A seventy-seven year old Francisco Goya left Spain for France in 1823; he still held his position as first painter to the court, but even so, with the final triumph of Ferdinand, he had gone into seclusion.
Goya saw Spain once more, during a brief visit in 1826, but he completed his life as a voluntary exile in the Spanish colony of Bordeaux. In these last years, he mellowed a bit. He had experimenting with the newly invented medium of lithography and employed it in 1825 to create a series of five bullfight scenes full of orgiastic vitality, “The Bulls of Bordeaux”. His painting was as fresh, as sparkling, as the happiest work of his youth, and as rich as the best work of his maturity.
---"Here are two men – possibly brothers – are shown fighting with heavy cudgels – slowly, rhythmically, as though they are driving a post. Their legs disappear into the ground, like Goya's Colossus, yet they appear wedded to the land and so their fight must be to the death. Bitter clashes between monarchists and liberals in northern Spain at this time imply that Goya may have intended this painting as an allegory of civil war." Patricia Wright, Eyewitness Art; Goya, Dorling Kindersley, London, 1993, page 49.--- read more: http://eeweems.com/goya/cudgels.html
Goya visited Paris, and legend says that he was glimpsed in his round of the studios by the young Delacroix. Delacroix became the first true heir. Goya found no followers during his lifetime, but by the middle of the nineteenth-century he had been appropriated as a god of the romantics: not only the painters but such literary figures as Victor Hugo. And he has been adopted on one ground or another as the natural father of successive generations of innovational painters. But, all historical considerations aside, the ultimate question in the case of Goya is a disconcerting and unobvious one: what did he ultimately force us to confront about ourselves?
Goya. The Fates. "In 1824 Goya left Spain, following his own phrase: "If you can't put out a fire in your own house, get out of it." Just as Picasso never returned to Spain under the Franco dictatorship, so Goya ended his days in exile in France, where he died in 1828 - just two years before the July Revolution of 1830. He was 82 years of age and could not speak a word of French. Alone and deaf, cut off from the world, he continued painting to the very end, and he wrote on one of his last paintings the phrase "aún aprendo" - "still learning".--- read more: http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/goya_2.html image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francisco_de_Goya,_The_Fates_%28Atropos%29.JPG
He has told us that we are egotistical, cruel, superstitious, and willingly deluded. Also, at our best, when we rise to affirm our noble potential, we are most likely to be murdered as individuals. But he believed in one thing, and his work tends to repeat this theme: In spite of everything, to have had the experience of living has been worthwhile, at least more or less. He knew that the opposite side of terrible is the wonderful, and that perhaps the only thing more terrible than life is an alternative composed of an empty nothingness.
Goya. The Bulls of Bordeaux. no.4. "Lithography had only been invented at the end of the eighteenth century, and Goya had tried it without great success before leaving Madrid. With the Bordeaux lithographer Cyprien Gaulon, whose superb portrait is in the show, Goya now mastered the technique, creating the famous series of four large prints depicting scenes of bullfighting known as The Bulls of Bordeaux. As with his miniatures, he adapted the technique to his own ends. He placed the lithographic stone upright on an easel and created the scene with a blunt crayon and then scraped away areas to make highlights. The furious energy of Goya's late style is evident in such works as Spanish Entertainment from the Bulls of Bordeaux, a scene of foolhardy amateurs play at being toreros. Nowhere is Goya's irrepressible verve more evident than in his drawings, the favorite medium of his last years." read more: http://www.worldprintmakers.com/frick/goyaslas2.htm image: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/IwT4w4pt6FzIYdpmOySLmg
He died in 1828 shortly after his eighty-second birthday, in Bordeaux.
ADDENDUM:
Alan Woods: Of all the artists of the 18th and 19th century Goya is the most contemporary – the one who has most to say to us. If it is the task of great art to look below the surface manifestations and lay bare the reality that lies beneath, then this is truly great art. For beneath the thin layer of civilization lie dark forces – forces of ignorance and barbarism – which at critical moments in history can escape their leash and threaten the very fabric of human civilization. This is true, not only for Goya’s epoch but for our own also. This art is an accurate picture of our own world – the world of the first decade of the 21st century.Read More:http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/goya_2.html a
Goya. Maria Martinez de Puga. "Goya’s luminous 1824 portrait of the woman known as María Martínez de Puga has always held a special place in the artist’s oeuvre as one of his most direct and candid works, radical in its simplicity. Acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914, the painting is the inspiration for The Frick Collection’s special exhibition, Goya’s Last Works, the first in the United States to concentrate exclusively on the final phase of Goya’s long career, primarily on the period of the artist’s voluntary exile in Bordeaux from 1824 to 1828." read more: http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/goya/exhibition.htm
Why do we find these disturbing images so familiar? In Goya’s time, the old feudal order was falling into decay everywhere. Above all in Spain it had outlived its usefulness and become a terrible obstacle in the way of progress. This obstacle had to be removed by revolutionary means if Spain was to advance. At that time, all that was best in Spanish society – all that was alive, honest, intelligent and noble – was fighting to replace the rotten regime of feudal absolutism with a new society. Capitalism at that time signified progress.Read More: http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/goya_2.html a
"In Bordeaux, Goya switched from the more precise medium of pen, brush, and ink to greasy black crayon, undoubtedly inspired by his work in lithography. This soft, forgiving medium allowed for greater breadth of execution and velvety tonal effects and may have compensated for the artist's diminishing eyesight and manual dexterity. On his walks through the city, Goya took note of its singular inhabitants, such as legless old beggars or fairground figures, as seen at left in Feria en Bordeaux (Fair in Bordeaux) (The Female Giant), or entertaining characters, such as a reckless roller skater. His style is energetic and cartoonish rather than classical, with bodies in exaggerated poses and states of emotion. He also returned to past themes, such as madness and witchcraft, and made puzzle pictures in which the meaning is left deliberately ambiguous." read more: http://www.worldprintmakers.com/frick/goyaslas2.htm image: http://www.frick.org/assets/images/exhibitions/goya/Goya_FeriaBordeaux.600.jpg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3651672/Goyas-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light.html
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But there is still a missing piece; this fascination with death and the supernatural that almost “possessed” Goya and provided much inspiration for the romantic poets; something even deeper than social theory and indignation:
Jesse Bering: And although Sigmund Freud ultimately abandoned this line of thought in favor of the disappointingly more lackluster “wish fulfillment” theory of belief in the afterlife (essentially, the catch-all skeptic’s view that we believe because we want it to be true), even the father of psychoanalysis once started digging in this direction. In his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud pondered why young soldiers were so eager to join the ranks during the First World War, and he concluded that this strange glitch of the human mind probably had something to do with it. “Our own death is indeed quite unimaginable,” he wrote, “and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators … In the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”
Camus wrote of an atheistic and materialist doctor in “The Plague” (1947) who once mused on the black fate of his plague-stricken patients: “And I, too, I’m no different. But what matter? Death means nothing to men like me. It’s the event that proves them right.”
We can see now how Camus’ doctor is fundamentally mistaken; given that he won’t be there to confirm his own hypothesis, he’s apparently unaware that such proof remains eternally just out of his reach.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Programmed+Afterlife/4262393/story.html#ixzz1E2PNBEVc
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