Artist rebelled in life, work
By Tova Navarra
May 7, 1989

Francisco Goya must have been tormented even in his sleep by the hypocritical, bigoted, bellicose segment of Spain’s society in the 1800s. While he painted portraits of members of the royal court, to him the common man was king.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new “Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment” exhibit, Goya’s true feelings about noblemen and the oppression of the working class are brought forth in the more than 125 paintings, drawings, and prints from the Museo del Prado in Madrid and public and private collections from Europe, North American and South America.
The exhibit provides essences of the artist who planted the seeds of modern art, especially modern art that has the nerve to oppose conventions and authority. One of Goya’s most famous paintings, “The Third of May, 1808” (not in the show), is a political statement of his unflagging sympathy for the common man’s plight.
Ironically, Goya seemed a quintessential political animal. His career at court began in 1775. He became painter to King Carlos III and court painter – and one of the trendiest artists – under Carlos IV, King Joseph (Napolean’s brother) and Ferdinand VII. While he cordially greeted officials who saw him only as an artist, he managed to depict with incisive accuracy their foibles and vulgarity and somehow get those aspects by them.
His elegant portraits of nobles (often his patrons) in their finery create one extreme of Goya’s work. At the other end of the spectrum are his satires involving the common, if not downtrodden, people amid their hardships.
Influenced by the 18th century European movement toward rationalism, education and skepticism known as the Enlightenment, Goya was a strong advocate of civil liberties. During that time, he was also clearly Spain’s outstanding painter. Taking up a Neo-Baroque style influenced by Velazquez and Rembrandt, whom he admired, Goya remained a favorite of the Spanish court despite his scathing visual pleas for liberal reform.
At the museum are rooms of Goya’s grandiose oil paintings of the prominent Francisco de Cabarrus, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, General Jose de Palafox, Countess Marissa and the family of the Duques de Osuna. How these contrast with Goya’s ink-wash drawings, etchings and aquatints (the mediums often combined) of the poor and working class! In the rooms where they are displayed, one lingers to read the background material posted alongside each work. The artist’s allegories jump all too easily to modern times.
Consider his titles: “Ya van desplumados” (“There they go plucked”), “The childish man,” “The sleep of reason produces monsters” and “The bogeyman is coming.” The viewer moves from one piece to another, absorbing a mine field of social commentary that was to provide a legacy for artists such as Honore Daumier and others who lampooned the issues of the day.
In this “album” of drawings, Goya thrusts hot pokers toward noblemen who act maniacally or like jackasses (as Goya himself labeled them), prostitutes who fleece their customers, molesters of children and other cultural blights.
Small paintings, such as “The Witches’ Sabbath” and “Witches in the Air,” depict people overtaken by their attracting to witchcraft and superstition, which Goya denounced. Fantasy painted as reality, these works step up two more of society’s blights to surrealistic perversion. In Goya’s technique, one can detect the root of symbolism and other modern movements.
Frightfully gimlet-eyed, he called the plays as he saw them. Was there hope in Goya’s relentless series? Probably not, because his themes still reflect human nature. In paintings such as “The Bordeaux Milkmaid,” his last canvas, painted in 1827 after his voluntary exile to Bordeaux, France, Goya set forth the only hope he could see: He gave indisputable dignity – yes, nobility – to the milkmaid.
One might also keep in mind that by 1792, Goya had been left permanently deaf by a disease that could well have been a severe case of Meniere’s. His vision, equilibrium and right arm – his painting arm – had been temporarily impaired, but it turned out that society’s noises, not its faces, would be blotted out of his life.
His self-portraits are telling. “Goya in His Studio,” a 1790 oil on canvas, shows the artist wearing a tall hat fitted with candleholders, because he revised his paintings at night. In a 1795 wash-and-ink drawing, Goya depicts himself a 50-year-old deaf man who avoids the viewer’s gaze and looks traumatized from illness. If this portrait of Goya could speak, it would grumble dejectedly.
A 1798 self-portrait from his “Los caprichos” (“The caprices”) series offers a near-profile, an engagingly offhanded view of his skeptical frown. Eight years before he was to die of a stroke, Goya painted “Goya Attended by Doctor Arrieta.” He allowed his frown to become death in his face and projected a solid warmth in the physician’s, and in the composition the two seem almost symbiotic in their sentiment for each other. This was how Goya saw himself in 1820 at 73, sparing himself not the slightest flattery or optimism; he was consistent in his views of himself, nobles, peasants and one of his major artistic influences, nature.
Among other paintings in the show are those Goya did for tapestry designs, some for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara. “Winter,” for example, is a work of beautifully ordered curves and a scene from peasant life, and in “The Wounded Mason,” Goya painted a slice of workers’ lives.