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Art: The Depths, Etched

2 minute read
TIME

. . . the atrocities of war . . . the spectacle of Spaniards fighting among themselves; and all the time, like the drone of a bagpipe accompanying the louder noises of what is officially called history, the enormous stupidity of average men and women, the chronic squalor of their superstitions, the bestiality of their occasional violences and orgies . . . Goya recorded it all.

Thus Aldous Huxley introduces The Complete Etchings of Goya (Crown; $3.50), the first inclusive collection in book form. The new Goya reproduces, mostly in their original size, the 268 brutal, sometimes nether-worldly scenes which Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) etched in the latter years of his life when deafness and ill health had embittered him and he was capping his prodigious career as court painter with a furious moral summation of all he had seen. Samples: a mule, Goya’s symbol of pride of lineage, fondling the genealogy of his mulish ancestors; a rapist soldier dragging a young woman over the contorted body of a baby; a man vomiting on a tangled mass of war corpses (“Is this what you were born for?”).

Aldous Huxley ranks these works with other final achievements of great artists—Beethoven’s last quartets, the last poems of Yeats, the later paintings of El Greco. In the Goyas, Huxley sees a vision of “the unplumbed depths of original sin and original stupidity. . . . We are in a world of demons, witches and familiars . . . wholly disquieting inasmuch as it reveals the sort of thing that goes on in the squalid catacombs of the human mind.”

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