Goya, Francisco

Black Paintings of Goya

The Spanish master-painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is revered not only for the delicate and sensitive treatment of his subjects but also for his radical political stance and modern sensibility. Towards the end of his life, embittered by the appalling cruelty of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, Goya decorated the walls of his house outside Madrid with a series of 14 terrifying murals that depicted the underbelly of life and the remorselessness of human existence. Known as the Black Paintings, this series of murals is recognized as one of Goya's greatest masterpieces and now hangs in the Prado. Fully illustrated, this is the only book on the Black Paintings currently in print in English. A controversial narrative gives new interpretations of the artist's intention behind these grotesque works and shows how this period of Goya's work anticipated Surrealism and other aspects of 20th century artistic vision.

Goya

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.
In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.


From the Hardcover edition.

Great Goya Etchings: The Proverbs, The Tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux (Dover Books on Fine Art)

Francisco Goya, 1746-1828 (Taschen Basic Art)

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) has often been called "the Father of Modern Art." One of Spain's most revered and controversial painters, known for his intense, chilling, sometimes-grotesque images, he portrayed the horrors of war and societies in peril with a power that remains unmatched today. This Spanish-language book samples every major style by this master.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes : 1746-1828

This paperback edition of the award-winning study of the life and work of Goya is filled with the same fine reproductions as the original 1994 hardcover. Goya was one of Spain's greatest and most controversial painters, famous for incisive portraits and the "black" paintings of his later years. Scholars have often attributed Goya's progression from producing light-hearted court paintings to creating somber images of the Napoleonic wars to the artist's serious illness of 1792, which left him deaf. Writer Janis Tomlinson's aim here is to show a continuity in his work before and after the illness. She sees in Goya's vast output--at least 1,800 works--a vital drive to explore and exploit his personal creativity, which was strengthened by the deafness that cut him off from all but visual communication with the world. With detail supported by formidable research, Tomlinson presents Goya's life chronologically, analyzing his work from icons like the Naked Maya to his Los Caprichos series of etchings with their biting social satire and supernatural imaginings of a world turned upside down. The demonic intensity of Saturn Devouring His Son and Witches Sabbath, painted on the walls of his "Country House of a Deaf Man" at the end of his life, suggest to some the work of an embittered madman. Rather, these disturbing paintings reflect Goya's profound empathy for the victims of a predatory and unjust society--empathy that a modern audience readily shares. --John Stevenson

This paperback edition of the award-winning study of the life and work of Goya is filled with the same fine reproductions as the original 1994 hardcover. Goya was one of Spain's greatest and most controversial painters, famous for incisive portraits and the "black" paintings of his later years. Scholars have often attributed Goya's progression from producing light-hearted court paintings to creating somber images of the Napoleonic wars to the artist's serious illness of 1792, which left him deaf. Writer Janis Tomlinson's aim here is to show a continuity in his work before and after the illness. She sees in Goya's vast output--at least 1,800 works--a vital drive to explore and exploit his personal creativity, which was strengthened by the deafness that cut him off from all but visual communication with the world. With detail supported by formidable research, Tomlinson presents Goya's life chronologically, analyzing his work from icons like the Naked Maya to his Los Caprichos series of etchings with their biting social satire and supernatural imaginings of a world turned upside down. The demonic intensity of Saturn Devouring His Son and Witches Sabbath, painted on the walls of his "Country House of a Deaf Man" at the end of his life, suggest to some the work of an embittered madman. Rather, these disturbing paintings reflect Goya's profound empathy for the victims of a predatory and unjust society--empathy that a modern audience readily shares. --John Stevenson

Goya and the Duchess of Alba (Pegasus Library)

Goya

Newly revised and lavishly illustrated, this acclaimed study of Spanish master Francisco Goya reveals the artist as a pioneer of modern art and culture.

Stunning color reproductions comprehensively survey Goya's paintings and prints in this essential study of his art and its impact on the modern world. Fred Licht's masterful text, revised and updated for this edition, has been hailed as "brilliant" and "profound," one of the most original and illuminating studies of a modern European artist.

Born in 1746 in a small Aragonese town, Goya rose to prominence in Madrid in the period around 1780, being named court painter in 1786. The atrocities of the Napoleonic period and the repressions of the restored Bourbon regime led Goya to paint his greatest works, now recognized as harbingers of modern art. Goya died in exile in France in 1828.

Organized according to the mediums and genres in which the artist worked, Goya is a series of investigations of those aspects of Goya's art that make it especially relevant today. By focusing closely on the work, Licht also illuminates, as few before him have done, the enigmatic personality of this artist, who, as the author affirms, "first fixed the courage and the despair of our modern age."

Other Details:
297 illustrations, 276 in full color. 360 pages. 11 x 13" trim size. Published in 2001.

Painting in Spain in the Age of Enlightenment: Goya and His Contemporaries

Goya

A new and profusely illustrated appraisal of this leading Spanish painter and graphic artist.

"As a draftsman and painter, Goya favors the human passions, whether uninhibited or suppressed, repressed or repressing." Thus does Werner Hofmann describe the essence of the vast oeuvre left behind by Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), pointing to the source of its vital energy, alarming immediacy, and striking modernity.

Discussions of Goya in recent decades have centered on his influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters. Hofmann redresses the balance, focusing instead on the Spanish artist's profoundly disturbing imagery, and demonstrating that Goya's modernity derives from his lifelong investigation of what lies behind the world of appearances and convention.

Hofmann places Goya's paintings, drawings, and prints in a biographical context, revealing the specific character of each phase of the artist's life and work. He discusses "the glory and the pain of faith" evinced by Goya's early work, the artist's parabolic representation of the threat posed by the French Revolution, his dramatic documentation of the French occupation of Spain, his variations on cruelty in the Disasters of War etchings, and the religious faith apparent in his late work. Hofmann also relates the artist and his work to contemporary intellectual developments, drawing comparisons with writers, critics, and philosophers from Goethe to William Blake to the Marquis de Sade. 220 illustrations, 185 in color.

Old Man Goya

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness that left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book, Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence, and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw around him into visionary paintings, drawings, and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who accompanied him to the end.

Blackburn’s singular distinction as a biographer is her uncanny ability to create a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation—to think herself into another world. In Goya she has found the perfect subject. Visiting the towns Goya frequented, reading the revelatory letters that he wrote for years to a boyhood friend, investigating the subjects he portrayed, Julia Blackburn writes about the elderly painter with the intimacy of an old friend, seeing through his eyes and sharing the silence in his head.

With unprecedented immediacy and illumination, Old Man Goya gives us an unparalleled portrait of the artist.