Goya

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.

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.

Goya was the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns. The Black Paintings presage surrealism and other aspects of the 20th century artistic vision. The series forms a star part of the Prado's collections.

Celebrated artist Francisco de Goya confronts demons real and imagined in this vivid portrayal of the end of his life. Francisco de Goya is considered one of the most important Spanish painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, last of the Greats and first of the modernists. But his sumptuous images stemmed from a mind in torment, especially later in his life. Goya: The Terrible Sublime is a graphic novel inspired by Goya’s life, in particular focusing on his final years, as he struggles with assorted physical ailments that threaten to take his mind, as well. Recovering from a serious illness in Cadiz, Spain, which has left him deaf, Goya suffers from terrible headaches, high fevers, and hallucinations, beset by visions of death that will become all too real with the advent of the Spanish War of Independence. Still, the monsters in his delusions are not real—but his friend Asensio Julia is, and he belongs to another world. From the mind of the terror master El Torres and the art of Fran Galán comes a terrifying story that brings readers into the artist’s world of madness and dark paintings, a historical miasma populated by recognizable figures like Manuel Godoy and the Duchess of Alba and swathed in an aesthetic of cobweb-shrouded palaces and beautiful grotesques living in the shadows. This unique graphic novel tells a horror story, melding the artist’s unique style and vision with the story of a man plagued by unreality. Yet even as the artist faces dreadful images of witchcraft and pure evil, he knows that he must not fall into what lurks beyond the dream of reason.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) created magnificent paintings, tapestry designs, prints, and drawings over the course of his long and productive career. Women frequently appeared as the subjects of Goya's works, from his brilliantly painted cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory to his stunning portraits of some of the most powerful women in Madrid. This groundbreaking book is the first to examine the representations of women within Goya's multifaceted art, and in so doing, it sheds new light on the evolution of his artistic creativity as well as on the roles assumed by women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain. Many of Goya's most famous works are featured and explicated in this beautifully designed and produced book. The artist's famous tapestry cartoons are included, along with the tapestries woven after them for the royal palaces of the Prado and the Escorial. Goya's infamous Naked Maja and Clothed Maja are also highlighted, with a discussion on whether these works were painted at the same time and how they might have originally hung in relation to one another. Focus is also placed on Goya's more experimental prints and drawings, in which the artist depicted women alternatively as targets of satire, of sympathy, or of admiration. Essays by eminent authorities provide a historical and cultural context for Goya's work, including a discussion on the significance of fashion and dress during the period. The resultant volume is surely to be treasured by all who admire Goya's art and by those who are interested in women's issues of his time.

Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability. He was born in 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small mountain village of a hundred inhabitants. As a child he worked in the fields with his two brothers and his sister until his talent for drawing put an end to his misery. At fourteen, supported by a wealthy patron, he went to Saragossa to study with a court painter and later, when he was nineteen, on to Madrid. Up to his thirty-seventh year, if we leave out of account the tapestry cartoons of unheralded decorative quality and five small pictures, Goya painted nothing of any significance, but once in control of his refractory powers, he produced masterpieces with the speed of Rubens. His court appointment was followed by a decade of incessant activity – years of painting and scandal, with intervals of bad health. Goya’s etchings demonstrate a draughtsmanship of the first rank. In paint, like Velázquez, he is more or less dependent on the model, but not in the detached fashion of the expert in still-life. If a woman was ugly, he made her a despicable horror; if she was alluring, he dramatised her charm. He preferred to finish his portraits at one sitting and was a tyrant with his models. Like Velázquez, he concentrated on faces, but he drew his heads cunningly, and constructed them out of tones of transparent greys. Monstrous forms inhabit his black-and-white world: these are his most profoundly deliberated productions. His fantastic figures, as he called them, fill us with a sense of ignoble joy, aggravate our devilish instincts and delight us with the uncharitable ecstasies of destruction. His genius attained its highest point in his etchings on the horrors of war. When placed beside the work of Goya, other pictures of war pale into sentimental studies of cruelty. He avoided the scattered action of the battlefield, and confined himself to isolated scenes of butchery. Nowhere else did he display such mastery of form and movement, such dramatic gestures and appalling effects of light and darkness. In all directions Goya renewed and innovated.

This book presents the first focused investigation of Francisco Goya's (1746–1828) graphic output. Spanning six decades, Goya’s works on paper reflect the transformation and turmoil of the Enlightenment, the Inquisition, and Spain's years of constitutional government. Two essays, a detailed chronology, and more than 100 featured artworks illuminate the remarkable breadth and power of Goya's drawings and prints, situating the artist within his historical moment. The selected pieces document the various phases and qualities of Goya's graphic work—from his early etchings after Velázquez through print series such as the Caprichos and The Disasters of War to his late lithographs, The Bulls of Bordeaux, and including albums of drawings that reveal the artist’s nightmares, dreams, and visions.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, was the most important Spanish artist of the last quarter of the 18th and first quarter of the 19th centuries, serving three generations of Spanish kings. During his six active decades he produced some 700 paintings, 900 drawings, and almost 300 prints, which reflect his rapidly changing world. This fully illustrated Grove Art Essentials title explores the artist's extraordinary and prolific career, which spanned the period from the late Rococo to Romanticism and, at the last, presaged Impressionism. Discover how Francisco de Goya, known by 1801 as the 'Apelles of Spain' has come to be regarded in the centuries since as a major master of international stature and the first 'modern' artist.