A Review
Goya’s Graphic Imagination curated by Mark McDonald is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and presents over 100 drawings and prints that reflect the expressions of an independent mind whose charisma evokes those Aristotelian feelings of pity and fear. Although Franciso Goya became the court painter of King Charles IV of Spain in 1789, it was not long before France declared war on Spain in 1793. The power of the aristocracy throughout Europe was quickly dwindling such that Goya’s honorable position became at once a paradoxical predicament.
Author Rebecca West focused extensively on the events of the 17th and 18th centuries within Europe while venturing throughout the Balkans. Due to the close proximity of these battles with the early formation of the Modern era, West conveys in her vast travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) that the confusion wrought by these historic events, to secure Europe’s liberation from dynastic rule, became what she referred to as “The Smudge,” denoting a blur of specifics.
This motif is obvious throughout each of Goya’s compositions on view. The two-tone gray scale, for instance, differs from one work to the next, indicating a kind of unexpected movement. And yet specific details remain hard to see. Goya’s Graphic Imagination not only references to the work of Diego Velázquez, but also to the more fantastic, surreal style of Hieronymus Bosch as well as the late medieval Fabliaux.
Jill Conner, New York
