Astonished by Goya; Creeped out by Goya

Astonished by Goya; Creeped out by Goya

The excellent catalogue that accompanies the excellent exhibition, Goya: the Portraits, at the National Gallery contains a passage that is key to understanding Goya’s power as a portraitist.

The catalogue refers to the series of etchings that Goya published at the end of the C18, Los Caprichos (not included in the Exhibition). In Goya’s own words (promoting the collection commercially): “He [Goya] has selected from among the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society … those subjects he feels to be most suitable materials for satire…”. One of the etchings shows a monkey painting the portrait of an ass.

The National Gallery catalogue comments:

[Goya] was well aware that a painter could “control” the external image of a sitter and communicate aspects of somebody’s character without the person realising what he was doing….[In the etching] while the ass sits proudly…the monkey portrays him with a wig, adding a symbol of social standing that “in reality” is not there. The “monkey painter” [as Goya was indeed once called] can turn anybody into somebody.

This art of subtle, perhaps sly, transmutation, as much as Goya’s breathtaking technical ability, is what makes the portraits great. Sitters are transmuted to engage our admiration or sympathy. Some are infused with nonchalant beauty or handsome confidence; others with humaneness of pose and expression; others rendered with unsentimental tenderness. Conversely, others are dressed-up asses, subtly critiqued or subverted (an example is the portrait of nasty king Ferdinand, of whom more below).

It is as well that Goya most produced canvases on a large scale. The exhibition’s rooms, relatively small spaces compared with those at, for example, the Royal Academy, are crowded with slowly shuffling, genteelly jostling visitors. This is in spite of timed entry tickets. But the Exhibition is nevertheless astonishing and uplifting.

By contrast, 2015’s earlier Goya exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, Old Women and Witches, was not a show to visit if your spirits were in need of uplift. This was especially true for those of us who are in what the novelist Ian McEwan calls the “toddlerhood of old age” (early to mid 60s). We were in for what was mostly a very unflattering, indeed bleak, preview of old age’s adolescence and ripe-to-rotting maturity.

The exhibition’s admirable (with one caveat) catalogue tells us that, following some unspecified but serious bout of ill health, Goya became profoundly deaf in the early 1790s. This malady caused or intensified an equally profound artistic introspection. Goya pursued themes which are private, fantastical or nightmarish, or a mixture of all three. This both in many of his paintings (all the time in parallel to his work as Court and society painter, as on show at the National Gallery) and, increasingly, in etchings and drawings; of which latter the material exhibited at the Courtauld is paradigmatic. The ageing Goya was intrigued and horrified by the cruelties and self-deceptions of age, and the malice of age towards youth (symbolised by the hag-witches and their baby victims) – but also acknowledged the seizing of pleasure against the odds.

What explains these two contrasting sides of Goya? And are they in fact oppositional?

From late middle-age onwards Goya lived through what the alleged Chinese curse refers to as “interesting times” in Spanish history  (and what times in Spain have not been so). In other words, he lived through the period at the beginning of the nineteenth century when a relatively enlightened monarchy gave way to, first, a far less enlightened one and, second, a vicious war (the Peninsular War) between yet another monarch (imposed and supported by Napoleon and his armies) and Spanish nationalists, both constitutional and irregulars, supported by a British army led by Wellington.

Goya’s well-known Disasters of War series records the atrocities and sufferings of that war in miniature and unflinching detail (as do his May 1808 paintings depicting the uprising in Madrid against the French and the subsequent reprisals). And then…

Napoleon defeated, the victorious allies promptly restored an absolutist king to the Spanish throne. This set the political conditions for the remainder of Goya’s life.

In all this political change, indeed convulsion, lies what for me is intriguing about Goya in his later period. Here you have, on the one hand, an artist who was under the patronage of the Spanish court (even, rather murkily, when the Napoleonic puppet was on the throne and even, as discussed above, when Goya’s “monkey” was painting a grand “ass”, Ferdinand, among others); on the other hand, a heterodox satirist who kept many works private for fear of offence, especially if given to the Church. Also, in politics he was a liberal.

What was it, to be a “liberal” in turn of the century Spain 200 years ago? It surprised me, and added another significant piece of knowledge to my patchy grasp of Spanish history, to learn that the answer is “quite a lot”. Enlightened monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century, together with the precedent of the new US republic (good) and that of revolutionary France (eventually not so good) appear to have sown the seeds of a very modern constitutional movement, which survived, even thrived, during the vicissitudes of the Peninsular War.

The Spanish Nationalist government, in opposition to Napoleon and his puppet king (in fact his brother), adopted the “Constitution of 1812” in that year. This provided for universal (male) suffrage, a constitutional monarchy deriving its role from the people and a cutting back of the political influence of the Church.

Goya supported this move. During the two years of the constitution’s “existence” (it remained largely an aspiration in the confusion and fortunes of war), he painted a celebratory Allegory of the Constitution of 1812, showing Spain (as a woman) being led by Father Time to a new future, whilst History (another woman) records the event.

Goya’s cynicism and weariness must have been well amplified when in 1814 there was the restoration of Ferdinand VII. He promptly asserted his absolute right to rule, abolished the 1812 Constitution, persecuted its proponents and brought back the Inquisition. This is the sombre background to the bleak works of Goya’s late period.

Discussion of this important political context is absent from the Courtauld catalogue – my only (fairly major) complaint. There is a fuller discussion in the National catalogue, although only an oblique reference to the short-lived Constitution, which itself is not explained.

The fate of liberalism in early nineteenth century Spain has some parallels with the fate of Republican Spain in the 1930s. In both cases there was an aggressive and merciless assertion of the prerogatives of a reactionary, mainly landowning, upper class, supported by the Church.

May & October 2015