Goya. The Bird-Men
From “The Proverbs” (Lefort No. 136)
Size of the original etching, 8⅝ × 12⅞ inches
Of the Disasters of War no prints exist prior to those of the set published by the Academy of San Fernando in 1863. Etched during 1810 and the succeeding years of the Peninsular War, the Disasters are regarded as the finest products of Goya’s needle. Yet he was sixty-four years old when he commenced them. Though he had subscribed to the Bonaparte régime and still held the position of Court painter, he lived apart from active affairs in the seclusion of his country home. The prints are inspired by his country’s sufferings, but he did not publish them. To do so would have been to raise a protest against the crime of the French invasion and to stir his countrymen to increased patriotism. Under the circumstances of his equivocal position Goya may have thought such a course impolitic. Perhaps he felt the national condition to be hopeless. At any rate, he closed himself around in an atmosphere of profound pessimism. “Was it for this they were born?” is the legend beneath one of the prints which shows a heap of mangled corpses. It is the note of the whole series—the criminal horror of war, and its futility. Nowhere else is the element of the macabre in his genius more fully revealed. The designs are in no sense illustrative; they are visions of his own brooding, projected against darkness and emptiness. Yet, just as in the Caprices he gave bone and flesh to the eery fabrics of his imagination, so by the magic of his needle his abstract imaginings of the enormity of war became visualized into concrete actuality.
Of Goya’s lithographs it must suffice here to mention the set of four prints, The Bulls of Bordeaux. They were executed in that city in 1825. For after the expulsion of the French by Wellington and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the person of Ferdinand VII, Goya again turned his coat. “For your treason you deserve to be hanged,” remarked the new king, “but you are a great artist and I overlook the past.” He was reappointed Court painter; but, broken in health and spirits, so deaf that he could no longer indulge his musical taste in playing, he obtained the king’s permission to retire to Bordeaux, where he was cared for by a Madame Weiss and her daughter. It was during this time that he visited Paris and was enthusiastically welcomed by Delacroix and the other Romanticists. When he drew The Bulls of Bordeaux he was in his seventy-ninth year and able to work only with the aid of a powerful magnifying-glass. Yet the prints in their intense and vigorous movement show no slackening of artistic power. He died three years later, in 1828, and was buried in the cemetery of Bordeaux. After lying there for seventy-one years, his body was claimed by his country and interred with honors in Madrid. For by this time the modern world of art had recognized Goya’s greatness and its own indebtedness to his genius.
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Goya’s etchings reveal him a great master of design. The versatility of his invention suggests the exuberance of nature, yet calculated art determines each composition. It is architectonic, organic, functional; possessing the quality of a built-up structure, with perfect correlation of its parts and absolute adjustment of means to end. Moreover, it carries the final mark of distinction in that it appears to have grown: it has the vitality, movement, and character of a living organism. It is discovered to be the product of a new mating of nature and geometry, inspired by a wider and more penetrating observation of the former and a more extended and imaginative use of the latter. Hence, at times it strangely anticipates what we are now familiar with in Oriental composition.
Most remarkable also is the plastic quality, which is realized not only in the ensemble but also in the component parts. Goya’s compositions are no mere patterning of surfaces, but an example of actual space-filling, in the true sense that they occupy the third dimension. The substance of his forms and their position in space are so concretely realized that they most actively excite the tactile sense. And yet, for all their concreteness, they are permeated with a quality of abstraction. Thus they fascinate alike by their actuality and their suggestion of a vision. They are frequently hideous, but in their capacity of sense-enhancement and in their stimulus to the esthetic intellectuality they are beautiful.
Goya. Good Advice