Art of Darkness
DISCH, THOMAS M.
Art of Darkness The extraordinary work of Francisco Goya. BY THOMAS M. DISCH By the kind of cruel coincidence that more commonly afflicts TV docudramas based on the latest celebrity murderer, two...
...Hughes refuses to admit that these, his favorite pictures of Goya's, those most redolent of a gothic terribilita, could come from any hand but the master's...
...BY THOMAS M. DISCH By the kind of cruel coincidence that more commonly afflicts TV docudramas based on the latest celebrity murderer, two biographies of Goya have just appeared in bookstores, each a page-turner by an established popular writer, each more or less idolatrous in its reverence for Goya, each hastily assembled The poet and novelist Thomas M. Disch is a frequent reviewer of art for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...She was continually pregnant...
...the Inquisition was still an active force...
...This makes them excellent subjects for the kind of novelistic biographer who has no compunction about inferring whole romances from a dropped handkerchief...
...Who would have thought Papa would end up sounding like such a lady...
...In any case, painters are notoriously unforthcoming, if not simply mum...
...Connell at least lays out the evidence for the Black Paintings having been a kind of collaboration between Goya and Martinez Cubells, the man known to have restored them after their removal from the Quinta...
...Hughes can also register as tendentious, as when he speculates that Warhol would have been a willing servant of the Nazis (this, by way of defending Goya against charges of collaborating with Napoleon's puppet regime) or when, egregiously, he boasts how well he would have scored with the Duchess of Alba, given the same chance Goya had...
...At his worst he is a little slapdash, as when he finds the Escor-ial to be "as sinister as an American prison...
...Hughes and Connell's books will not cause readers to develop warm feelings for Goya, though the circumstances of his life are always of interest...
...and the economy was in steady decline as Spain's American colonies defected one by one...
...The first is G^oya by the Australian critic Robert Hughes, and the second is F^r^^^iisco G^oya by the American novelist Evan S. Connell...
...It was, as well, for Goya, but he lived there...
...Recent research suggests that the upper story of the Deaf Man's House had not been built when Goya lived there—which is rather a problem, since one can't paint murals on walls that don't exist...
...Like Daumier or his contemporary and soul-mate, William Blake, Goya expressed his own feelings more readily with the pen and the etching needle than the brush, especially when those feelings were scorn, indignation, fear, disgust, and sheer horror...
...I've heard that prisons in Istanbul and Capetown can be equally creepy...
...Had Goya spent his career in any country but Spain, we would probably know a good deal more about him than we do...
...from the same rather slender stock of two-century-old gossip...
...Hughes's Goya has the advantage of a more ardent advocacy...
...Of the two accounts, Connell's zooms in on Goya and out to the dioramas of history with more artistry and at a quicker pace...
...That boast can be read, however, as an appreciation of Goya's achievement in the department of art devoted to female anatomy, and that is certainly a central concern...
...All by himself, in the darkest corner of Europe, surrounded by tyrants, imbeciles, brigands, and hags, Goya was a one-man Gothic Revival...
...Yes, the Escorial is prison-like, but are American prisons particularly sinister...
...Of these two recent lives of Goya, Connell's is the livelier and more concise narrative, as one would expect of the author of Mrs...
...Connell is never so matey, nor does he wink so broadly at the subject of Goya's The Naked Maja, or squirm quite so uncomfortably at the various ways in which Goya showed himself to be a toady...
...That he was married doesn't enter into it...
...I confess that I am as loath as Hughes to admit the possibility of fraud and forgery, because the Black Paintings do seem to be the real payoff of Goya's whole career...
...Bridge...
...he, by virtue of his skill for painting the clothing of the rich, was the best regarded painter, which is to say, a servant of low stature...
...If so, it would have been highly inappropriate...
...The work for which he is most admired nowadays are aquatints, not oil paintings, and were seen by none or very few of his contemporaries: the Caprichos of 1796-97 and his graphic account of the Peninsular War, Los Desastres, posthumously published in 1863...
...In any case it is the subject matter that will fascinate the reader of either book...
...the six-year-long Peninsular War against Napoleon was at least as unremittingly cruel as the Spanish Civil War of the next century...
...Yet there is a kind of drama in the alternative: If the Black Paintings were in fact the products of Cubells (or some other scam artist), then they must be counted as among the most considerable homages in art history...
...Such circumstances are not conducive to biography...
...Add to this a number of festive scenes of bucolic life executed as cartoons for the tapestry factory that Goya ran for the Crown, and that was his financial mainstay for much of his life...
...Prudent men did not keep diaries and had no pen pals...
...He never painted her...
...The Bourbon monarchy, Goya's primary employer, was as grotesque a clan as the Munsters...
...Perhaps only those who remembered what his style owed to an American lesbian, Gertrude Stein...
...Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pollock—all have been given the full Hollywood treatment...
...There are few significant landscapes from his hands, no still-lifes, and even in the matter of the figures he produces few memorable pictures of religious or mythological scenes, which were the pinnacle of painterly ambition in his day...
...That's what gives him a special authority on the subject of Hell, which is the theme of his final and most problematical group of paintings, known as the "Black Paintings" of the "Quinta del Sordo," or the Deaf Man's House...
...She was in the first, brief flower of her twenties...
...He becomes pugnacious at times, and even matey, as when he intrudes these thoughts into his reflection on Goya's bullfight etchings: "The rituals of the bullring have inspired a deadening mass of kitsch art—and kitsch writing, too, such as Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, so unreadable today...
...By both Hughes and Con-nell's accounts, Goya's chief (and almost sole) merit as a painter lies in his treatment of the human figure...
...Even Goya has already had two operas to his credit, to say nothing of a pair of Hollywood biopics, the earlier of which, the 1959 The Naked Maja, starred Ava Gardner as Dona Maria Teresa Cayetana de Silva, thirteenth Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya is reputed to have had a passionate affair...
...She was the richest woman in Spain, not excepting the queen...
...These are Gothic showstoppers: Saturn Devouring His Son, Witches' Sabbath, the haunting Head of a Dog, and more: some dozen pictures that were discovered as murals on the walls of Goya's country retreat, which eventually found their way to the Prado...
...He did portraits, more often than not of people history has shown to be dimwits and venal time-servers, portraits that were valued by their sitters for their rendering of laces, metal buttons, and watered silk...
...He should have painted them...
...Neither of these enterprises accounts for the adulation Goya has enjoyed posthumously...
...Goya had the courage, genius, and sheer good luck to take root and thrive as an artist in the soil of Hell...
...For the Gothicists elsewhere in Europe, Spain was the heart of darkness...
...Spain in Goya's time—he was born in 1746 and died in 1828—^was as scary as any horror movie...
...Hughes and Connell differ on whether Goya's mad passion was reciprocated or consummated (not necessarily the same thing with the thirteenth duchess...
...Better a full-scale coffee-table tome—Werner Hofmann's Goya with its gorgeous reproduc-tions—or no pictures at all...
...he, well into middle age and already deaf...
...some miscarried, the moiety of the rest died in infancy...
...Goya's wife was only there for breeding purposes...
...Hughes spends far too much time describing the paintings in potted art-history lectures, paintings one must squint at in his book's exigent reproductions...
Vol. 9 • February 2004 • No. 23
