The Prado Museum
Goya the personal and the political: above left, the painter’s grandson Mariano; above right, “The Third of May, 1808.” Both are in “Goya in Times of War,” at the Prado until July 13
According to the New York Times there was a little orchestrated flurry of drama here 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 corner 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 you wonder how anyone like Goya — who, as the art critic John Berger once wrote, knew the appearances of things “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 Holofernes.
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 “The 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 told me, with a kind of rapture, that he 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 of 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 (it remains on view through July 13) is most memorable for pictures less famous, some rarely or never seen — still lifes and portraits — many from obscure collections, which Ms. 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 we identify with in the “Caprichos” and the “Disasters,” the laconic Goya who speaks to the cynic in us; 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.
Retreating into himself as the years passed, he exorcised plenty of ghosts. You see one in “The Giant,” which, by contrast with “Colossus,” is clearly authentic Goya, haunted, strange, heartbreaking. The giant sits, under a crescent moon, turned mostly away from us, his head gazing over one shoulder in our direction, as if alerted by some sound that we can’t hear, toward something we can’t see. Moonlight picks out his cheekbone, a muscled back, the shape of a knee.
He’s not menacing. He’s alone. His expression suggests something of the faraway, wide-eyed disbelief of the man in “The Third of May,” a look beyond words. These eyes are not white. They’re pools of black. Actually, it’s not white but light that Goya is so adept at varying. In the nocturnal half-light, the landscape here is a miraculous smudge unfolding as primordial space, stretching toward infinity.
Mr. Berger got Goya right on other scores as well. It’s less the darkness that holds terror than the light that discloses it, he noted. Yes, light equals truth, whose horrors might cause us to lose hope, except that we steal a march on our misfortune by having it brought out from the shadows.
That, anyway, is one virtue of Goya, whose art can glorify emperors and undress a duchess. “Seated Giant” shares a small room with prints and drawings — swift landscapes, microscopically precise portraits, among them a self-portrait of grim and breathtaking honesty. The range sums Goya up in a nutshell.
In the end, he was uncontainable, a kind of colossus himself.
AP
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