Waking to Goya's ways

Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 28, 2003 at midnight

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Robert Hughes' passionate new book on the artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes begins with a show-stopping account of a fevered visit by the painter to the writer during his recovery from a near-fatal automobile accident.

Or better put, during a nightmare.

Multiple bones shattered, Hughes finds resolution, if not rest, in his coma: "Much of the time, I dreamed about Goya. He was not the real artist, of course, but a projection of my fears. The book I meant to write on him had hit the wall; I had been blocked for years before the accident."

Many chapters later, after the introductory "Driving Into Goya," after chronological discussions of Goya's various bodies of work, after painstaking descriptions of the sad, disjointed political affairs of Spain and its royals, one thing is clear: If only Goya, that supremely talented artist and diplomat, could have visited Hughes again. Perhaps, he could have whispered some answers in Hughes' ear about the perplexing black paintings of Goya's late life, which Hughes, in more than one case, sums up as impossible to interpret. (Reportedly the book was completed before controversy arose over authorship of those works.)

More important, the ectoplasmic Goya could have asked, "Señor Hughes, how did Andy Warhol get into a big book about me?"

But back to the beginning. Hughes skates on some details of that accident, which brought him innumerable legal troubles as well as severe injuries. For the most part, however, the veteran Time magazine art critic and author of the groundbreaking dissection of modern and contemporary art, The Shock of the New, is painstaking in his approach and discussion of Goya.

Goya: court painter and master of navigating the milieu of repression. Goya: creator of a series of work - Los desastres de la guerra - that laid bare the horror and waste of Spain's six-year war against Napoleon's France. Goya: the man about whose personal life so little is known, from his 39-year-marriage to a shadowy wife to his reaction to deafness that shut him into a silent world.

Yes, a master, and to Hughes (and many others in the art world) at the forefront of modernism. "Goya was a very different creature; he could see and experience nothing without forming some opinion about it, and this opinion showed in his work, often in terms of the utmost passion. This, too, was part of his modernity, and another reason why he still seems so close to our reach, though we are separated by so much time."

Goya might have been a patriotic Spaniard - a difficult thing to be in the era of a still simmering Inquisition, petulant rulers and a meager class of intellectuals. (Hughes is clear on Spain's notoriously fallow soil during the era of the Enlightenment; the few who were in sync with Voltaire et al. were termed ilustrado.) But Goya never became a blind follower of the parties in power; and if he was independent in thought, he did have to walk a fine line. He loved pop culture, writes Hughes, but was not a populist; he loved humanity, but not the mob.

"What interested him, as a good and committed ilustrado (which he was some of the time, if perhaps not all of it), was the appearance of rational Truth: the light of objective and critical ilustración, which would dispel the goblins and the follies, and get rid once and for all (vain hope for an artist!) of 'harmful ideas, commonly believed.' "

Thus, Hughes relates Goya's skill, on one hand, at making a living serving the royals and to a lesser extent the church, while on his own time, so to speak, creating a series of aquatints and etchings that commented on the folly, superstition and cruelty of Spanish society (Caprichos) and the wanton destruction of the 1808-1814 War of Independence against Napoleon (Los desastres).

Hughes' descriptions of the artist's work is authentic and exhaustive, on target and paired with copious illustrations in color where appropriate. While reading, arm yourself with a magnifying glass, though: These images trade the positive of placement near related text, with the negative of size.

The author's language throughout Goya is zesty, as his longtime readers might expect. The blond angels in a fresco look like "airborne babes." Fernando VII, the grandson of Carlos III, Goya's first royal patron, is a "tyrannous weasel." Referring to the hypocrisy touted in one of Goya's Caprichos, Hughes describes the ugly (but rich) groom as "vacuously grinning (his features and expression irresistibly recall, to a modern TV watcher, a character from The Simpsons). . . ."

Still, Hughes diminishes the power of his tale by occasionally snarky commentary that appears to come from beyond left field. In one aside, Hughes explains how Josef Thorak, Hitler's sculptor laureate, managed to redeem himself after the war: He " . . . ended up doing idealized portraits of the rich avant-garde collector, for all the world as though he were Andy Warhol - who, given the chance, would probably have served the Nazis with enthusiasm."

It's Hughes' book, to be sure, and his lively writing is appreciated; but to propel a story with such strange surmise is more jolt than illumination.

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2677.

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