Goya: Spain’s One-Man Melodrama : Works blur the line between sense and madness

At some point in nearly everyone’s aesthetic education, the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya is their favorite artist. He came to history at a crossroads when a need for realism opened up to a desire for dreams--in the chaotic passage from the 18th to the 19th Century.

Goya died at 81, deaf and exiled to France in 1828. He stood in his corridor of time watching his nation vacillate between enlightened hope and inquisitorial repression. The French Revolution quickened his hopeful pulse. Napoleon’s invasion horrified his spirit. In the end, Spain’s mighty empire was gutted and the nation sank into a backwater of conservatism where it has remained.

Goya probably comes to each of us when we are still revolutionary idealists. We find him when we believe art can do good in the real world if the artist is daring. And there stands Goya depicting the King and Queen of Spain as venal piles of offal held in bags of brocade and silk. His prints become as familiar as our own youthful rage against the conventional stupidities of church and state, of social pretention and hypocrisy, of lust masked as love and greed disguised as charity.

He comes at a time when we still have comic-strip minds that want to simplify the world into smug and cozy caricature. Maybe last year our favorite artist was Daumier.

But we find something unexpected in Goya. As he skewers a young vixen for seducing an old man, we see he loves the girl and knows the old man as a brother. As he sneers at superstition he looks for witches under the bed. As he scolds society for its treatment of the insane we feel the spider of madness spinning in his own skull.

There is a streak of peasant fatalism in Goya that shrugs and says that’s just the way it is. He teaches ethical relativity without being a wimp. He shows us the fuzziness of the border between sense and madness, preparing us to cross over into modern art--into Expressionism and Surrealism.

As he pushes the boat into the dark waters he says, “Don’t worry. It’s something we’ve always known. Bruegel knew it. So did Bosch and the men who carved the gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals. Don’t worry.”

Finally he shows us that nothing he shows us would have the slightest effect if it were not for his astonishing pictorial genius--the striking massed shadows of the prints, the shimmering evanescent grays of the paintings. If we end by admiring Velasquez’s subtlety over Goya’s melodrama, well, Goya taught us to do that too.

Given Goya’s unique place in our hearts and in the history of art, any exhibition of his work must be approached with the hopeful nervousness of a meeting with an old love.

There has never been a major retrospective of Goya in the United States and likely never will be. The only way to get him full strength is to journey to Madrid to the Prado, where the experience of the art is unrepeatably revelatory. At the same time, Goya’s great print series, the “Caprichos,” “Disparates” and “Disasters of War,” are so widely reproduced and exhibited here that we know them indelibly.

Clearly, any attempt to do Goya in the here and now has its work cut out for it. The proof is “Goya and the Spirit of the Enlightenment,” on view at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, through March 26. It was seen at the Prado, where it must have appeared a bit redundant, and will move on to close at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 9-July 16. It will not (sigh) come to Los Angeles.

At first go, the roughly 150-work exhibition is a predictable letdown. For such a rare event we want a blockbuster icon or two, like “The Naked Maja” or “The Family of Charles IV,” and they are just not there.

Piffle. Came all this way through sleet and snow and don’t even get a clothed Maja.

Soon, however, disappointment thaws. Goya is a tough artist to water down, and the ensemble contains not only fine works but an encompassing idea. It attempts to put an artist often thought isolated and unique into the cultural context of his times.

What affrontery. How dare anybody try to make Goya a period artist. That’s like trying to say the utterly original Picasso was just a product of his times.

Take it easy. All artists are the spawn of their moment. They are shaped by it and in turn give shape to it, like a sculptor who is being sculpted while sculpting.

Grossly put, the thesis of the show and its fat scholarly catalogue is that Goya was in touch with the leading intellectuals of his time--people such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, whose portrait is on view. These people were steeped in notions of the French Enlightenment--the encyclopedists as well as Rousseau and Voltaire. Their rational humanism rubbed off on Goya and influenced his art.

Makes sense and is probably partly true. But Goya’s art proves he was never any form of ideologue. He was too much in touch with realities seen and unseen. And yet he was a child of his times.

All evidence points to a young Goya as an ambitious artist in a rococo manner who married his mentor’s daughter and sought conventional success as a court painter.

But his tumultuous and contradictory world forced another vision to come out of him. It resembles a modern vision except it is more humane, more like that of a great novelist--he’s a Spanish Tolstoy in some vague way but more haunted.

His painting “The Colossus” shows a vast naked giant striding away from a chaotic battlefield. It is a nightmare vision of his world but the way this exhibition is cast it is the portraits of individuals that become the most memorable and affecting.

He paints the Condesa de Chinchon. She is a pale red-head wearing a silken white gown. Hardly more than a child herself she is shown pregnant sitting in a gold chair, against a background of infinite blackness.

Idly we read about her in the catalogue. She was the daughter of an aristocratic family that had fallen on hard times.

There is an apparent non sequitur in the narrative.

The Queen of Spain, Maria Luisa, is a formidably ugly woman who has a lover named Manuel Godoy, an upstart. The queen has persuaded the king--Carlos IV--to make Godoy his most important minister. All is well except Godoy has taken a trashy young mistress, Pepita Tudo. Annoyed and jealous, the queen wishes to distract Godoy. Under the guise of improving his social position she comes up with the idea of marrying him off to the young Condesa Maria Teresa.

The match is made and presumably everybody is happy--except Goday retains his trashy mistress, openly entertaining guests at dinner with his wife on one side and Pepita on the other.

We look back to Goya’s portrait of the young wife and realize that he has already told us the story--not the narrative of course--but the essence: the girl’s terrible isolation, her naivete, her estate as a victim of larger forces. He does not sentimentalize her. She seems to be thinking, “I thought I was so wise--improving my condition in life and now I sit wondering just how long it will take me to go mad.”

It’s an extraordinary piece of work that Goya repeats for the whole dramatis personae of his world.

We take back what we said about Goya not being subtle.