Art: The Steep Path

Had Francisco Goya died of the infection that deafened him at 47, he would be remembered only as a Spanish court painter with a knack for candid likenesses. But the tortuous, stone-silent path he entered in middle age led steeply upward, and he clambered gloomily to greatness. The blackest and harshest of the old masters, Goya made bitterness a virtue and found pessimism a fountain of youth. A big traveling show of Goya drawings, on display this week in San Francisco, proves once again how great his final achievement was.

Troublesome Tourist. Goya’s beginnings were humble; they did not make him so. Every self-respecting Spaniard considers himself in some sense noble, and Goya was born in one of the proudest Spanish regions: barren Aragon. His father, a gilder by trade, was too poor to provide much for his son’s education, so Goya decamped for Madrid, twice tried and failed to get an art scholarship. In 1766, when he was 20, Goya turned up in Italy. According to legend, he was a troublesome tourist, cocky, stocky, amorous and quick to duel.

He must have supported himself by hack painting, was apparently unmoved by the marvelous remnants of the Renaissance.

Five years later, Goya returned to Spain. He married the sister of an influential painter named Bayeu, got a commission to design tapestries for the royal weavers. Everyday-life scenes were the assigned subjects which forced Goya to look sharply at the world around him. His tapestries could not be called brilliant, but they record the life of the day with considerable verve. Ordered to make engravings after the Velásquez portraits that hung in the palace galleries, he did a barely creditable job, but the genius of his predecessor was impressed upon him.

Striving for the same objectivity, the same near-magical illusionism that distinguished Velásquez, Goya took up portraiture himself.

The Naked Emperors. Goya’s foreign contemporaries —Guardi, Gainsborough, Fragonard—specialized in elegance. Goya did too, but instinctively pricked the bubbles he blew, fastening on the frivolous, pompous and stupid personalities inside the fine clothes of his noble sitters. Like the naked emperor of the fable, they seemed not to notice. Charles IV made him court painter and gave him a carriage. Occasionally Goya was commissioned to portray a beautiful woman, which enabled him to exhibit a warmer side. Friends who sat for him got off lightly; he could still admire a few.

His portraits of children were invariably sympathetic; he showed them looking bored, as no doubt they were.

Goya himself had five children, money in the bank and a gay life—”Everything I could wish for,” as he wrote to a friend.

Then, in 1793, real fortune came to him, as often to genius, in the shape of disaster.

Some say it was syphilis, a theory which accords with Goya’s rakehell reputation.

Whatever the illness, it deafened him completely. While convalescing, Goya painted the first of his many hellish fantasies—only, as he wrote, “to occupy my imagination, which was troubled by the consideration of my ills.” With deceptive modesty, he noted that in his new pictures he had “succeeded in making observations for which my commissioned works, in which fantasy and invention had no place, never gave the opportunity.” What actually happened was far more important.

Goya had wriggled out of his old, gregarious personality. He emerged as the dour genius the world now knows. In the fading, Baroque art of Goya’s day, charm was the watchword. Goya brushed charm aside; he no longer cared to please. Throughout his career, he had listened to others’ orders and carried them out amiably enough. Now he no longer heard his orders; he gradually ceased to obey, and even to reply. Except for official portraits, Goya’s art stopped being a succession of answers to the world’s demands and became simply statements of the artist, delivered with bullet force.

Love & War. The new Goya glares with brutal clarity, like a wounded fighting bull, from the self-portrait made two years after his illness (see cut). It was at about this time that the Duchess of Alba took him on. As willful as she was lovely, the Duchess surrounded herself with the freaks, dwarfs and buffoons whom Goya loved to draw. They made a dramatic setting for her fragile, doll-like beauty. Goya drew and painted her often, sometimes with admiration and sometimes in anger at her wild flirting. Once he showed her carried away by witches and looking as cool as ever. When she died, he turned from palace to street life, found it every bit as weird. He was the first social commentator in art to recognize and dispense with the unconscious snobbism of picturesque effects.

Like most Spanish intellectuals since his day, Goya was a liberal at war with himself. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Goya at first welcomed what he hoped would be a clean broom. But his patriotic heart went out to the defenders, and he finally engraved on his dagger the words: “Death to the French.” Still, he lived on the fringes of the invader’s court, painted French generals as well as Spanish. He also portrayed the triumphant Wellington, and finally, though with obvious distaste, the returned King Ferdinand VII. Vacillating and bad-tempered though Goya was, no ruler thought of dispensing with his talents. Meanwhile he was recording the horrors of the war in a sketchbook that had no heroes at all, only villains and victims. The etchings he made from the drawings were considered too violent to publish until long after his death.

Demons & Bulls. With age, Goya retired deeper and deeper into lonely fantasy. He adorned the walls of his house outside Madrid with huge ghosts, monsters and demons, and made a series of etchings, Stupidities, giving nightmare form to the superstitions and cruelties that obsessed him. At 78 he went into voluntary exile at Bordeaux, where a circle of liberal expatriates welcomed him.

Henceforth the world was to see the Spain that Goya had abandoned through Goya’s bitter art.

Toward the end, Goya returned to an early passion, bullfighting, and drew his great series called The Bulls of Bordeaux.

With that comparatively mild valedictory —the testament of a man who liked violence in its place, though he loathed it elsewhere—he died at 82, full of years and terrible triumphs.

Three Masters. “I have had three masters,” Goya once remarked, “Velásquez, nature, and Rembrandt.” If Italian painting struck him as too arty, Velásquez’ portraits had a Spanish directness, a quality of here and now, that perfectly suited Goya’s own temperament. Velásquez taught him that oil paint can be made to look like real people in a real world. He practiced the magic all his life, first in portraits and later in big, dramatic compositions such as his two masterpieces, The Second of May and The Third of May, which depict the first Madrid uprising against Napoleon. The fantastic paintings of his old age. e.g., the Metropolitan Museum’s A City on a Rock, with its winged men hovering overhead (TIME color page, Feb. 23, 1953), are like dreams dragged into daylight by sheer force of art.

As Velásquez’ naturalism inspired Goya’s painting, so nature and Rembrandt stood behind his drawings, and, as San Francisco’s exhibition made plain this week, the drawings were among his greatest triumphs. Nature meant human nature to Goya; most of his drawings are of people seen in sharp focus against the vaguest of backgrounds. Rembrandt gave Goya the tool he needed for drawing people in action: a way of blocking out forms in terms of light and dark. “There are no lines,” Goya said. “I see only prominent or receding planes.” Like Rembrandt, he used lines as a sort of parentheses, simply to enclose lights and shadows.

But in Goya’s case, as Andre Malraux said, “there is none of that solemn Biblical illumination which transfigures the personages of his master . . . There is no light, only lighting.” Malraux calls Goya “the greatest exponent of agony that Western Europe has yet known.”

Man’s Folly. Praise of that kind would probably have hurt Goya’s feelings. He was a moralist, turning the searchlight of truth on war, bestiality, sadism, madness and the excesses of the clergy, and brushing away cobwebs of superstition. One of his most famous and explicit drawings has all the optimism of the Age of Enlightenment, shows the Goddess of Reason driving out error (see cut).

The obvious fact remains that while man’s folly disgusted Goya, man’s ills affected him with a personal torment. Torn between disgust and sympathy, between superficial rationalism and basic pessimism, and walled in as he was by silence, Goya may well have feared for his own sanity. Instead of succumbing, he rose, to amaze and disquiet the world.