It was an opportunity to illuminate the artistry of Goya, and he missed it

Francisco Goya: A Life

Evan S. Connell

Counterpoint: 246 pp., $26

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Evan S. CONNELL is a talented writer who gave us “Son of the Morning Star” and “Deus Lo Volt!” -- imaginative turns on Gen. George Custer and the Crusades. In “Francisco Goya: A Life,” you expect that Connell would give us something novel on the great Spanish artist. But his unorthodox book is more frustrating than enlightening, and his characteristic impressionistic style does not do justice to this precursor of modernism in art who remains a vital contemporary force 200 years after his death.

Through no fault of Connell’s, his book also suffers next to “Goya,” a comprehensive work published a few months earlier by art historian and writer Robert Hughes, that is nearly twice as long and has a multitude of illustrations, although a few are lamentably small.

Connell’s book has a cover illustration and a frontispiece, Goya’s shimmering portrait of the lovely 21-year-old Maria Teresa, countess of Chinchon. That’s all. So a book about a painter and etcher whose work still astounds and confounds the world must be read with another illustrated book of Goya’s work at hand.

Another comparison, though odious, is inevitable. Hughes goes right to Goya’s art. He tries to tell us what we see in Goya’s work, why it moves us and why Goya is a great painter. In his long career, Goya rendered subjects from the kings and nobles of the royal court in all their ungainly insipidity to bullfights to human follies and the disasters of war, to the menacing and obscure “black paintings” of his old age, such as “Saturn Devouring His Son.”

In the etching series “The Disasters of War,” Goya is pitiless, exempting neither the invading French nor the defending Spaniards from the burdens of the brutality and terror of war. In these etchings, and in two commanding paintings, “Second of May, 1808” (a battle in a Madrid street) and “Third of May, 1808” (the execution of a prisoner a Madrid street by the conquering French), Goya created some of the most powerful antiwar images ever produced by the hand of man. In his book, Hughes aptly likens them to certain photographic images of the Vietnam War, like Eddie Adams’ picture of the Vietnamese general shooting a prisoner in the head.

By contrast, Connell assumes a modernist stance of distance and irony. He plunges us into the middle of the world of Goya’s 18th and early 19th century Spain with too few signposts to tell us where we are. Yes, the Inquisition is there, in its still-terrifying decrepitude, as are the stifling strictures of a Spanish society that has largely avoided the Enlightenment. Connell quotes a number of commentators on Goya’s work and their reactions to it but mostly declines to assess it himself. His book is filled with the personages of Goya’s day, the painter’s travels and acquaintances, but a sense of time and place and his location in them is oddly missing. Connell conveys the impression of a bedlam Spain overrun by Napoleon and Wellington, but the whole composition seems somehow out of focus.

In an effort to make the road to the past smoother for the contemporary reader, Connell digs some annoying stylistic potholes. He writes that the duchess of Alba, whose portrait by Goya is one of his most recognized works, “attracted men like ants to a honey pot.” When he was invited to go to France on a pension in his old age, Connell says, “In good spirits, therefore, the old curmudgeon saddled up and headed north.”

Connell at times displays a lack of scrupulous judgment that an art critic must bring to his craft. He notes that books containing caricatures by William Hogarth and others were available in Spain in 1800, then asserts that “several plates” among Goya’s “ ‘Caprichos’ (Follies) can be traced to Hogarth and to other English artists.” Then he writes: “Similarity, yes. Influence, yes. Plagiarism?” That is a frivolous question to ask about any serious artist, most of whom have borrowed, copied or adapted throughout the history of art. They have always stood on one another’s shoulders, or peeked over them.

Connell ends his book, after a melodramatic speculation involving the duchess of Alba, with a quotation about Goya from a later commentator, Charles Baudelaire: “He painted the black magic of our civilization.” Amusing, but it would have been more forceful to have said he painted its horror.