 |
| The Clothed Maja |
 |
| The Naked Maja |
 |
| The Third of May |
Francisco Goya, in full Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, (born March 30, 1746, Fuendetodos, Spain—died April 16, 1828, Bordeaux, France), Spanish artist whose paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. The series of etchings The Disasters of War (1810–14) records the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion. His masterpieces in painting include The Naked Maja, The Clothed Maja (c. 1800–05), and The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid (1814).
Robert Hughes wrote that " 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 time at a time worse than his."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disasters_of_War
"He was right: Goya feels like our contemporary. In part, this is thanks to the nightmarish, abject plates of his Disasters of War, which, in hindsight, seem to anticipate the atrocities of mechanised conflict that scarred the 20th Century. For many people, Goya’s etchings even provide a pioneering example of tough, first-hand war reportage: plate 44 of the series, for instance, is entitled “I saw it”.
Although they were not published until 1863, the Disasters date from the second decade of the 19th Century, when Goya was already a mature artist with a reputation as a brilliant court painter and satirist. Years earlier, in 1793, he had suffered a mysterious illness, perhaps a series of strokes, which left him permanently deaf. This had a profound impact on his art, which became increasingly visionary and strange – arguably paving the way for the nihilistic worldview expressed in the Disasters of War. But it was the turbulence, hardship and depravity of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain during the Peninsular War (1808-14), when Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed Kingking, which actually prompted Goya to make the series. In October 1808, aged 62, Goya was summoned by General José Palafox y Melci to Zaragoza, the provincial capital of Aragon not far from his birthplace where he had trained as an artist. Palafox had become a national hero after inspiring thousands of Spaniards to resist French troops who had laid siege to the city. What Goya witnessed there provided the starting point for the series, which he began two years later, around 1810. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140717-the-greatest-war-art-ever
The genius of the Disasters is that they transcend particularities of the Peninsular War and its aftermath to feel universal – and modern. Perhaps this is because, as the British writer Aldous Huxley put it in 1947, “All [Goya] shows us is war’s disasters and squalors, without any of the glory or even picturesqueness.” So should we consider the series as the greatest war art ever created? Wilson-Bareau (curator of the show at the Imperial War Museum in 2014) certainly thinks so. “For me, yes,” she tells me. “I have lived with these prints, which many people consider too shocking, absolutely unbearable, and I find in them – besides the heartbreak and outrage at the unspeakable violence and damage – a great well of compassion for all victims of the suffering and abuses they depict, which goes to the very heart of our humanity.” http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140717-the-greatest-war-art-ever
