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Imagining the Truth
John Haberin New York City
Francisco de Goya's Graphic Imagination
The Spanish Manner: Goya and Spanish Drawings
I could understand if you were eager to enter "Goya's Graphic Imagination" at the Met. First, though, you must get past the artist. Ten years after a show of Spanish drawings, it puts Francisco de Goya front and center.
There is no getting around it. His self-portrait, facing front, rests on a pedestal just outside the show's three rooms and its more than a hundred prints and drawings. He looks weathered enough in his fifties, but vigorous, from his sharp eyes to his long, scraggly hair. 
There is little sign that he has already had his first brush with death, an illness that cost him his hearing but definitely not his sight. The Met contrasts his focused expression with his careless appearance. Yet both accord with the popular image of an artist today, and he could almost have invented it.
Could they hold the secret as well to his graphic imagination? His hair and his eyes are the work's darkest areas and twin centers. Goya spares only a trace or two for his clothing and little beyond his head. That, too, is part of his studied indifference—and the study and the indifference alike signal what mattered most to him, the unvarnished truth. But what kind of truth? The show has one asking where his observation ends and his imagination begins.
Participant and observer
Not that Francisco de Goya believed any less in the truth. He may have been the first modern artist, but not in the least postmodern. He created such series as Los Caprichos—where he means the folly of human caprices as well as the Italian tradition of the capriccio, or display of the artist's fancy. When he calls a print Truth Has Died, he means it as the ultimate accusation. He was first and foremost a moralist, and many a print bears a long title to spell out its moral. Still, honesty extends to his role in the human comedy as well.
Look again at that self-portrait, from somewhere between 1795 and 1797. His eyes testify to one kind of truth, the observer's. Meanwhile his hair testifies to another, what he sees. A second self-portrait, a study for Los Caprichos as little as a year later, has him taking care for his appearance as a dandy, but again with knowing eyes. He is just another sneering actor in the human comedy, but an observer as well. And that twin stance as participant and observer runs through his work on paper.
Goya rarely appears in person. That first portrait sketch was for his eyes only. He has, though, plenty of alter egos. He got a late start as a painter, after a trip to Italy and employment in the design of tapestries. Also on his return to Spain, he found a model in its greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, and set about studies after the Baroque artist. When Goya singles out the figure of Don Diego de Acedo, a court jester, he may have had himself in mind, too.
Entering the picture means taking responsibility. He shares that bushy hair with the subject of his most ominous print, a seated giant from 1818, and he could be the dreamer in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters or, hovering over him in a sketch, his dream. Who knows what art can unleash? When he turns to a series on the bullfight, La Tauromaquia, some think that it shows his love of the game, and legend has him at one time a toreador. Yet there is no getting around his account of its cruelty. An early tapestry design centers on a blind guitarist, and blindness must have been his greatest fear, while the guitarist as seducer and court entertainer keeps coming back.
Goya had ample reason to wonder at the world's skilled seducers and at his place among them. He never published his most frightening series, The Disasters of War from around 1815, based on Napoleon's invasion of Spain and the Peninsula War that followed. The Met's curator, Mark McDonald, notes that the prints concern not great heroes and greater villains, but the suffering of ordinary people, to which the king was likely indifferent. One might better ask who waged wars like these in the first place. Still, Goya had been the court painter for more than fifteen years. Not that it kept him from singling out the perpetrators and the nightmares.
When he shows a young man hitting on a woman, as Even Thus He Cannot Make Her Out, she is not altogether discouraging. Not that Goya was any less concerned for sexism, and women bear the brunt of the disasters of war. He just cannot see human behavior in black and white. Still, he reserves his sharpest criticism for hypocrisy and authority. That includes the Inquisition, but also the day-to-day work of the law. Perhaps his first independent print is a garroted man. The man could almost be smiling.
Folly and suffering
Goya's honesty makes him prescient today. When a figure breaks up a quarrel only to beat both parties soundly, the artist could be protesting police violence on behalf of Black Lives Matter. When he fears that truth itself has died, he could be thinking of politics after Fox News and Donald J. Trump. Saturn Eating Her Children, a late successor in paint to the sleeping giant? Talk about which generation will pay for climate change. Comparisons are cheap and easy, not to mention misleading, but they have much to do with Goya's staying power.
I had not thought of him as half as popular as other museum stalwarts, but he has had no shortage of exhibitions—and I have already covered Goya in the Met, Goya's late paintings, his portraits of the Altamira family, and those Spanish drawings (so do follow links to past reviews for more). Why yet again? The museum can point to the place of works on paper in his output, including some three hundred prints and nine hundred drawings. It has ample loans, but it can boast of its remarkable holdings. It arranges things roughly chronologically, as a career survey. It also arranges things by series and notebooks, because Goya thought of them as distinct projects, too.
On the one hand, it helps in understanding how he worked. He could depict figures in mass and in depth, especially in the early tapestry studies. But then like Rembrandt he became less and less interested in what one might call drawing. He rarely outlines a subject, rather than let careful shading and sudden splashes of ink add up. He does not even distinguish prints from drawings all that much. Many a study begins as an etching or, later on, an aquatint or lithograph, but then he applies the fine point of a brush or a wash.
On the other hand, the show has limited insights into Goya's paintings, because prints and drawings were for him their own medium. On canvas, he turned out individual portraits, but almost never on paper. He has instead the series and the nightmares. They may anticipate his terrifying Black Paintings, but his late drawings in fact become clearer and cleaner, with greater contrasts—with black as unsurpassed darkness and white as a redeeming vision. As clouds gather overhead, for God Save Us from Such a Bitter Fate, a diagonal divides the composition in two. Figures may be lit from behind, even as a still greater light falls on the front of their dress.
Above all, the works bring out his central concerns for human folly and suffering, particularly of women. And again, it is hard to separate the two. The victim of torture is forced to wear a dunce cap, like yet another court jester. Late notebooks have a madman straining at the bars of his cell, but also drunkards, acrobats, and one last blind singer. A late series includes cruel, merry, and ridiculous follies, daring you to tell one from another—and this series, too, remained unpublished. Maybe T. S. Eliot was right, that humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Last, they show Goya himself, the participant and observer. His meeting of observation and the imagination is more of what makes him an early Romantic and modern. Any number of works show the idiocy of quacks and patent medicine. Yet he left Spain for France, four years before his death in 1828, in search of Bordeaux's healing waters (or so he claimed, although he may merely have wished at last to escape the court, at the price of exile). He must have walked the streets unable to speak the language, but then he was deaf. Then, too, he may have felt relieved at the isolation after the follies and responsibilities of a court painter.
Goya in Spain
A decade before, the Frick wanted you to know something else about his drawings, too: Goya was Spanish. Not that you were in doubt, given the most famous Spanish artist before Pablo Picasso, and the Frick has done as much as any institution to make sure of that. More than four years later, its focus on Spain continues with its newly cleaned portrait by, shall we say, the runner-up, Diego Velázquez. First, though, it asks to bridge the two with drawings from Baroque Spain and Goya himself. "The Spanish Manner" amounts to two distinct shows, each with its own room, but more than a short corridor connects them.
Jusepe de Ribera in the 1620s draws a bat heading straight for the viewer. Even without a human ear below each wing, it carries the shock of an experience that, I trust, you will never have. Yet for all its strangeness, it is a study in anatomical precision. The furry mammal looks as familiar as house mice, and legend has it that a bat actually landed on a patron's helmet. A Latin inscription marks the entire sheet as most likely a study for a coat of arms. Artifice and fantasy get along just fine with naturalism, practicality, and solid workshop training.
Much else before Romanticism lives in just that world, between the miraculous and the real. It allows a lesser-known artist, Antonio del Castillo, to make a solid figure study out of a gaunt Saint Jerome. It contributes to the sweeter finish of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and it helps Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra lend Murillo's religious ardor to peasants. Neither Velázquez nor Francisco Zurbarán appear, but otherwise nearby museums suffice for a decent Baroque survey. Few drawings by those two survive, in part because of how they worked—and in part because because Spanish collectors long showed little interest in drawings. Lots (in both senses of the word, auction fans) are lost.
Lots else, though, comes right out of Goya's playbook. An auto-da-fé, like a martyrdom (by Vicente Carducho) with a dog prominently enjoying the show, anticipates his distrust of piety and the madness of crowds. Ribera's precision extends an open-mouthed satyr or a profile—with another tiny man resting on his head. He accentuates the difference between David and Goliath, as if the fallen giant belonged in a freak show. The room ends with a Holy Ghost by Francesco Bayeu, looking so very much like a life study. Just down the hall Goya is waiting, in a self-portrait from just three years later—fashionable, dour, and gentlemanly, but also soon after bitter illness left him deaf.
Some years earlier, the Frick showed late Goya not as a tired, cynical fantasist, but a fine and vigorous observer. Here he moralizes to his heart's content, but with ambiguous morals. A nun's hurry to shed her robe could mean the dread weight of religious orders—or of harsh laws against them. A man, striding across rocks and water, could be abducting a woman or rescuing her. Goya embraces victims, like the mutilated man hung in the sack of his clothes. Yet he depicts human sympathy, too, in prisoners joined in mutual support or shepherds at rest beside a sheep in calm profile.
Humanity still has more than its share of fools. A man exposes his butt to a woman quite eager to see it, a woman clutches her eggs like a proverbial wet hen, men masquerade as asses, and many more hide behind crowds. And the artist relishes them, with dry scratches for a torturer's flesh or dots for eyes almost like anime. The Frick's painting of men at a forge turns out to have begun on paper with a freer stance and tauter arms. Black washes create a beggar's shadow, a nun frightened by a guitar-playing ghost, or the dark landscape closing in on a nude. Goya sees everything in black and white, except for human beings.
"Goya's Graphic Imagination" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 2, 2021, "The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya" at The Frick Collection through January 9, 2011. Related articles look at Goya in the Metropolitan Museum, Goya's last paintings, and Goya portraits before his illness and at the height of his reputation.