Today March 30 2016 is 270th Birth Anniversary of Francisco Goya
"...Even while he was following the protocols of aristocratic portraiture, Goya just couldn’t stop himself noticing — and depicting — all sorts of extraneous and revealing sights. Cats, their eyes bulging with ferocious greed, wait to pounce on the pet bird held on a string by the dandified toddler, ‘Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga’ (1788). There are such subversive undertones and notes of sardonic comedy to many of his pictures..."
(The Spectator, UK, October 10 2015)
Robert Hughes writes in his much lauded book 'Goya', 2003:
"...The main reason that I started thinking about Goya with some
regularity lay in the peculiar culture whose tail end I encountered when I went
to live and work in America in 1970. It had almost been eviscerated of all
human depiction. Of course it had plenty of human presence, but that was
another matter. Here was America, riven to the point of utter desolation over
the most bitterly resented conflict it had embarked on since the Civil War.
Vietnam was tearing the country apart, and where was the art that recorded
America’s anguish? Well, there was art—most of it, with a few honorable
exceptions like Leon Golub, of a mediocre sort, the kind of “protest” art more
notable for its polemics than its esthetic qualities. But in general there was
nothing, absolutely nothing, that came near the achievement of Goya’s Desastres
de la guerra, those heartrending prints in which the artist bore witness to the
almost unspeakable facts of death in the Spanish rising against Napoleon, and
in doing so became the first modern visual reporter on warfare. Nor did there
seem to be any painting (and still less, any sculpture) produced by an American
that could have sustained comparison with Goya’s painting of the execution of
the Spanish patriots on the third of May, 1808. Clearly, there were some things
that moral indignation could not do on its own..."
Now imagine what all we missed by not having our own Goya in India....
...imagine him painting cruelty of the practice of Sutti...Indian Rebellion of
1857...Jalianwala Bagh....hanging of Bhagat Singh....exploitation of Dalits....decadence
and opulence in Indian palaces...romance of Indian railways...light and colours of Diwali/Holi...Nautch
girls...first showers of monsoon...
(By the way- I have already fantasized about his presence at an important political event in India here: "
शनिवारवाड्यात
गोया!")
Goya’s ‘Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga’ (1788)
"...Even while he was following the protocols of aristocratic portraiture, Goya just couldn’t stop himself noticing — and depicting — all sorts of extraneous and revealing sights. Cats, their eyes bulging with ferocious greed, wait to pounce on the pet bird held on a string by the dandified toddler, ‘Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga’ (1788). There are such subversive undertones and notes of sardonic comedy to many of his pictures..."
(The Spectator, UK, October 10 2015)
Robert Hughes again:
“...Goya was a mighty celebrant of pleasure. You know he
loved everything that was sensuous: the smell of an orange or a girl’s armpit;
the whiff of tobacco and the aftertaste of wine; the twanging rhythms of a
street dance; the play of light on taffeta, watered silk, plain cotton; the
afterglow expanding in a summer evening’s sky or the dull gleam of a shotgun’s
well-carved walnut butt. You do not need to look far for his images of
pleasure; they pervade his work, from the early tapestry designs he did for the
Spanish royal family—the majas and majos picnicking and dancing on the green
banks of the Manzanares outside Madrid, the children playing toreadors, the
excited crowds—right through to the challenging sexuality of The Naked Maja.
But he was also one of the few great describers of physical
pain, outrage, insult to the body... Goya truly was a realist, one of the first
and greatest in European art...
...Most of the Spanish artists who were Goya’s
contemporaries—Agustín Esteve, Joaquín Inza, Antonio Carnicero, and others—left
no trace of opinions about society and politics in their work. They were
craftsmen; they made their likenesses, did the job expected of them, and that
was all. Goya was a very different creature; he could see and experience
nothing without forming some opinion about it, and this opinion showed in his
work, often in terms of the utmost passion. This, too, was part of his
modernity, and another reason why he still seems so close to our reach, though
we are separated by so much time..."
