Conjuro (1797-1798).

Oil on canvas 45 x 32 cm.

Museo Lázaro Galdiano (Madrid)

El exorcizado (1797-1798).

Oil on canvas 42 x 30 cm.

National Gallery (Londres)

El convidado de piedra (1797-1798).

Oil on canvas 45 x 32 cm.

Cocina de las brujas (1797-1798).

Oil on canvas45 x 32 cm.

Private collection (Mexico).

 

THE WITCHES' SABBATH (1821-22)-Detail

Oil on canvas. 55.5 in. x 172.5 in.

Prado, Madrid

On the walls of his home Goya painted the fourteen "Black Paintings". This one hearkens back to a theme he had treated years before, a coven of witches presided over by a goat in monk's habit. No trace of time or setting or even air exists.

The 'blackness' is not absolute but enlivened by streaks of white as well as ochre, carmine, even greens, applied in bold, discontinuous strokes over a black priming. The bestial faces, all traces of human spirit and reason obliterated, are dominated by eyes star ing with hallucinatory effect. Heads all on the same level press closely together; human individuality has become submerged in an abstract mass.

This visual theme may have inspired the nineteenth century Belgian artist James Ensor, in whose paint ings masked carnival figures, similarly demonic, are grouped in the same way. The exact meaning of Goya's mixture of fantasy and realism is not known, nor is the overall intent of the Black Paintings cer tain. They seem to have been a working out of private obsessions, for which numerous parallels can be found throughout his etch ings. After these paintings Goya's work regained a certain serenity.

Life

Goya's subject matter

Social and political features of Goya's work

Goya. A clear-sighted individual confronted by life's contradictions

 

Life

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Francisco de Goya is one of the greatest masters that Spain has ever produced and is considered the "Father of Modern Art". His works, which are world reknown, changed the way artists would interpret the world. His works, paintings and drawings, spread on a span of 60 years covering from about the last half of the 18th century to the first quarter of the 19th century, and portray a celebration of life and a realistic view of the world.

Goya was born in the province of Zaragoza. When he was a teenager, he entered the service of a local artist. Later on, he travels to Madrid, where he is greatly influenced by the last of the great Venetian painters. After several failed attempts to enroll in the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Goya travels to Rome. Returning to Spain in the decade of the 1770s, Goya paints frescoes in several churches of his native province.

With his wedding, Goya begins his ascension, working under Mengs, he finally enrolls in the royal academy and later on is named the King Charles III's painter. By 1799, Goya becomes the official Chamber painter of King Charles IV. But by this time he had suffered an illness which left him deaf, and his alienation from the pomposity of the Court began. He produced dark works at this time.

Together with the critiques to his works, Goya undergoes a time of wild imagination, in which sordid images of a surreal world begin to appear. Unable to present his works to his old clientele, he is forced, under the threat of the Inquisition, to withdraw his works. Meanwhile he continued with his services as crown painter; and by 1800, he creates La Familia de Carlos IV (The Family of Charles IV).

By this time political and social upheaval connected with the Napoleonic kidnap of the Spanish crown and the invasion of Spain, Goya produced 2 de Mayo de 1808 (2nd of May of 1808), and other pieces in which the artist epitomizes the suffering and the realism of the time to a height not seen before. Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, reinstitutes Goya as the Chamber painter after the war, but by this time the artist's convictions lead him to witness the vanity of court life. This begins his period known as the black paintings.

A decade later, after having witnessed the excesses and the attempt to enforce an absolutist regime by Ferdinand VII, Goya decides to leave Spain to settle in Southern France where he will die.

Because of the richness of works from Goya, one can witness how his attitude towards life and the world evolves and changes, as the socio-political events surrounding him shift. His works hardly stylized the Classical from prevalent of this time, but tended to be more of a romantic nature. In his old age, Goya becomes an embittered and disillusioned person towards society and its false pretenses.

Goya was no more than a man, but it is his humanity which allows us to view his personal turmoil in a world that was fast disappearing before his eyes. You can appreciate the bulk of his works at the El Prado Museum in Madrid where other great Spanish masters are well represented too (See our page on El Prado).

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Goya's subject matter

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The first studies that have been conserved were the small paintings he made in Luzán's studio, his Italian sketchbook and his copies of Velazquez, all of which are testimonies of the apprenticeship of an artist that soon to become one of the greatest artists in the Western tradition. However, his passion for learning new techniques put him amongst the ranks of the avant garde. At the end of the 18th century, Goya embarked on a series of paintings and etchings full of imagery and personality, which were called the Caprichos (a term meaning caprice, invention) which made no concession to the fashions required by commissioned work. Little by little, his love of innovation would invade and fertilize the totality of his work.

During his time as painter for tapestries, a job which required the study of conventional themes, Goya committed himself to the pictorial study of his characters. In his first studies of daily life, the customs and fashions of the day were painted without comment and Goya pandered to the tastes and requirements of his clients. However, by the end of the century, Goya was working on themes from the War of Independence, drawing sketches and making etchings which clearly show a sharp awareness of social conditions of the time. In these works, Goya demonstrated a sympathy with the common individual and a surprisingly modern commitment to the freedom of the individual.

In his works of a social nature, Goya systematically addressed the most pressing social, economic and political problems in Spain: the vices of the clergy, the philistinism of a large part of the aristocracy, the absurd and barbaric repression of the Inquisition, the excesses of violence and war, prostitution and the exploitation of women and obscurantism and superstition. In these works Goya revealed himself as an ilustrado, a supporter of the Enlightenment, a lover of freedom and a humanist. Thus, Goya rightly deserves to be placed amongst the pantheon of the Spanish Enlightenment, a place won by his pencil and brush. These, along with his acid, painfully accurate titles, were the tools which he used to create his world.

 

by: Francisco Javier García Marco

© 1996 InfoGoya.

 

Social and political features of Goya's work

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Unlike Renaissance painters, who admired and painted subjects from Classical Antiquity and the Christian tradition, Goya dedicated a great part of his artistic output to a pictorial description of the society in which he lived. However, Goya did not limit himself to figurative painting as a way of simply photographing reality. His vision of the world was partisan, he had well-developed ideals, and as an artist he was in a state of constant evolution.

His critical vision was clearly and effectively shown in his prints and drawings. In these works he avoided the use of colour. By doing so they became an ideal medium for giving a simple, vibrant vision of reality. They also allowed the artist to create a darker, caricatured view of life.

By studying his prints and some of his oil paintings the following points about the painter's social, religious and political ideals emerge:

• A belief in the Enlightenment, a movement which believed in the value of culture and which despised irrationality.
• His vision of the different levels of the society of the Ancien Regime (the nobility, the clergy and The Third State), the habits and behaviour of which he subjected to intense criticism.
• The stance he adopted in favour of a more tolerant and liberal society. This meant that he was against the political activities of the majoritary sector of the Church after the War of Independence. He also attacked the censorship of the Inquisition.
• His attitude to social problems, mistreatment of women, loveless marriages, prostitution and begging.
• His militancy in favour of working people, and his opposition to exploitation of farm workers and tradesmen.

In terms of his bourgeois background and level of culture, Goya was a Spaniard of the Enlightenment and a moderate liberal. His ideals and beliefs moved in tune with the history of his country. However, his social and political works transcended his political beliefs. In his work, Goya, a sharp-eyed caricaturist, shows the contradictions of Spain at the end of the 18th century and the beginnings of the 19th. It is also clear from his work that Goya was an extraordinarily clear-sighted individual who, with an enviable intellectual grandeur, was able to juxtapose the greatness and the vileness of human nature.

 

Bibliography

Alcalá Flecha, Roberto. "Literatura e ideología en el arte de Goya". Zaragoza: Diputación General de Aragón, 1988.

by: Francisco Javier García Marco

 

Goya. A clear-sighted individual

confronted by life's contradictions

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Goya's work, especially his drawings and prints, reveal a powerful personality; an individual who insisted on seeing things in his own way. At the beginning of his artistic career his work is smooth and detailed, conforming to the wishes of his clients. At the end of his life he had become more uncompromising and irascible. One consequence of this was that he threw himself into the search for the essentials, stripping them of unnecessary detail.

He had a way of looking at the world that never deceived itself about the realities of life. In his work Goya showed himself to be aware of the limits that created and defined human anxiety. His clear-sightedness drove him to melancholy. His energy, honesty and stubbornness led him to rebel against so much imperfection and hypocrisy.

One notable feature of Goya's personality is his sense of humour. A sense of humour that seems to have been the result of a compromise between his lust for life and a merciless vision of human nature. In the course of time this feature of his character took on a progressively deeper shade of black. The gentle irony of his earlier work gave way to the corrosive humour of the Caprichos. At the end of his life it was a hallucinatory, surreal, satirical vision that revealed itself in his last drawings and prints. However, even in his later works he added an element of indestructible hope. One example of this is the tenderness and innocence of the little girl with the accordion that invests his masterpiece The Great He-Goat. with a touch of gentleness.

by: Francisco Javier García Marco

© 1996 InfoGoya.