ART REVIEW : Goya’s ‘Sleep’ Laced With Reason, Emotion

The flame of Enlightenment rationality flickers behind each of the 217 haunting engravings and lithographs by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery. Titled “The Sleep of Reason,” after one of the most famous of these prints, this exhibition tells a peculiarly contemporary tale in which reason’s clear light sometimes shines brightly, but usually is extinguished by encroaching darkness.

Composed of beautiful first-editions, all but four of which were acquired by Pomona through a gift from Norton Simon, the show features about 80% of the prints the Spanish master made. The in-depth survey, organized by the gallery’s acting curator Steve Comba, focuses exclusively on works produced over the last 30 years of the artist’s life, after a near-fatal illness had robbed Goya of hearing and his eyes had begun to fail. Simultaneously disturbing and humorous, these contradiction-riddled pictures pose loaded questions about the fate and function of reason.

Four series account for all but six of the images. Celebratory portrayals of great moments from the history of Spanish bullfighting hang alongside unflinching depictions of the horrors of war. “La Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting)” and “Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War)” were undertaken for very different purposes: to entertain aficionados and to morally instruct broad audiences. But they are linked by their palpable fascination with violence, fanaticism and spectatorship.

In each of these two series of page-size etchings, chaos reigns equally and indiscriminately upon aggressors and victims. The 33 images in “La Tauromaquia,” published in 1816, include a disproportionate number of bulls goring matadors, picadors, horses, donkeys and spectators--even the mayor of Torrejon, whose front-row, afternoon diversion came to a bloody and final end when a bull leaped into the stands, wreaking havoc until it too was killed.

Completed in 1820 but not published until 1863, Goya’s “Los Desastres de la Guerra” takes viewers on a hellish journey through 80 graphic close-ups of anonymous savagery and suffering. Inspired by the six-year war between France and Spain, in which well-armed French soldiers ruthlessly slaughtered impoverished Spanish peasants until the invading forces were finally driven from the country, this suite of prints is relentless. Its unsentimental depiction of hand-to-hand barbarism and war’s long-term cruelties, like inconsolable bereavement and slow starvation, are exhausting and dispiriting.

Paired, these series outline the complexity and nuance of Goya’s understanding of rationality. Hardly an abstract, academic category that invites absolute distinctions to be drawn with distanced objectivity, his notion of reason includes a healthy dose of emotion and ambivalence. Put simply, it would be unreasonable to think of reason too restrictively.

The remaining two series leave no room for an outside position from which to judge or even safely view their captivating subjects. Published from 1797-99, “Los Caprichos (The Whimsies)” began as two sets of prints, a meandering sequence of fever dreams and a general satire attacking clerical hypocrisy, aristocratic privilege, institutional injustice and a rich panoply of human foibles.

As Goya worked on the two suites of etchings, they fused to form a layered, sometimes hilarious meditation on human greed and shortsightedness. Mismatched couples, grotesque caricatures, men with hen’s bodies and donkey-eared officials populate these prints, the goal of which, the artist wrote, was to “lead the mind through the night of human absurdity to the daylight of reason.”

Whether Goya’s images actually serve this uplifting purpose is an open question. Despite the straightforward moralism of his statement, his etchings suggest that the dark journey through absurdity rarely ends in daylight.

Unlike most moral parables, Goya’s inventive prints refrain from pointing fingers at culpable culprits. No formula is available to easily disentangle virtue from depravity. Instead, everyone is implicated in a murky gray-area from which escape must be found for oneself, on an individual basis.

Goya’s grim realism is fueled by its inclusion of the imagination’s irrepressible power. The artist’s sinister vision culminates in an enigmatic, untitled series commonly referred to as “Los Disparates (The Follies).” Larger and more lovingly crafted than any of his other etchings, the 18 on display build upon “Los Caprichos,” pumping up the psychological tumult and downplaying the social commentary.

In these fancifully malevolent works, people are stuffed in gunnysacks, men strap giant birds on their backs to fly through the night sky and the bodies of ghoulish couples fuse like mutant Siamese twins as leering crowds look on. Rationality seems to have little impact on the state of mind these fervid pictures describe.

Goya’s powerfully psychological prints still resonate today because they treat rationality with extreme flexibility, inviting logic and illogic to cross paths--and cross-pollinate--with hallucinatory frequency.

* Montgomery Gallery, Pomona College, 333 N. College Way, Claremont, (909) 621-8146, through Oct. 8. Closed Monday and Tuesday.