Goya
Robert Hughes, Harvill Press, £20.00
“The writer who does not know fear, despair, and pain cannot
fully know Goya,” states Robert Hughes at the outset of his epic
biography of the tormented Spanish artist. The author has earned the
right to make this melodramatic claim and describes in gut-wrenching
detail the bones of his which were pulverised in a near-fatal car
crash in 1999. That this is no ordinary biography becomes theatrically
clear when Hughes goes on to describe how he met the artist in a hallucinatory
vision while pinned together, unconscious, in the intensive care unit
of the Royal Perth Hospital, West Australia.
It would be tempting to compare Hughes’ vision with the miraculous
sightings of saints so cherished by the Catholic church in Spain,
and to call his 400-page tome a hagiography. In some ways it is: Hughes’
admiration for Goya is unbounded and at times hard to fathom, but
at the same time, the self-proclaimed “ex-Catholic” is careful
to debunk many of the myths which have grown up around the artist’s
name, even in Goya’s own lifetime.
Robert Hughes, award-winning art critic of 30 years’ standing
at the Times magazine, has now got eleven substantial books under
his belt; if you are interested in art you are likely to have one
of them on your shelves: The Shock of the New, Nothing if not Critical,
or Heaven and Hell in Western Art. Hughes’ work sells because
it combines scholarly research with a highly readable narrative. He
is chatty and provocative; he tells good stories and makes you want
to read on, either to find out what happens next, or just to savour
the next jaw-droppingly acerbic attack from out of the blue.
Francisco de Goya was born in 1746, going deaf after a frightening
illness in his forties, and dying in 1828 at the ripe old age of 82,
quite an achievement in a world where 30 was the average life expectancy.
Starting out as Royal tapestry designer, and thereafter becoming court
painter, Goya served three generations of Spanish monarchs –
with a Napoleonic one thrown in – for over 50 years. It is not
for his royal portraits and tapestries that he is famous, but for
his intensely individual paintings and etchings of human brutality
and madness. His grotesque series’ of scenes from the Peninsular
war (when Spanish guerilla fighters struggled in vain to repel the
Napoleonic fighting machine) and of the many tortures of the Spanish
Inquisition, set him apart, and wrought a profound influence on later
artists such as Manet, Dali and Picasso.
No other artist before or since has matched Goya’s ability to
“successfully make eloquent and morally urgent art out of human
disaster,” according to Hughes, who stakes Goya’s claim
on the cusp of art history as the last Old Master and the first true
Modernist. This may be so, but the key failure of the book is in its
illustrations; the reproductions are tiny and of a quality more in
keeping with tourist brochures – Goya’s dark, flailing masses
of human misery are hard to read at the best of times, but with these
reproductions we are forced to take Hughes’ word for it. And
a word to The Harvill Press – you’ve printed one politically
intriguing painting, Allegory of the Constitution of 1812, the wrong
way round.
Hughes has done a great deal of background research into Goya’s
world, and indeed he spends more time describing the historical figures,
events, social mores and philosophies of Bourbon Spain than the specifics
of Goya’s life. It never once gets boring, though, and every
detail – tangential though it may be – contributes to the
reader’s understanding of Goya’s preoccupations. Three Bourbon
kings are excoriated under Hughes’ scalpel, he laments the failure
of the Enlightenment (ilustración) to confront the tyranny
of the Inquisition, and the finer nuances of bullfighting are laid
bloodily bare. One mistake sticks out like a sore thumb, though –
for Ben Turpin (20th century cross-eyed comedian of the silent movies)
read Dick Turpin (18th century highwayman).
Throughout, the author is palbably – and sometimes irritatingly
– present. Every mention of Fernando VII comes complete with
Captain Haddock-style invective: “that tyrannous weasel”,
“detestable archreactionary”, “the slothful, thick-lipped
brute”, and my personal favourite, “graceless poltroon”.
Modern-day comparisons pop up here and there, loaded with prejudice,
and any reader who is opposed to fluoridation of water supplies or
to Thatcher’s treatment of trade unions, who believes in the
Immaculate Conception, or who is a fan of Diana Princess of Wales
or Picasso’s Blue Period (this little lot surely covers most
people), must prepare to suffer from friendly fire.
Bizarre bêtes noires aside, this book is a serious piece of
scholarship in seriously readable form. Hughes examines many of the
myths around Goya – that he had a passionate affair with the
much younger Duchess of Alba, that he was a life-long rebel, born
into peasant stock, and that he personally witnessed all the atrocities
of war and torture that appear in his work. Sadly, he was not and
did not. The worst of the Spanish Inquisition was over before Goya’s
birth, and although he came under its spotlight more than once, it
never involved more than official correspondence. Goya’s drawings
and etchings of interrogation and punishment were often based on historical
evidence, but sometimes imagined and, in the case of his drawing of
Galileo in shackles, misleading.
Hughes’ analysis of the pictures themselves is largely historical,
elucidating on the characters, context and events, all of which information
is much-needed in unpicking the meaning of often convoluted and ambiguous
images. His art-historical examination tends to boil down to two factors:
the surprisingly Neo-Classical nature of Goya’s compositional
approach, and the use and re-use of similar poses in different pictorial
contexts throughout the artist’s life.
For all the analysis and hard-headed scholarship, at its heart this
book is a labour of love, a votive offering to the spirit of Goya.
Catrìona
Black, Sunday Herald 19.10.03