Art: Rocky Genius

Francisco Goya acknowledged only three masters: “Nature, Velasquez and Rembrandt.” His careful study of all three was made apparent last week in a fine survey of Goya’s work staged by a Manhattan gallery. The show also pointed up the strength and poignancy of Goya’s feelings, which set him well apart from the mainstream of his age.

An artisan’s son, born in the dirt-poor village of Fuendetodos in 1746, he had the ruthless energy that stops at nothing and that nothing stops. Goya fought bulls and men with equally savage joy; had he written his autobiography, it could have been as proud and action-packed as Benvenuto Cellini’s. He lived in a time known variously as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, but, Spanish to the core, he substituted allegories for reason and sardonic darkness for enlightenment.

Naked Royalty. In art, it was a period dominated by elegance and smugness. His contemporaries, Guardi in Italy, Fragonard in France and Gainsborough in England, all devoted ‘themselves to the depiction of pomp and pleasure. Goya did, too, but he painted pompous fools and smirking harlots. He was as harsh and realistic a portraitist as ever lived (and sometimes a surprisingly offhand one), but that did not prevent him from becoming Madrid’s court painter. Goya’s paintings of the royal family were much admired, for no one dared admit that he showed them naked as the emperor in the fable of the “Emperor’s New Clothes,” stripped down to essence, strutting and stupid under their satins.

In portraying his friends, Goya showed that he could penetrate to and successfully picture not only shoddy natures but also noble ones—a far more difficult achievement. As a painter of women he was customarily kind, perhaps because he took their bodies more seriously than their brains. With a few glaring exceptions, he flattered his female sitters, made them look appealing if not particularly intelligent. With children he was tenderness itself, putting into his canvases their innocence, their questioning eyes, their flashes of playfulness and of rebelliousness, and even their solemn discomfiture as models.

Napoleon’s invasion of Spain inspired Goya to a series of etchings that stand today as the most eloquent condemnation of war in the history of art. He could put more brutality in the back of a military executioner’s neck than any artist since has been able to show in a head-on view. But Goya patched up a personal peace with the victors, painted them, as he had the Bourbons before them, and as he was later to paint Wellington and the restored monarchy of Ferdinand VII.

Disarmed Bandit. At 78, Goya got permission to travel to France for his health. He left behind half a century of masterpieces that embraced not only portraits and war etchings but also gay nudes, spooky fantasies, still lifes, street scenes and dozens of bullfight pictures. With six action pictures illustrating the Spanish ballad of Fray Pedro and the bandit Maragato (in which the priest disarms the bandit and shoots him in the pants), Goya had done his bit toward inventing the modern comic strip. In Bordeaux, he joined a group of Spanish exiles, one of whom described him as “deaf, old, awkward, feeble [but] so happy and eager to see the world.”

In the four years that remained to him, the old man painted some of his greatest pictures. One of them, a Bullfight in last week’s show, had all the sunny sparkle of Manet at his most engaging, plus the blood and tragedy that Goya always saw in the bull ring. Another, Saint Peter Repentant, looked as rocky as Goya himself.