An End to Nightmares

John Haber
in New York City

Francisco de Goya: Last Works

Plan on some extra time at the Frick, for its exhibition of Francisco de Goya's last works. You might need it to get past the shock of the first room.

Goya's earlier work has its shocks, from his unnerving Disasters of War to his painting in black of Saturn Devouring His Children. Yet his ability to startle only grew, from a vision on canvas of his own close encounter with death to experiments with lithography, barely twenty years after its invention. It includes the human comedy that he found in exile, on the streets of Bordeaux—and within his own vivid memories and wild imaginings. It includes the black carbon smears of his late ivory miniatures or the still darker struggles in a bull ring.

Goya's last gasp—and then some

I had to draw back, to appreciate the community that Francisco de Goya has brought to life. I stood amid them, side by side on three walls—the physician, the bookish international trader, the architect, the attorney's wife, the playwright and poet, the judge turned schoolmaster, the artist himself, and the cleric who had given him refuge from political terror. They define the ideal of a liberal elite.

Goya presents them simply, with a restricted palette and a seemingly casual brush. In contrast with the pale green backgrounds and sharp red highlights, his deep blacks take on the semblance of a rich brown. Blue shadows veer into a hint of beard stubble, while the palette knife adds a translucent white to sleeves. Thin scratches after paint is all but dry add that extra sparkle. Brush marks are especially noticeable in a female portrait from the permanent collection. That portrait provided the impetus for the show, curated by Jonathan Brown and Susan Grace Galassi.

Elbows thrown out, a woman engages the viewer with little more than a glance. Others read intently, and one has his writing before him, but no one seems lost in thought. For people like this, books focus the mind rather than induce a dreamy introspection. They come across as warm, informal, and intellectual, but also active, composed, and unafraid. One could mistake the last painting, of a milkmaid, for a portrait as well.

Their vigor appears even in despair. The very first painting on display shows the artist tended by his physician. The sick man, in the pose of a dead Christ, grasps his sheet for warmth, but also as if to contrive in his own burial. The doctor, his eyes in menacing shadow, lifts a cup to Goya's lips—at once the healing drug, the chalice of last rites, and the poison that will bring them on. Three figures behind them, barely distinct from the darkness, could serve as physician's assistants or demons to welcome the invalid into the underworld. Goya completed the painting as a thank-you for his recovery, but with thanks like that, who needs satire?

The painting's subject may be dying, but the artist has the skill and edgy vision to bring it alive. It is just the first of several compact, well-focused groupings of his art. The exhibition's three rooms include the oils, painted between 1820 and 1824. It then continues until his death in 1828, with selections from his last two drawing albums, miniatures, and lithographs. Each stage comes with shocks of its own.

I had expected the work of a man in his seventies, on the brink of exile. I anticipated a painter taking stock of himself, Spain, and humanity itself. I expected more of his harsh satire and my own worst fears, as in his Black Paintings. And one does find that, but also a confident artist still looking, imagining, and experimenting.

Beggars and choosers

One has every reason to expect a broken man. His first severe illness, in 1790, had left him a far cry from the young man who, rumor has it, fought as a toreador. He suffered deafness and the loss of children. A Goya drawing shows his dissolute surviving son with vacant eyes, a loose jaw, and a patchy cloak that threatens to overcome him entirely. Of course, it also shows the artist's keen objectivity and the increasing range of technique in his final years. Edvard Munch foresaw his own death in Between the Clock and the Bed, which also inspired Jasper Johns. Goya makes them tame by comparison.

When it comes to Goya, one can hardly separate the personal toll from the political one. The royal painter since 1799, he had witnessed the vagaries of the court, the devastation of war, and the looting of art as Napoleon crossed Spain on his march to Portugal. After five years of occupation, a new monarch took command, his reign then interrupted by a military coup. His return to power brought deadly purges, the triumph of the Inquisition, and the end of liberal hopes. Along with friends and patrons, Goya chose exile in Bordeaux during an amnesty in 1824. Even that did not bring rest, as the artist traveled first to Paris, then twice to Madrid and back to see his son.

One imagines a man in his late seventies on those long journeys across the mountains, in search of those who cared for him and never at home. One imagines him in Paris, where J. A. D. Ingres and Eugène Delacroix had shown together at the Salon of 1824, dividing the art world between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and where Théodore Géricault had died only months before. One imagines him unable to meet with these artists but recognizing their breakthroughs, with more than a little pride, as already his own. On imagines him on the streets of Bordeaux, unable to speak French or to hear a word. However, he could still observe, and for Goya that almost amounts to listening.

His prodigious output of drawings continued. They mix memories and discoveries, still pungent, of the human comedy. But who can say where observation leaves off and the comedy begins? Goya effaces the very distinction between social realism and fantasy. The weariness, austerity and grandeur of old age may recall one of his favorite artists, Rembrandt, as in a sleepy reclining nude among the miniatures. Yet his eye takes leave of the studio, for the street or the skies.

Subjects seem strikingly specific, even familiar. A fashionably dressed man roller-skating could pass for a roller blader today, with the same egotism and prowess. Even when he returns to older motifs, he gives them a contemporary or fantastic twist. Giambattista Tiepolo in Italy or François Boucher in France portrayed figures on swings, as part of a romantic idyll. Goya's swinger has somehow soared into the clouds, and no one can foresee the way back down.

Other images have more humble roots, but folk tales, too, have an uncertain origin and sometimes uncertain ending. In one drawing, an elegantly clothed fox encounters a dumb-faced beggar. Goya takes equal delight in the fox's snout, the sheer white of his cloak, and beggar's open expression. Who is taking advantage of whom?

Shades of black

For all his torments or even because of them, he arrived in Bordeaux with a greater empathy for ordinary men and women than ever. Even when his imagination runs to freaks, witches, and dreamers, he hardly gives in to despair. A lunatic reaches so forcefully through the bars of brutal confinement that one cheers for him before backing away.

Goya's sympathies comes across particularly in his treatment of women. They endure terrible husbands and indifferent overseers. A female giant towers over a pale gray mass of gaping men, and one has no trouble labeling them as the freaks and fools. The confusion of gawking and responsibility recalls another giant so many years later, in a photograph by Diane Arbus. In the miniatures, he returns to two legends of victimization and independence—Susanna at her bath, surrounded by the leering elders, and Judith taking deadly revenge. Artemisia Gentileschi would feel a kindred spirit.

Yet the very last drawings do look more fantastic, and the ivories and lithographs express one last burst of violent folly. The miniatures recall images from the Black Paintings. The bullfight scenes in lithograph grow messier each time, their loose figure eight dissolving into chaos. Edouard Manet admired paintings like the one here on loan from the Getty, but his Dead Toreador looks truly noble by comparison.

If Goya is always looking, both within himself and without, his changing imagery relates, too, to his experiments with technique. To some extent, he is simply adapting to the physical limitations of age, by giving up his thin, controlled line for something looser and less exacting. Yet he is also open to new media and to chance.

Even before his lithographs, his drawings adopt a closely related tool, black crayon. A last stroke of jagged black might lend a nasty caricature to eyes or deaden a gesture with a layer of fabric, like that on his own son. His miniatures do not bother with a fine brush and traditional stippling. He smears black on near squares of ivory, from two to three inches on a side, and takes it from there. Rubbing with his thumb helps shape the figures, scratches dig through for white highlights, and white watercolor adds still more. The overall black and white makes the narrow touches of color stand out with unusual intensity.

One can see why his style had such an influence on Edouard Manet. The Frenchman must have loved the bold but feathery touch of the palette knife. He would have understood the freshness with which Goya's portraits evoke a circle of friends, much like Manet's own sitters. He would have admired, too, a growing conception of paint as a single surface, rather than worked up by layers after a large-scale drawing. As if in rebuke to Vermeer's Milkmaid, Goya's adds more color, a fluid pose, and patchy brushwork closer to Impressionism—enough that some have doubted Goya's hand.

Empathy and horror

Manet would have appreciated Goya's variety of black, but he could not have understood his varieties of blackness. Where Manet's generation documents a new avant-garde, a culture of writers and artists within a newly comfortably urban middle class, Goya's eye roams all over the map. Where they would have related fully to either his liberalism or his alienation, they never even saw how Goya's nightmares again take over from everyday life. Perhaps Paul Cézanne comes closest, but Cézanne's development hinges on his sublimating the thick outlines and explicit sexuality of his first paintings.

Goya's ambiguity makes him a modernist before the idea existed. His protests speak on behalf of his subjects as well as against them, with revulsion but without cynicism, coming near to love for all the howls and grimaces. Work this restless also makes it hard to pin down what he saw—and, at times, what he believed.

He could have observed his carnival entertainers, madmen, and beggars at first hand, in a culture that put them all on public display. They served at once as entertainment and figures of sympathy. They stood as object lessons in a moral and class war, with the sides as bitter and as jumbled as in America now.

Michel Foucault used that public display to criticize liberalism—from Goya's lifetime through the present. He saw mechanisms of repression in the madhouse and festival ground. Goya, though, made them his very subject, just as he looks objectively at the madman through the bars. If he felt the tension between his liberal sympathies and his horror at human folly and cruelty, he could turn that tension into art.

As with the Memling portraits this past fall, the Frick defies expectations for a city's cherished refuge. When museums look at a major artist, they bring the strengths and weaknesses of a strong point of view. The Met's recent shows of Fra Angelico and now Antonello da Messina broke ground, but also tiptoed around an artist's most important work. With the early Italian Renaissance, the Met focused on Fra Carnavale, a lesser-known artist from its own holdings. With Leonardo, Peter Paul Rubens, or Vincent van Gogh, it sensibly limited itself to their drawings. Yet it has seriously distorted the Northern Renaissance and Italian Renaissance.

By sticking to eight critical years and refusing to sacrifice its ambitions, the Frick shows Goya experimenting with painterly technique and media, in ways that look past his central role in Romanticism to his influence on Manet and beyond. It shows him pursuing his nightmare imagery, all but prefiguring Odilon Redon or Surrealism. It shows him building on his closely observed satire, prefiguring even contemporary political art. Can the Frick enter the mainstream without bankrupting its ideals—or itself? Time will tell, but call Goya's last works a good start.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Goya's Last Works" ran at The Frick Collection through May 14, 2006. Related articles look at Goya in the Metropolitan Museum, Goya drawings and prints, and Goya portraits before his illness and at the height of his reputation.