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Visiting the heights and the depths, with Goya as guide
There was a little orchestrated flurry of drama at the Prado a few sweltering days ago when the museum staged a news conference to announce what was hardly news: that "Colossus," the famous, much reproduced Goya painting of a giant terrifying a landscape, may not be a Goya after all. Experts had been questioning its authorship for years. Expert or not, anybody who bothered to look closely at the picture and not just glance at Goya's name on the label next to it, might have felt doubts.
The museum suggested that two initials, A. J., in the lower left comer of the picture, which have always been right there in plain sight but somehow overlooked, may belong to Asensio Juli, a Goya associate. On a stroll through the galleries the other afternoon, Manuela Mena, a longtime curator at the Prado, shook her head at all the badly drawn animals in the landscape. The giant, too. makes one wonder how anyone like Goya - - who, as the art critic John Berger once wrote, knew the appearances of tilings “in the very movement of his fingers and wrist” -- could have painted such a clumsy figure.
Fortunately, "Goya in Times of War” is running at the museum these days to make clear what real Goyas look like. It's much too big an exhibition, like so many shows. But then, an excess of Goya is not exactly an unbearable prospect.
After all, he is a trip. A couple of years ago the Frick Collection in New York presented a small survey of his final years, in Bordeaux. France, which included palm-size slivers of painted ivory. They were like talismans. Against a dark, wet ground, Goya let fall a drop or two of water. The resultant blobs and blotches invoked shapes, on top of which he devised miniature scenes of exquisite weirdness. The whites acted like flashbulb bursts. One caught the image of a screaming monk; another, a man picking at fleas; a third, Judith chopping off the head of Holofemes.
The Prado exhibition, for no special reason, brackets the years between the mid-1790s, when he was recuperating from the near-fatal illness that left him deaf, and 1820, before he fled Spain for France. It has as its ostensible excuse the refurbishment of "'Die Second of May, 1808" and "The Third of May. 1808,” the landmark pictures from 1814 about the Spanish uprising against French troops.
The sculptor Richard Serra saw the show recently and was amazed by all the different ways Goya painted white. “The Third of May,” in particular, depends on whites: under a black sky, the white of the shirt of the captive who kneels before the firing squad, arms flung open, is illuminated by the glare pf the square yellow-white lantern before him. The picture's punctum, the detail that lingers in the mind after registering the bloody pulp of the dead man's head in the foreground and the silent rows of bayonets and shakos, focused on their victim, is the semicircle of white in the Spaniard's eye, disbelieving, beseeching.
It can seem as if the whole of art history’ pivots on that expression, that image. After it came modernity’. But the show is most memorable for pictures less famous, some rarely or neverseen — still lifes and portraits -- many from obscure collections, which Mena, its curator, has finagled for the occasion.
These include swift drawings like “Cuantas Baras?” (“How Many Yards?”). It's a minor masterpiece of condensed, sardonic understatement, with a priest in a voluminous robe that, seen from the rear, gives him something of the creepy aspect of a bat. Then there are paintings like the portrait of Goya's grandson Mariano, standing, rosy-cheeked, beside his toy carriage, an image as tender as the priest's is ruthless.
That is the genius of Goya, not just to give equal weight to drawings and prints and paintings, to public and private pictures, but also to move so effortlessly between cruelty and love. The human condition was never whole. Goya made clear. It splintered into fragments, refused order. Society verged on chaos, then inevitably succumbed. An artist bears witness, unflinchingly. This is the Goya art enthusiasts identify with in the “Caprichos" and the "Disasters," the laconic Goya who speaks to the cynic in all; but there was also the Goya who painted those portraits and landscapes of such surpassing grace and dignity -quiet pictures that found redemption in exceptional people and places. The Romantic Goya, who prompts comparison to Goethe.
Source: The New York Times