Arts & Leisure
Rare opportunity to enjoy Goya's "Los Caprichos" at the PMA
By Rose Safran
"The world is a masquerade. Face, dress, and voice, are all false. Allwish to appear what they are not. All deceive and do not know themselves."
- Interpretation of image "Nobody Knows Himself" from Goya's "Los Caprichos"
Were the great Spanish master Franscisco de Goya (1746-1828) alive today and living in America as a citizen here, surely, he would be a Democrat!
"Sympatico" with the plight of the underprivileged, intolerant of the airs and pretenses of the privileged, disgusted with hypocrisy in its many forms, understanding the tragedy of young women forced into arranged marriages or those raped, wary of corrupt or inept power whether by nobility or church, disdainful of superstition and quacks, hateful of war and all its ravages, aware of how poverty pushes people into lifelong disaster, Goya, the royal painter of Spain, created several series of absolutely brilliant graphics works satirizing these and other social and political ills.
"Los Caprichos" or "The Caprices," a set of 80 etchings currently on view at the Portland Museum of Art, is one of these four sets of startling graphics works in which this socially-conscious artist speaks his mind - and speaks it in terms that would assure that he would not have his head chopped off for so doing. After all, this was Spain's royal painter, and as such, a man who relied on commissions from nobility to survive, boldly and courageously taking it upon himself to criticize the source of his bread.
How did he get away with such tom-foolery, with such an indictment of the society of his time, post-Inquisition yes, but still beset with a host of ills deriving principally from a rotting society of unequal wealth, false pretensions and misused power?
He was an artist, an astute observer of the world in which he lived, not a writer. Yet, with cleverly selected captions set beneath exquisitely rendered visuals that represented, for the most part, a fantasy world, he managed to portray social and political concepts with exaggeration so bold it couldn't possibly apply to anyone in power.
"This couldn't be me," might say the duchess whose reputation is ruined through an affair … "That's somebody else," says the mother who abuses her child. Unjust law practiced by judges (gorillas) didn't apply to anyone recognizable. Through the use of goblins, monks outfits, animals (in particular the donkey) given human elements and activities - but all cast in such extreme and sometimes strange positions that comparison to reality was questionable, Goya left a legacy of societal exposure, of psychological demons and human folly, of savage caricature much of which might be apt today.
Because exaggeration and symbolism are Goya's tools, interpretation of some images is, at times, necessary. The current exhibition achieves this via references to three bodies of literature available: the Prado manuscript believed by some authorities to have been written by Goya himself; the Ayala manuscript, which differs, but at times attempts to identify specific Spanish individuals, and a third manuscript, from Madrid's National Library, Madrid Biblioteca Nacional. Additionally, the Spanish captions that Goya wrote for each one of these 80 "caprices" and are contained in the plates are translated into English. I found the Spanish ones more succinct, more pointed; found, too, that it was more fun to try to figure out the message than to rely on the scholarly endorsements accompanying each visual.
Goya produced 300 sets of "Los Caprichos" and offered them for sale in 1799. In the frontispiece to the series, Goya placed a three-quarters view self-portrait, which is included here: stovepipe top hat on his head, down-turned disapproving mouth, profiled eye set sideways and casting his look down, observing, "This is your world and mine," says this portrait, "And it isn't pretty." It's a world where donkeys ride men and monsters inhabit men's souls as in "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters."
But, oh my, is it brilliant - not only conceptually in intent, but also technically in execution - mostly through aquatint and etching. Abrupt contours, fine tonal qualities abound, contrasts are striking and so much is transmitted in so little space. Says the art critic Robert Hughes, "Without aquatint they (Los Caprichos) would not have been possible. Those deep, thick mysterious blacks against which figures appear with such solidity and certainty, and yet with such apparitional strangeness; that darkness in which most detail is lost, so that one's eye moves into a record of states of mind rather than a description of a "real" world - such effects owe their intensity to the aquatint medium and might not have been so available to Goya without it."
"Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos," a superb early first edition of the complete set of 80 images, will remain on view at the Portland Museum of Art through Feb. 25.
