| Goya's Last Works | |
| A Special Exhibition Review by Stan Parchin |
About the show:
The career of the great Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) spanned both the Rococo and Romantic periods in Western European art. While he has been the subject of at least two special exhibitions in recent memory (Goya in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Goya: Another Look at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), these retrospectives dealt neither exclusively nor at length with the intriguing works from the final four years of his life. Goya's Last Works at New York's Frick Collection does just that in a critical two-floor examination of masterpieces produced by the artist in his old age. What one sees in this show is a Goya who, despite illness, exile and frailty, continued to reinvent himself in a period of physical, but certainly not intellectual, decline.
During his adolescence, Goya apprenticed with the painter José Luzán Martínez (1710-1785). He matured artistically during the Spanish Enlightenment of the reform-minded Bourbon king Charles III (r. 1759-1788). Goya soon joined the painters Francisco (1734-1795) and Ramón Bayeu y Subías (1746-1793) after they established their Madrid studio in 1763. His patronage by Spain's four successive rulers began in 1774 when he was asked to produce lithe Rococo cartoons (preliminary paintings) for the crown's Royal Tapestry Factory. At the same time, Goya began to study the portraits of Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) in the royal collection. In the late 1780s, the artist received a number of aristocratic portrait commissions. Paintings produced by Goya during this period amply demonstrate his mastery of broad brushstrokes that visually evoke the sensitive emotions of his patrons. These same works of art also describe the sumptuous Rococo finery to which his sitters were accustomed.
After a three-year appointment as painter to King Charles III, Goya was promoted to court painter for Charles IV (r. 1788-1808), apathetic to his cousin, King Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792), during the French Revolution. In 1792-93, Goya suffered a serious and lengthy illness while on a trip with an art collector to Cádiz in Andalusia. During a lengthy convalescence, the artist tragically went deaf, possibly from exposure to the lead-based white paint that he used in his compositions. Upon his return to Madrid in 1793, France declared war on Spain. In this period of political upheaval and social distress, Goya executed his Self-Portrait after Illness of 1792-93 (ca. 1795-97) with a pointed brush and gray wash on paper. It depicts the artist, already robbed of his hearing, with fiercely energetic untamed locks of hair that frame his inwardly gazing visage, revealing a sense of intense isolation. The curl of each hair in Goya's self-portrait, upon close inspection, reminds one of Leonardo da Vinci's ferociously cascading water studies.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Self-Portrait after Illness of 1792-93, ca. 1795-97
Brush and gray wash on paper
6 x 3 9/16 in. (15.3 x 9.1 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1935 (35.103.1)
Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1799, Goya produced a series of 80 etchings called Los Caprichos. They were collectively an uninhibited allegorical condemnation of the foibles of eighteenth-century Spanish society. His prints criticized the ruling elite, superstition, deceit and the erosion of rational thought. In his The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), perhaps the frontispiece (an illustration preceding the title page of a book) for his set of ribald satires, the disillusioned Goya depicted himself asleep amongst his drawing implements, surrounded by nightmarish creatures that represent the evils and corruption he associated with Spain. It's in this work of art that the viewer already sees harbingers of the almost surreal world of specters, hybrid creatures, witches and social outcasts that Goya used pictorially to criticize the moral ills of his Spanish homeland in the later years of his career.
After the French invasion of Spain in 1808 by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), the collapse of Charles IV's monarchy, the atrocities committed by Napoleon's soldiers on Spanish soil and the restoration of the Bourbon rule under King Ferdinand VII (r. 1813-1833), Goya retired to the outskirts of Madrid. There he fell victim to a second near-fatal illness in 1819. His remarkably expressive Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta (1820) is a visual tribute to the physician who miraculously saved the wearisome, seventy-two-year-old artist's life. The pale and listless painter is portrayed buttressed against the strong left arm of Dr. Eugenio García Arrieta. With his right hand, Arrieta offers the ailing Goya a cup of medication. Three mysterious and menacing figures eerily emerge from the dark recesses of the composition's murky background. These apparitions, sinister in look, quietly observe the unfolding drama. The one to the viewer's extreme left grasps a drinking vessel that vaguely resembles a chalice. Perhaps Goya intended this painting to be a memento mori or reminder of his own mortality, replete with haunting demons ready to consume his soul.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta, 1820
Oil on canvas
45 1/2 x 31 in. (115.7 x 79.1 cm)
The Ethel and Morrison Van Derlip Fund
© The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Ferdinand VII's return to power in 1823 and his purge of liberal thinkers precipitated Goya's move to Bordeaux, France the following year. There, drawing was Goya's principal means of artistic expression. The last two of a series of eight albums, created from 1824 to 1828, demonstrate Goya's continued interest in themes that were prevalent in many of his earlier satirical works: superstition, witchcraft, marital woes, eccentrics and the like. Sheets from his albums, labeled G and H, were executed in black crayon rather than pen, brush and ink. This allowed Goya to produce freer, more cartoonish images not confined to the strictures of academic drawing. In his Se quieren mucho (They Love Each Other Very Much) (ca. 1824-28), the artist portrays two demons embracing one another with their brittle limbs. Their angular wings are drawn in an upward-moving arrangement that suggests levitation.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Se quieren mucho (They Love Each Other Very Much),
Album G. 59, 1824-28
Black crayon on paper
7 1/2 x 5 7/8 in. (19/2 x 15.0 cm)
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, All Rights Reserved
© Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Goya's Man on a Swing (1824-28) exhibits a certain exuberance that characterizes a number of the artist's late graphic works. The barefoot old man hurls himself frenetically forward through the air on an unbridled and unattached rope. In this drawing, Goya possibly satirized the works of French Rococo artists Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). In their compositions, aristocratic women were portrayed swinging back and forth rhythmically in joyous abandon (possibly a masturbatory metaphor in eighteenth-century French culture, according to the exhibition's catalogue).
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Man on a Swing, Album H. 58, 1824-28
Black Crayon on Paper
7 1/2 x 5 7/8 in. (19.0 x 15.1 cm)
The Hispanic Society of America, New York
Photography by Roberto Sandoval, Courtesy of
The Hispanic Society of America, New York
In the same gallery that the Frick Collection exhibits Goya's drawings is a central display case that neatly exhibits the artist's innovative miniature works on ivory. Maja and Celestina (1824-25) depicts on a small scale a young prostitute hounded by Celestina the procuress (a hag derived from Spanish literary tradition). It is here that Goya sought to make a visual commentary on the moral malaise of society as he saw it, this time employing a character from decidedly Spanish legend.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Maja and Celestina, 1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory
2 1/8 x 2 1/8 in. (5.4 x 5.4 cm)
Private Collection
Perhaps the most unsettling image in this exhibition is Monk and Old Woman (1824-25). Approaching the surreal, a grotesque cleric and elderly woman, both with ghoulish facial expressions, peer out at the spectator as if the viewer has unexpectedly invaded their macabre private space.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Monk and Old Woman, 1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory
2 1/4 x 2 1/8 in. (5.7 x 5.4 cm)
Museum Purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund
Princeton University Art Museum
The Frick Collection's presentation of Goya's Last Works succeeds in allowing one the opportunity to view the inner workings of a master artist's mind. It also offers the visitor Goya's remarkable view of the world in which he lived though the works that he produced at the end of his life. His small-scale masterpieces on paper and ivory, produced late in life, are lasting tributes to a Spanish master who can justifiably be called a Romantic Realist.
Special thanks to Hilda O'Connell-Harris, MFA, distinguished painter, art historian, instructor of Fine Arts at Regis High School and professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, for her insight regarding this article.
About the catalogue:
Brown, Jonathan and Susan Grace Galassi.
Goya's Last Works (exh. cat.).
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.
This 224-page hardcover catalogue of 51 works from the last phase of Goya's career features two remarkably insightful essays: one on the artist's experimentation with lithography and miniature painting on ivory; and the other on the cultural scene of Bordeaux, France, where he worked while in exile at the end of his career.
For further reading:
Hughes, Robert. Goya.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2003.
This recent brilliant study of Goya's life and times is necessary reading for any student of the artist and his body of work.
"Goya's Last Works" is on view from February 22 through May 14, 2006 at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70 Street, New York, NY 10021-4967 (Telephone: 212-288-0700; Website: www.frick.org). The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and Sunday from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. On Friday evenings through May 12, 2006, "Goya's Last Works" will be open until 8:00 P.M. Admission is $12.00 for adults, $8.00 for senior citizens (62 years of age and over), $5.00 for students and pay as you wish on Sunday from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, which includes the ArtPhone recorded tour of the museum. Children ages 10 to 15 years of age must be accompanied by an adult.
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From your Guide: Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museums and Special Exhibitions, is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history, and a regular contributor to About Art History. You may read all of his Special Exhibition and Catalogue Reviews here.
