches of a bull. This may have been strategic: a way of suggesting that the same act of viewer collaboration which is necessary to translate his marks into images is also required to appreciate their meanings. What look, seen up close, like arbitrary marks, are resolved into pictures of bullfights; what look, at first sight, like pictures of bullfights, are resolved into a message, profound and disturbing, about mankind. Everything, indeed, is a sign for something else.

But Goya's use of different mimetic conventions within the same print also creates an unsettling, dream-like effect. In the last print of the series, which records the death of the toreador Pepe Millo, it heightens the isolation of the dying man: he is separated from those who watch him, or who begin to run towards him, not only by the void space of the arena, but also by the fact of his being rendered in a different register from them. Goya has chosen to signify the toreador's body using a mixture of hatched marks and white reserve, so that he seems modelled by the light that falls upon him; the bull that gores him, by contrast, is modelled in thick black lines, so densely gathered that the animal appears virtually as a silhouette. Goya's conventions seem freighted with symbolic intent: the toreador's light is, literally, extinguished by the darkness of the bull; he becomes an image of man overwhelmed by inchoate, brutal forces, although Goya also manages to suggest that this overwhelming is, also, a communion of sorts, an obscene marriage.

The very virtuosity of Goya's prints, their slippage from one register to another, might be said to dramatise his tragic sense of life. Things, and people, are sundered from one another. History is a broken chain of events, charged with pathos perhaps, but without logic. Goya's genius lay in his ability to make a few lines say all this.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) is highly regarded as a painter of exquisite, faintly melancholic still- lifes but his etchings, at the Tate, are less familiar than they deserve to be. Morandi had Goya's mastery of line, but he turned it to very different ends. Nicknamed ''Il monaco'', the monk, he seems to have spent his career cultivating an art designed, precisely, not to refer to the world at large. His images, generally of bottles and other containers meticulously arranged on tabletops in the dusty flat in Bologna where he spent most of his life, may constitute a reproof to the very idea of art as a vehicle for symbolic meanings. Italian modernism has a reputation for hysteria; but always there was Morandi, the grand contemplative, the stubborn ascetic, asserting his own vision of things.

Observation, and its translation into the language of etching, is seemingly all that counts here. The bottles and jugs look as though they have been stared at for an eternity, and as if an eternity of craft has gone into their simulation on the copper plate. The range of tones Morandi derives from his technique (a kind of arachnoid version of cross- hatching, a web of lines that look spun as much as engraved) is almost unparalleled in the history of printmaking. But even in this art of impeccable empiricism, you come up against the hard paradox of the medium: even as you marvel at the subtlety of Morandi's language, there is no escaping its status as a code for the apparitions of sight.

And, again, it seems important that the codes are multiple. Morandi varies the thickness and depth of his line and as he does so the precision with which the objects in his field of vision are registered increases or diminishes. What this variability seems to imply, cumulatively, is the limitation of any one way of looking at things. At times, at their most fractured and crystalline, these prints can look like analogies for insect vision; or, as the lines cluster together, they can suggest the vagueness of looking with eyes half-closed; or they may evoke the close-focused clarity of Dutch still-life painting. For every way of looking, there is a different code.

A sort of pathos enters in here, although it is very different from that of Goya. Morandi's theme is the truancy of vision. His prints are, on one level, literalisations of the idea that to see is to construct - of the idea that we see everything through the screens imposed by mental habit and by the biology of the human eye. Art cannot mirror the world, it can only encode it - a theme which, Morandi recognised, the print is well adapted to express.