Goya re-examined
Giants of death continue to pulverize entire towns. The "Black Paintings'" hysterical pitch of fever and terror had been foreshadowed with such works as "Colossus." This had been the approved story. But now it has been removed from Goya's oeuvre ("Prado says 'Colossus' not the work of Goya," July 7), how does this subtraction shade his step? We know the court painter of velvet aristocrats, the painter of a nude and thus unwitting fomenter of a tempest in a philatelic teapot, but as he made a drastic or not-so-drastic turn at the Peninsular War, Francisco Jos de Goya y Lucientes travelled through veils and curtains of shadow, shadows that stalk us at night and mock and frighten our living daylights. (And Manet and Picasso have lengthened and intensified these shadows). Embittered after all he had seen, Goya began cloistered works of ultimate terror.
The supposedly clumsy forearm gives birth to controversy and is characteristic of Goya's unsettling place. It is the first of seemingly valid reasons to reject "Colossus" from cannon, and despite the persuasiveness of Mr. Glendinning's argument, damning initials would appear to close off hope. (An extension of the argument might have been that he who is still an artist, still a pre-automatic painter, of Goya's stature, chooses his weapons with precision). One painting's subtraction from that brush is dwarfed beside the torn-out piles of thread his disappearance would pull. For instance, the Marquis of Pbol stands atop these ravelings. And without Goya my own gouaches dissolve as sugar in water.
The last century multiplied the echoes in whispers and shouts of outrages against which Goya painted. In the new, giants accelerate: They are steam powered and run on black and glistening coal and priceless petrol and are even computerized. (This is not to mention miserable Spanish dwarves who dial our death on modified cell-phones).
Even our delicious sleep is reduced to a guilty luxury, and shaken from it we glimpse, barely, black moments as if seen in caves. The nightmare rips away every hope, everything shored up against collapse, every politesse. We do not shake it. Goya is the ambiguous figure who gives witness to its destruction.
CHEVALIER DANIEL C. BOYER
Houghton
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Johnnybluebeard
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07-19-08 2:37 PM
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I had the pleasure of viewing these pieces in the Prado some years ago. Anyone who says the Colossus does not belong has an agenda. We have "sanitized" war for public viewing and consumption--no pictures of return caskets of fallen soldiers--and now we must begin to sanitize the world of art, especially the art that disturbs sensitive people like Williaminpelkie.
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williaminpelkie
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07-19-08 12:23 PM
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The idea of "miserable Spanish dwarves" dialing up death on cell phones certainly gave me pause! I avoid his work as it usually brings about a pschotic episode followed by a prolonged fugue state.
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