All things literary

Hughes portrays life, art in poignant 'Goya'

It is clear from the opening pages that art critic and author Robert Hughes has a personal and passionate affinity for the subject of his latest work, "Goya." Hughes writes on how his critical analysis of the life and art of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes had passed him by until a near-fatal car accident in 1999 made him intimate with physical and mental anguish — two subjects with which Goya's art deals heavily. Hughes even goes so far as to recount the macabre, surreal dream he had during his hospitalization involving the artist, as if writer and subject shared an intimate, dreamlike connection.

Such a sentimental episode can prompt some rolling of the eyes (some dreams just aren't meant to be shared), but, thankfully, the sometimes overdone surrealism gets lost in the engrossing breadth of Goya's life, meticulously detailed by Hughes' attractive and highly opinionated prose. How refreshing to read a biographical study where the writer unabashedly defends his subject the way an older brother protects a vulnerable younger sibling.

As for Goya himself, Hughes pilots us through the span of his long life, from his beginnings as a court artist under the patronage of a lineage of Spanish royalty, up until his last days, deaf, sick and exiled in France. Not only are we privy to the growth and development of a major European artist, but we also find ourselves immersed in the politics and society of 18th and 19th century Spain. The artist's eye encompassed everyone and everything from frugal countryside picnics to dank asylums and among the crowds at bullfights.

A seminal aspect of Goya's paintings and sketches (depicted in numerous — if small — color and black and white reproductions) is the emotional depths of many of his works, the pathos that lurks underneath the faces of his many priests, politicians, robbers, matadors and commoners. Architecture and metropolitan backgrounds are a rarity among Goya's artwork, passed over for the immediacy of human interactions.

Of all the multiple stages of Goya's artwork, there are four well-known that remain embedded in the brain, each one of them tinged with the brutal horror that has seemed to become Goya's trademark. The first of these is the "caprichos" (caprices), a series of aquatint etchings that mark and mock the hypocrisies and defects of Spanish society. Here, we see with startling detail prostitutes and old hags, donkeys with human characteristics and naked witches — a veritable grotesquerie that becomes all the more shocking for its serious subtext.

The same is true of the "Disasters of War," evoking the graphic events of the war with Napoleon through a barren landscape of limbless bodies and mass violence.

The "Tauromaquia" are a series of early 19th-century etchings illustrating the world of bullfighting, peppered with acrobatic matadors at the moments of both triumph and death, the black bulls either tensed to strike or caught in the middle of their charge.

Goya's last days in Spain are marked by deafness and a debilitating depression that led to a series of frightening images painted onto the walls of his house, coined "the Black Paintings." Perhaps the most gruesome painting in the collection (and maybe even his entire oeuvre) is that of a seemingly insane Saturn caught in the act of devouring his own children. Is it pleasant? No. Is it powerful? Absolutely.

This is to say nothing of Goya's many other works detailed in these pages, including Goya's most-recognized painting, "The Third of May," with its central point being the white-shirted Spanish citizen awaiting a French firing squad's bullets. As Hughes writes, "No attic vase painting of Homeric battle, no Renaissance image of perfectly proportioned bodies slugging it out, no frieze of warriors so impresses you with its raw truth."