Goya [Hardcover]

`[Goya] was an absolute genius, and a real inspiration to me... a must-have book about the man and his work.' -- Daily Express --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘Wonderful…As an accessible study of Goya’s life and work, the book is all you could ask for and more’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘Hughes succeeds where others have failed…As far as anyone can, he instinctively understands his man’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘A lively, intimate work that combines real scholarship with real feeling’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A subtle, insightful and lively biography of one of Europe's greatest artists, by one of the world's foremost living commentators on cultural history and the visual arts. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Chosen by Nick Brooks.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.
In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.

Sensitive, engaging and opinionated, GOYA is a multi-faceted picture of an artist deeply engaged, like Hughes himself, with all aspects of life and committed to documenting his world with an unflinching and compassionate eye for the truth. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine and twice winner of the American College Art Association's F. J. Mather Award for distinguished criticism, is author of The Shock of the New, and of Heaven and Hell in Western Art, both written before the present work. He is also author of the acclaimed Nothing if Not Critical, a work on Frank Auerbach; Barcelona, and Culture of Complaint, essays on the fraying of America. (20031208) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

GOYA’S BEGINNINGS

About thirty years separate the two paintings [‘St Isidro’s Meadow’ and ‘The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro’] that, between them, show the scope of the artist’s career. Although their subject is the same, their mood and meaning, as well as the way in which they are painted, are utterly different. Yet they were painted by the same man: Francisco Goya y Lucientes. We expect an artist to change in thirty years. But to change so much? To remake himself from top to bottom, into so apparently different an artist, and with such compulsive force? Such a change can happen when youth turns to age, and sometimes art historians call it the coming of a "great, late style." It is radical, but not with the comparatively weak radicalism of youth. Coming as it does after a long life, when there is so little time left, it ha a seriousness beyond mere experiment or hypothesis. It says: look at this and look at it hard, because it may be the last you’ll hear from me.

In each work he was painting the feast day of San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, where Goya lived. Each year it falls on May 15, and it is one of the city’s biggest occasions for celebration and jollity. The person it commemorates was, according to legend (or hagiography, to be polite), an eleventh-century labourer who was tilling the soil in the meadows and flats beside the Mazanares, the river that gave Madrid its water, when his hoe struck a "miraculous" fountain in the earth, which thereafter never ceased to flow. Gradually, it became of place of pilgrimage; those who went there sometimes found that their diseases and infirmities were cured by drinking the water from San Isidro’s well. In the sixteenth century a hermitage was built on the spot by Empress Isabel after her Hapsburg husband Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) and their son Felipe drank the water and were cured of their illnesses. The hermitage became a church, which, expanded and remodelled in a neoclassical style in the early eighteenth century, still stands today, looking back across the Manzanares to the city. By the time Goya was born, in 1746, so many ‘madrileòos’ crossed the Segovia bridge each May 15 and converged on the slopes and meadows below the church of San Isidro that the spot had become a combination fairground, picnic ground, and religious gathering place.

They would come in their spring finery, the men in tricornes, breeches, and stockings, the women as delicate as butterflies with their parasols to ward off the sunshine, their carriages and barouches well furnished with picnic hampers; bowing and chatting to one another, passing compliments, and each swallowing a pious draft of holy water from the well.

This was the scene painted by Goya in 1788 in a brisk oil sketch almost small enough to have been done on the spot, ‘en plein air’, though it was almost certainly made in his studio from memory and pencil scribbles. Goya was then a man of forty, a late starter, his career scarcely even begun. Forty was not youngish for the time, but it was for Goya, who would defy all actuarial probabilities of the day by living to the age of eighty-two. His picture is happy and festive. The people in it are those he wants to be among, those, you might feel, that he wants to be: the young man in the foreground, for instance, leaning forward on his cane, gazing with happy absorption at the bouquet of women under the elliptical saucer of the white parasol. Goya would like to be their friend, their social equal, their sexual partner. He would like to know the girl in the red jacket and the yellow skirt, who bends forward to fill the glass of a young man who leans forward to receive the drink. Goya’s vision of this feast day of San Isidro is as uncomplicated and without strain as a Renoir boating-party scene. It is all decorum and shared pleasure.

In the distance, across the swiftly brushed gleam of the Manzanares, two big buildings look down on the merrymakers. One building has a single dome, the church of San Francisco; to the left of it is the Pardo, one of the various royal palaces in and around Madrid. Before long, Goya hopes, the scene he is painting will become the sketch for a huge full-scale preliminary study, or cartoon (meaning that the design was done on ‘cartone’, paper), which will then be woven in wool to mural scale – Goya meant it to be almost twenty-five feet wide – and placed in one of the rooms of the Pardo palace. He expects it to help bring him fame, and propel him on his trajectory of success, in the course of which he will become the chief court artist, first painter to the king.

This did not happen in the way Goya hoped and expected. Later in the same year, 1788, the king – Carlos III, the Bourbon monarch of Spain – would die, and the Pardo palace would fall into disuse: no more new paintings and decorative schemes, including tapestries, would be done for it. There would be no full-size cartoon of the happy open-air crowds on San Isidro’s day, and no tapestry based on such a cartoon. But the small sketch would be absorbed eventually into the collections of the great museum of the Prado, where it remains as one of the very few completely unshadowed images of collective social pleasure in Goya’s work.

The second picture, traditionally entitled ‘The Pilgrimage of San Isidro’, also hangs in the Prado, in the galleries reserved for what are called Goya’s ‘Pinturas negras’, the Black Paintings of his old age. It was painted sometime between 1821 and 1823, when Goya was in his mid-seventies and had only a few years left to live in Spain… --This text refers to the Paperback edition.