TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/013089/01308900.067

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.4 KB | 145 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 70

A Despairing Assault on Terminal Evil


The raging Goya was actually a man of the Enlightenment, a
masterly show argues

By Robert Hughes


    No artist has ever been so eloquent about his society, or
seemed so eager to speak beyond the grave to ours, as Francisco
Goya (1746-1828). The idea of a universal painter, capable of
addressing humanity in general rather than this or that time and
culture in particular, may be a pious fiction, but Goya comes
as close to fulfilling it as anyone has ever done.  We see his
face pressed to the glass of our terrible century, mouthing to
make his warnings understood.

    There has never been a complete retrospective of Goya's
work, but the next best thing may  be the exhibition "Goya and
the Spirit of Enlightenment," which was shown at the Prado in
Madrid last fall, opened last week at the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston, and will be seen from May 9 at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York City. Organized by Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez,
director of the Prado, and Eleanor A. Sayre, the eminent Goya
scholar who is curator emeritus of drawings, prints and
photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, the show is a curatorial
masterpiece. Its catalog, with essays by Perez Sanchez and Sayre
as well as other art historians such as Boston University's Fred
Licht, is both a summary of existing Goya scholarship and a
breaking of much new ground. Its theme is explicit: to show
Goya's role in the Spanish Enlightenment, to present him as a
man immersed in the values of liberal thought, to amend his
reputation as a solitary fantasist who did sardonic court
portraits on the side.

    The difficulty with Goya is that for the past hundred years
and more, he has been somewhat obscured by the Goyaesque. Our
idea of him has been so much shaped by the Romantic sensibility
that pervaded Europe after his death that we still like to see
him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his
temperament against his times  -- the first skeptic of art, the
titanic ancestor of surrealism.  "It is when Goya abandons
himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable,"
wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in
making black clouds, filled with vampires and demons, rolling
in the warm atmosphere of a stormy night." The effect of this
has been to pluck Goya out of his own age and put him in our
own.

    There is a case for Goya as the first great modern artist,
because of his fascination with the irrational and his critical
rage against church and class. Indeed, the inscriptions on two
of his prints -- Y no hai remedio (And there is no remedy),
referring to the shooting of bound prisoners in the series
titled Disasters of War, and El sueno de la razon produce
monstruos (The sleep of reason brings forth monsters), the
title page of his Caprichos -- seem as fixed above the wars,
pogroms and massacres of the 20th century as Dante's words
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" were on the adamantine
gates of hell.

    But only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it
seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an
inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in
pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point.
Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of
his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the
betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of
that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to
France, they became a continuous pessimism.  He never idealized
the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho, the 18th century
"mob," a many-headed beast capable of every atrocity and
stupidity as well as sublime moments of collective courage.

    Had he been asked, amid the intellectual and political
convulsions that tore Spain asunder between 1790 and 1815,
"Whose side are you on?", he would have answered, "Reason's."
For Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the gilder's son from Aragon,
did not have the education of a Diderot or a Rousseau, but he
was completely a figure of the Enlightenment; his paintings and
prints, with their obsessive imagery of the conflict of light
and darkness, are perhaps its supreme metaphorical expression
in European art outside of the classically formalized work of
Jacques-Louis David.

    But what they do not possess -- especially not the Caprichos
and the Disasters of War -- is the sense of intellectual decorum
and poise that the well-born, French-reading illuminati of
Madrid preferred the discourse of images to have. Goya was not
good at optimistic allegory. His large painting of the adoption
of the liberal constitution of 1812 -- the constitution as a
maiden in white presented by Father Time while pretty Clio, the
muse of history, takes notes -- is one of his few real pictorial
failures.

    Moral reflection, in Goya's prints and not a few of his
paintings, moves from being a philosophical exercise into a sort
of frenzy, a despairing assault on a world of terminal evil.
Greed, whoring, pederasty, witchcraft and the religious bigotry
that was its mirror image, the brutality of the low and the
myopic arrogance of the high, and above all the limitless
cruelties inflicted in the name of orthodoxy (by the
Inquisition) and political conquest (by the invading French and
their guerrilla opponents): these possess him as they have
possessed no other artist before or since. Seen through his
encyclopedic vision of folly and cruelty, Goya's Spain is more
like Dean Swift's Ireland than Voltaire's Europe.

    Some of the best of the portraits in which Goya celebrated
the nation's distinguished liberals are also in the show. There
is his impressive if slightly servile early image of
Floridablanca, Prime Minister to the liberal Carlos III and, by
1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to
the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the
Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion
groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the
best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon,
pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty
white mass of sprigged muslin, to the level, sagacious gaze of
his friend the art collector Sebastian Martinez, Goya left on
record an extraordinary sequence of human presences.

    Perhaps the most moving of these -- a Spanish equivalent, in
its effort to embody intellect, of David's portrait of the
Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de
Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish
Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office
as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya
shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in
melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his
modesty.

    It cannot be an accident that Goya adapted Jovellanos' pose
for the dreaming figure in The Sleep of Reason. He had no
illusions about the distance between liberal hope and the
possibility of its fulfillment.  But even though present-day
Republicans and their flacks have corrupted the American air
with babblings about the L word, as though liberalism were
something to be ashamed of, Goya's beliefs, so passionately
held, still testify to the liberal conscience as the best hope
of Western man in the past 200 years.