Saturday, October 11, 2003
Goya and Hughes
Robert Hughes just wrote a book on the great Goya. Hughes is a fluid, intelligent writer; he makes art accessible, but in doing so, he doesn't dumb it down. I don't always agree with Hughes, but he is worth reading. Writers can help in entering the world of a painting, or in this case, a painter's world.
Here is Hughes, from a 1989 article in the NYRB:
...(Goya) speaks to us with an urgency that no artist of our time can muster. We see his long-dead face pressed against the glass of our terrible century, Goya looking in at a time worse than his.
This review of Hughes' book starts badly, saying: "Francesco de Goya y Lucientes was the first modern artist and the last old master". Degas probably more closely approaches this description. But the review then well explores Goya's life.
Goya's works are disturbing, psychologically loaded, ambiguous - far more modern in their complexity than images of our own time which seldom even attempt to explore this realm of the psychological complexities of the human condition.
The reviewer explains some of the mystery and depth of this last cycle of paintings by Goya:
They are the climax of Goya's work as a painter. We sense this even though we don't really know what the hell they are about. If one of the characteristics of modernism, and modernism alone, is its privacy, its lack of public address, then Goya's Pinturas Negras are just about the first paintings by any great artist to fulfill that criterion. Goya painted them for himself, and himself alone - an audience of one. If anyone outside his small family did see them, no mention of them, no commentary, survives. Here it is, one of the weirdest and scariest image-cycles in all art history, and nobody wrote a syllable about it.
Hughes and Goya must have quite a bit in common. This is undeniably true. Both are bruisers. Both are plain-speaking enemies of hypocrisies of all kinds. When Goya was growing up, there were no museums in Spain, and no thriving artistic community. It was a backward country, repressed by church in the form of Catholicism and state in the form of the Bourbons. Hughes had to fend for himself too. He describes the Australia of his childhood in one of those characteristic lashing phrases of his as a "womb of non-history". Both men loathe religiosity, but Hughes goes much further. He loathes the repressive unreason of Catholicism tout court - and that couldn't be said of Goya. Goya, a wily man, struggled to survive as court painter - and succeeded for decades (1789-1828) - in an overwhelmingly Catholic country at the beginning of the 19th century, and though he castigated repeatedly the venality and the hypocrisy of priests, it was false religion which he hated, not religion itself.
We read Hughes because he is so unlike the common or garden art critic - all those cautious generalisations, those small-scale successes, and that generally slightly craven attitude towards everything that has been said before by everyone else. Hughes, impetuous, sardonic, irreverent, unstuffy, couldn't be more different from this...