Goya and the Art of Survival – The New Yorker

A good time for thinking about Francisco Goya is while the world stumbles. Crisis becomes him. “Goya: A Portrait of the Artist” (Princeton), a biography by the American art historian Janis A. Tomlinson, affords me a newly informed chance to reflect on an artist of enigmatic mind and permanent significance. In the tumultuous Spain of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya worked for three kings—the reformist Carlos III, the dithering Carlos IV, and the reactionary Ferdinand VII—and then for social circles of the French usurper Joseph Bonaparte; for an overoptimistic three-year constitutional government; and, finally, woe to the land, for Ferdinand VII again. Goya kept landing on his feet as cohorts of his friends and patrons toppled from official favor, or worse. His increasingly naturalistic portraits—vivid in characterization and unconventionally flattering, with all but breathable tones and tints in dusky chiaroscuro ignited at times by clarion hues—sustained him at court despite the intrigues of rivals and schemers. It could be argued that the deafness that befell him in 1793 (possibly from lead poisoning), when he was forty-seven, and continued until his death, at eighty-two, in 1828, provided him some diplomatic padding, as he managed his interests with politic correspondence and the support of well-situated admirers. He was firmly prestigious by the time he took to making works of lacerating wit and escalating, ultimately horrific intensity. A stormy petrel skimming waves of change that swamped others, he introduced to history a model of the star artist as an anomalous spirit equipped with social acumen and licensed by genius. His nearest avatar is Andy Warhol.

Tomlinson’s dryly written accounts of the Spanish court are no Iberian “Wolf Hall,” but they feature arresting characters, such as the raffish antihero Manuel de Godoy. A twenty-four-year-old military officer when he was elevated by Carlos IV, in 1791, Godoy came to manage Spain’s crazily shifting alliances in a war with Revolutionary France and, when that went badly, one in league with France against Portugal, with Godoy promised a personal stake in the spoils. Big mistake. In 1808, Napoleon occupied Spain, made his brother the King, and discarded Godoy, who barely escaped the wrath of his betrayed fellow-citizens. (They made do with destroying nearly every available trace of him, such as portraits by Goya.) Rumored to be the lover of Carlos IV’s queen, María Luisa, Godoy may have commissioned, or at least incited, Goya to paint his only erotic nude, “The Naked Maja” (1797-1800). (Majas and their male equivalent, majos, were flamboyantly cheeky lower-class dandies.) The Inquisition impounded “The Naked Maja” and its clothed counterpart in 1813 and posed stern questions to Goya, which he seems to have successfully ignored. There can be a lucky charm, during treacherous times, in being really, really good at something. Imperilled after the Bourbon restoration of 1814 by a purge of collaborators with the French regime, Goya redeemed a painting that he had made of Joseph I by substituting, or having someone else do so, the face of Ferdinand VII. He was cleared. The country’s cultural establishment couldn’t spare Goya’s gifts, and arrivistes clamored to be portrayed by him.

Tomlinson addresses, with refreshing clarity, a chronic question of just how independent, not to say subversive, Goya was of the powers that employed him. She debunks a common oversimplification of Goya as a committed post-Enlightenment liberal. He was more complicated than that, and ineluctably strange. Uncanniness had to be part of his magnetism. There’s often something haunted or haunting in his portraits and in some of his religious and allegorical commissions, though not in the antic cartoons of Spanish life that were destined for tapestries, an irksome duty of his early career. It’s as if he always had something up his sleeve. That impression affected me strongly on a visit to the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, last year. Looking at his works can rouse the sensation of an alarm going off nearby, but you can neither understand the reason for its activation nor find it to turn it off.

Goya didn’t emerge as a master through a neat evolution of period styles. He can seem at once decadent and innovative, with some lingering tropes of the late Baroque and the rococo and the brassiness of the then fashionable neoclassicism along with utterly original freshets of Romanticism. Spanish art had become provincial. The country’s leading art educator was the mediocre German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who promulgated a sort of housebroken neoclassicism. In 1778, when Goya was thirty-two, he turned to Spain’s own lapsed glories, with a set of etched copies of seventeenth-century masterpieces by Velázquez, skeletonizing the art of the painterly demiurge in incised line with washes of aquatint. The hair-shirt exercise puzzled some of his fellow-artists. The renderings are spot on, but their reductions of color to line and shading are like a broadcast of the “Hallelujah” Chorus over a kid’s walkie-talkie. I think that Goya sought gains for painting through grasping what had been lost to it. No longer equal to illusions of reality, paintings were fated to become objects, real in themselves, of a certain kind. Rather than forge a signature style, Goya practiced a temperamental abnegation of anything usual. This kept—and keeps—him impossible to pin down: a deserter from the marching ranks of the Old Masters, forever on the loose.

An homage to Velázquez’s touchstone “Las Meninas” (1656) figures in perhaps the most beautiful group portrait ever painted. “The Family of Carlos IV” (1800-01) stands out in Goya’s portraiture as a one-off masterpiece on purpose, affirming for good the justice of his recent elevation to the first court painter. In the background, the artist gazes out from behind, it would appear, the very canvas that we behold, suggesting that he’s working from a mirrored view of the scene—an unlikely conceit that seems meant mainly, and wittily, to recall Velázquez’s similar self-portrayal in “Las Meninas.” (The jape amounts to a proto-modernist instance of art about art.) Thirteen lavishly clad persons, from the fifty-two-year-old monarch to a babe in arms, share a room awash in the softly shadowed, caressing light of a golden afternoon. They assume informal attitudes of everyday aplomb, except for a woman who looks away as if distracted in the pictured instant. She represents a princess of Naples who was the bride-to-be of Carlos IV’s son Ferdinand VII; her looks weren’t yet known in Spain. She faces a muddy painting, on the room’s back wall, that made reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Some modern commentary detects, in her Lot’s-wife posture, a critical stab at the corruption of the monarchic state—as if no one at the time could have noticed it. And doesn’t Carlos IV look clownish? Your call. The more germane point is that he looks like—because he is—the King.

The tacit sensibilities of a given era tend to elude subsequent generations. I suspect that Goya’s sophisticated contemporaries found his occasional mischief chic. Tomlinson writes that to assign personal perspectives to Goya’s work for the court “is to impose values that are not of his time”—a familiar defense of historical figures who are judged harshly by present-day standards, but apt, as well, for an ill-fitting halo. When we presume agreement with Goya’s supposed politics, we drift afield of his extraordinary complexity. What it was like to be him crouches behind an ineffaceable question mark.

The lower-middle-class son of a gilder, Goya studied painting in his beloved home town of Zaragoza, northeast of Madrid. When he was twenty-three, he went to Italy and spent two knockabout years of which little is known. (But he won second prize in a competition in Parma for a painting of Hannibal crossing the Alps.) In 1773, he married María Josefa Bayeu, a sister of his elder Zaragozan Francisco Bayeu, who was then a court painter to Carlos III. Among several miscarriages, Goya and Josefa had seven children, only one of whom survived childhood. Does that concatenation of tragedies help explain the radical pessimism of Goya’s later works—most shocking, the eighty-two engravings assembled as “The Disasters of War” (1810-20), which he made in reaction to the Peninsular War of Bourbon Spain, Portugal, and guerrilla bands, backed by Great Britain, against the French occupation? Other psychic scars may be adduced: Goya’s witnessing of public executions by garrote and, in the case of a woman whose face he remembered and drew decades later, a burning at the stake. And sights of inmates from Zaragoza’s mental asylum stayed with him. But any traumas hung fire as he launched himself on a professional career with seething ambition, adapting Bayeu’s rococo manner, but with a faster, more spontaneous hand.

In 1772, for his first major commission, Goya frescoed a dome in the immense, new Zaragoza basilica of El Pilar. His drawings for the design displeased the local cognoscenti, leading to a suggestion that Bayeu should touch them up in the correct fashion. Having made grudging modifications, Goya completed the project on his own, but he was summarily dismissed from further work at El Pilar. The affront initiated five years of bad blood between the brothers-in-law. (Tomlinson reports that today a visitor to El Pilar can behold the Goya ceiling in full illumination, while a nearby one by Bayeu hovers in gloom.) The humiliation, staining Goya’s reputation in his home town, nettled him for most of his life, even after Zaragoza was obliged to embrace him as an illustrious native son. Nothing like it happened again.

What most dramatically did happen, starting in 1793 with the small paintings on tin that he made (and found a market for) of what Tomlinson summarizes as “natural disasters, cannibals, madhouses, and murder,” was the emergence of a blistering negativity. The works coincided with spells of freely admitted anxiety and depression—“at times raving in a mood that I myself cannot stand,” Goya wrote to a friend—but there’s nothing deranged about the paintings. Strongly styled, they process rather than express his disturbances: correlatives set outside himself. They were followed, in 1797, by the start of a series of eighty satirical engravings of Spanish life, “Los Caprichos,” which proved widely popular. (Carlos IV acquired a set in return for granting Goya’s son a pension.) He spared no class—O.K., except the titled—in his burlesques of donkey-headed professionals, superstitious peasantry, female and male poseurs, hypocritical clerics, and fools who, perhaps because so lost in delusion, verge on transmogrifying out of human form. In a rare public statement, advertising the series, Goya coolly declared as his targets “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.” Note the fatalism in that “any civilized society.” If buyers of the works fancied themselves superior to the characters depicted, Goya surely didn’t mind; but you know he had his doubts.

No public welcome could be counted on for the “Disasters of War,” which weren’t published until thirty-five years after Goya’s death. He shared them privately, giving a set of proofs to a friend who inscribed it, laconically, “Fatal consequences of Spain’s bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices.” Understatement! Murder and dismemberment, rape, desecration of corpses, and ghastly tortures multiply. It is natural to assume outrage in the author of visions so terrible. But what freezes my blood is an equanimity that sublimates rage and sorrow at what people can—and will—do to other people when civilization’s thin crust fissures.

Visiting war zones around Madrid, Goya witnessed scenes of the carnage; and he was present for the catastrophe, in 1811, of a famine that filled the city with desperate, diseased, and dying refugees from the despoiled countryside. History is replete with war and starvation, but nothing else in art before or since—including, to my mind, photography and film—compares with the “Disasters” for penetrating hurt. The pictures are something more, less, and other than what we think of as protest art. Working up his nightmare scenarios stroke by stroke, as if from the inside out, he vivifies both the suffering of cruelty and the delirium of inflicting it, without any allowance for a rote response. Nor did he affix blame. One of his sardonically bland captions, “Rightly or wrongly,” withholds the verdict on a scene of soldiers about to kill two blade-wielding men who, for all we know, may be patriotic guerrillas or mere criminals. Other captions—“There is no one to help them”; “What more is there to do?”—visit contempt on the impotence of the uninvolved. The same petrifying dreadfulness marks those intermittent engravings which impute monstrousness—embodied by eruptive owls or witches—to the dreaming states of the putatively rational. Goya doesn’t indict the evils of individuals and groups; he amasses evidence of universal depravity. He added to the series compulsively, using battered, pitted, or otherwise flawed copper plates to etch when good ones fell subject to wartime scarcity. The sublimity of his skill occasions no relief, but, rather, the opposite. The last turn of the screw is your aesthetic delectation.

Goya had been on hand for the French invasion, which, in 1814, informed two astounding paintings of an uprising fomented by the dethroned Ferdinand VII, “The Third of May 1808” and “The Second of May 1808.” I cite the second date first because the image, a massacre of Spanish citizens by a French firing squad, is so routinely regarded as an antiwar icon on a par with “Guernica.” Its central figure, arms raised in hopeless supplication, feels at once a bit Christlike and a lot like a guy who is appalled to find himself in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. Now consider “The Second of May,” a street scene of citizens frenziedly assaulting French forces. Their targets prominently include Mamluk cavalry from Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. Possibly Muslim, do those figures touch a nerve of Spain’s expulsion of its Moors two centuries earlier? (Fanatic religious intolerance had been one factor in the nation’s decline from a cosmopolitan empire to a chew toy for armies.) We can’t know what Goya had in mind for the picture, other than commonplace lunacy. But it wasn’t propaganda.

Goya seems to have been a good enough man who led a decorous enough life, though hot-tempered in such practical matters as being paid for his work—reasonably, considering his early memories of poverty and his obligation to support members of an extended family after the death of his intestate father, in 1781. There’s a lingering suspicion of homosexuality regarding his primary and, perhaps, only close friend, a never-married Zaragoza businessman named Martín Zapater. When apart, they corresponded constantly and longed for each other’s company. But Zapater fell silent when Goya became hysterical during a case of smallpox in his remaining heir, Javier, and pelted his friend—“oh my soulmate”—with letters of hyperbolic devotion. (Javier survived, and Goya simmered down.) So there was a limit, though a porous one. The pair revelled in bawdry and exchanged drawings of male and female genitalia. Tomlinson discounts a sexual liaison on the ground that the men were too discreet to risk the possible scandal. But she confirms that the darkest turn in Goya’s emotional life coincided not with his deafness or any other recorded misfortune but with Zapater’s untimely death in 1803. The open-heartedness (exceedingly rare for Goya) in portraits that he made of his friend, which radiate mutual affection and trust, plunges me half into love with the sitter myself. For the record, I doubt a sexual relation, for want of more than speculative evidence. In Goya’s one later painting that bespeaks male intimacy, “Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta” (1820), we see the artist, drastically enfeebled, being attended to by a doctor who is almost comically virile, competent, and concerned. It’s a picture to make you smile through tears.

We come at last to the Black Paintings (untitled by Goya), of which Tomlinson gives a bracingly investigative account: fourteen pictures that Goya painted in oils on the plaster walls of the house in Spain where he lived from 1819 to 1824, before a sojourn in France and his final four years among Spanish exiles in Bordeaux. (His expatriation was elective. He could—and twice did—revisit Spain.) The works vary in size and format, from panel to panorama. Though effectively installed in an oblong room at the Prado, they arouse a retroactive ache to have seen them in situ before they were transferred to canvas, in the nineteenth century, and, judging from early photographs, in some cases coarsened by clumsy restoration.

There’s no getting used to the jolts of a darkling procession of the immiserated and the insane: a crazed giant (traditionally assumed to be Saturn, but who knows?) devouring a human body; two men buried to their knees in a barren landscape and fighting to the death with cudgels; witches and a goat-headed demon in sinister excelsis; a little dog about to perish in what looks to be a tide of shit. Tomlinson surmises that an oddly ladylike giantess is Goya’s maid and companion, Leocadia Weiss, whom he met after the death of his wife, in 1812. That image was situated next to the front door of the house, welcoming visitors to a peculiar scheme of interior decoration.

How do we square the courtier artist with the tour guide to Hell? It may be easier than it seems. For starters, what if the Black Paintings are in the nature of a joke? Tomlinson cites the possible influence of contemporaneous horror-mongering entertainments by showmen. And do the grotesqueries fundamentally contradict Goya’s prior imaginative process? (I had thought, before my most recent visit to them, that I must be inured to those paintings. But no. Still and again, I cowered.) Mere squeamishness may impede thought on the question. Relative snowflakes that we are today, we can start by adjusting to the thicker skins of the culture that shaped Goya. Think of the cult of the bullfight, which he adored and immortalized in sensationally informative, visceral engravings and technically innovative lithographs that beggar Picasso’s superficial homages a century and a half later. Goya was an avid hunter, once apologizing for having missed one shot of nineteen that had brought down two hares, a rabbit, five partridges, and ten quail. Tomlinson hazards that, for a social climber, hunting with aristocrats was that era’s version of golfing with C.E.O.s. She admirably keeps the mysteries of Goya’s character distinct from its self-serving machinations. He was unremarkably bourgeois, though salaried by royalty. (Payments kept arriving until the end of his life.) The boring parts of his story are salutary, framing the discontinuous dramas.

Goya’s relationship with Weiss seems to have been tempestuous, but he was enchanted by her daughter, Rosario, whom he deemed, from the age of eleven, an artistic prodigy and promoted to everyone he knew. He had no other follower in art—unless you count, indirectly, most artists since. With a knack for miniaturist portraits, Rosario set an example for Goya that he took up and, of course, surpassed, with virtuosic miniatures of his own. Competitiveness consumed him. (Rosario went on to a meagre career as a copyist of paintings and was not above the odd forgery.) Ruling him, too, was humor, if that’s the right word for sabotaging anyone’s presumption to know his mind. I’ve compared the effect of the Black Paintings to unfriendly laughter coming out of a well. Don’t kid yourself that he cares about connecting with you. But the works test, in the depths of the incommunicable, the degree of anyone’s courage to envisage the bad in life, the worse, and the almost inconceivably abysmal. Whether he was driven by perversity or by obsession, there’s an unholy glee about what Goya watched himself doing in and to his domestic haven. That’s what keeps us returning to the works, as sorry as we may feel, yet again, to have come. One thing’s for sure: the series marks no mental disintegration. Goya worked at top form, though reduced output, after moving to Bordeaux.

I believe that the Black Paintings distill, to a hundred proof, Goya’s singularity. You can perceive tinctures of it in his best portraits, which register personhoods—specific existences—with curious dispassion. They attract obliquely. That’s their eeriness. Be the sitter the Duke of Wellington (posing at stately ease while looking a bit tired, after his triumphal entry into Madrid, in 1812) or a gussied-up little boy (Goya was great with children, savoring their innocence of their preassigned social status), you sense him, when done, gathering his brushes and going home. Something has happened—the live capture of a personality, if not a soul—but it was engendered by a job, not by a divination. The quality of a remote regard, transposed from reality to fantasy, extends to even the most bizarre or tragic of his satirical subjects. No other artist possesses such a capacity to feel and to not feel, at a go. The Black Paintings simply—simple for him!—polarize torridity and iciness at simultaneous extremes that we would otherwise not suspect possible. Goya’s cynosure is detachment regardless of the degree of pressure, professional or psychological, he may have been under. He leaves his subjects alone, as he was alone, and he leaves us alone with them. Rarely consummate in the ways that we associate with great art—Goya cranked out lots of so-so pictures—he is an outlier’s outlier in the canon. His legacy isn’t a commanding body of work but a homing beacon for worried people in worlds that are subject to unpredictable changes, perhaps suddenly and soon. Goya knew the problem and let slip the solution, which is to keep in mind that there is no solution, only an immemorial question: Now what? ♦