Crashing into Goya

“Sometimes you are just scared of writing about the objects in your deepest affection,” said Robert Hughes, reflecting on the 50-year artistic love affair that finally produced his latest book, on Spanish painter Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes. “I had a crisis in confidence in my abilities as a writer. I thought I probably wasn’t good enough to carry this one off, to really handle him, to do justice to him. If you do a book about Goya and you screw it up, you can hear him laughing.”

It’s a startling confession from a famously fiery writer who might be presumed to have no fears, particularly of long-dead artists. In a world in which real men are not art critics and art critics are not stars, Hughes is a two-fisted anomaly. An Australian-born, macho guy with a formidable intellect, a love of lusty humor and an immensely readable style, he became America’s best-known art critic during his three-decade tenure at Time magazine, which ended two years ago.

Equally skeptical of the art world’s entrenched royalty, heirs apparent and court jesters, Hughes writes what he thinks about art -- and everything else that piques his interest. At 65, he has turned out sweeping histories of Australia and Barcelona, opinionated surveys of modern art and American art and a devastating polemic on American politics and culture in “The Culture of Complaint.”

But it took a near-death experience for Hughes to come to grips with Goya. A Spanish court painter and acute social observer whom Hughes regards as “the archetype of the politically engaged artist,” Goya lived from 1746 to 1828 and created a huge body of work: portraits of rulers and their families, prints portraying atrocities of war and absurdities of human behavior, nightmarish paintings of witches and monsters. Struck deaf by a mysterious disease in midlife, he worked for 30 more years, leaving an artistic legacy that bridges the chasm between Old Master painting and modern Expressionism.

Hughes also got back to work after dealing with a personal crisis. He had planned to write a book on Goya for many years, but it didn’t get off the ground until late May 1999 -- when he nearly died in a head-on automobile collision in western Australia. As he writes in the first chapter of his book, “Driving Into Goya,” the artist appeared to him in his post-accident delirium and cruelly mocked his inability to realize the long-contemplated book.

“There was only one way out of this humiliating bind,” he writes, “and that was to crash through. Or so it seemed. Through all the pain and psychic confusion, Goya had assumed such importance in my subjective life that whether I could do him justice in writing or not. I couldn’t give up on him.”

Hughes was smitten with Goya’s work in his youth, when he purchased an inexpensive, poor-quality version of the etching “The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters” from the “Caprichos” series. Goya’s depiction of himself, besieged by a bestiary of midnight terrors, seemed to reflect Hughes’ teenage fears. As he looked at more of Goya’s work, he found other personal connections.

“He seemed to incarnate a revolt against established authority,” Hughes said on a recent visit to the Getty Center, where he gave a lecture on Goya. “I was raised in a family that was very Catholic and I felt very strongly, as a not very good little Catholic, that it was incredibly venturesome for this 18th century man to launch these brilliant attacks against the temporal power of the church and to mock the priests.

“There is one etching in the ‘Disasters of War’ series that shows the pope walking along a slack rope that has all these knots and is obviously on the point of precipitating into the jaws of the crowd below. It has an inscription that says ‘May the rope break.’ If I had shown that to one of the priests then, half a century ago when I was in Jesuit school, they would have been horrified and possibly punished me.”

Hughes’ family hoped that he would go into law. Instead, he studied architecture, worked briefly as a cartoonist and got his start as an art critic at a small magazine in Sydney. He moved to London in the mid-’60s and established himself with critiques published in British newspapers and broadcast on the BBC. Time magazine hired him in 1970, and he moved to New York, still his principal residence.

Hughes’ accident left him with a shattered leg, a damaged hip, a crushed elbow, punctured lungs, and broken ribs, collarbone and sternum. Now, after a dozen operations and 3 1/2 years of healing, he walks with a cane and uses a wheelchair to cover distances.

“The only good thing about this is that I get through airports more quickly,” he said, as an aide wheeled him from the gallery, where the J. Paul Getty Museum displays its Goya paintings, to the auditorium, where he would deliver his lecture to a packed house.

Well, maybe not the only good thing. The accident pushed him into getting down to business on the Goya book, despite his physical condition.

“I had done some research,” Hughes said. “I had a fair few books to assimilate and I had seen a fair few paintings. But what it really came down to was just some very intensive looking. I spent a lot of time at the Prado, where they referred to me as ‘el cojo’ -- the cripple.”

It was a term of endearment, Hughes said. “It’s just not true that specialists resent the intrusion of non-experts in their territory. Goya-istas were very happy to share their knowledge, provided I showed them respect.”

That respect often is spiced with humor. While testing the Getty auditorium’s sound system before his lecture, Hughes stepped up to the microphone and announced that Goya is “the last Old Master, the first Modern and almost as famous as Jeff Koons.” During the public presentation, he noted that the Duchess of Alba, as portrayed by Goya, bears a close resemblance to Cher.

An evolving process

True to form in the book, Hughes sprinkles erudition with slang -- while distilling a vast amount of research, dispelling myths and changing some of his ideas.

“I used to think, for instance, that he was the lover of the Duchess of Alba, which I’m now sure is not true,” he said. “Their friendship was real and quite deep but more complicated that that. I also thought of Goya as an enemy of authority. But how did I square that with the fact that he worked for all those kings? I persisted in believing, against any real evidence, that those royal portraits -- particularly the great group portraits of Carlos IV and his wife and their horrible son -- were acts of satire.

“But that’s just inconceivable,” Hughes said. “Why would we think Goya would be exempt from censure? Kings, queens and princes may not be tremendously smart, but one thing you can be certain of is that they are fairly vain.” Goya could not have gotten away with ridiculing the royals, as is often thought, Hughes contends. Unattractive as some of his royal subjects may look, they probably were portrayed in a flattering light.

As for the theory, put forth by Spanish art historian Juan Jose Junquera, that Goya did not paint, near the end of life, the horrific images known as the “Black Paintings” on the walls of his country house, Hughes dismisses it quickly.

“If Goya didn’t paint the ‘Black Paintings,’ who did?” he asks. “Junquera’s nominee is Javier, Goya’s son. It’s true that Javier is referred to as a painter by his father when he wrote a letter to get him a royal pension, but that could mean anything or nothing. If he was a painter, none of his paintings have survived. How could he have painted this cycle of amazing power? I don’t believe it. You have to work up to something like that, and working up to it leaves traces.”

Hughes’ book is a highly personal biography, woven into a cultural epic that provides a historical, political and social context for the art. But he seems to take the greatest pleasure in describing the works of art in a style that bears no resemblance to academic prose or art-world jargon.

Of “Carlos IV in Hunting Clothes,” a 1799 portrait, he writes: “Goya has endowed him with a portly dignity, if not with any flattering signs of intelligence.”

His 1785 portrait of Countess Maria Josefa de la Soledad sends a different message: “He did not paint her as in any way a conventionally pretty woman -- the face is a little too sharp-boned for that, the nose too long, the mouth a trifle thin -- but the countess’s eyes sum you up with a level and piercing gaze, and her posture, one hand holding its fan and the other resting on the knob of a cane or parasol, bespeaks complete self-possession.”

“You’ve got to describe,” Hughes said. “That’s the way you induct the reader into an active relationship with the text. And if you don’t get it right, if what you write has no chance of surviving as literature, that’s the end of it. It’s writing before it’s anything else.”

As for his method, “I just do it,” Hughes said. “I really don’t have any powers as a theoretician and I’ve never missed them much. I had a philosophical education from the Jesuits, but I’m not a philosophical type. I’ve got too much to write.”

What’s next?

“I have often thought how worthwhile it might be to do a proper biography of Delacroix,” he said, referring to 19th century French artist Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix. “There is such a rich social and cultural context, and one that is so completely different to Goya’s. But I’m sure if I started that, I would be three-quarters of the way into it and it would turn out that some [Frenchman] had written something brilliant that had just been translated and rendered all my efforts worthless.”

Still, he had the same fear about Goya, Hughes said.

“The good thing about being a writer is that if you are a real writer, no one is going to write the same book as you. They might get some things right that you got wrong, but it won’t be the same book.”