The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya
October 5, 2010, through January 9, 2011
Goya: Draftsman of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), Self-Portrait,
c. 1798,
chalk over traces of pencil,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Bequest of Walter C. Baker, 1971
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Throughout his career, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) served royal,
aristocratic, and ecclesiastical patrons, with often conflicting ties to Enlightenment
figures and supporters of the French, the enemy of the Spanish monarchy. Working
against a backdrop of war, persecution, and a government in flux, he produced an
enormous oeuvre of paintings, prints, and drawings whose content and tone can
be patriotic or subversive, spiritual or satiric, grave or humorous, and anything in
between. After pursuing a traditional artistic education in Zaragoza and, briefly,
Rome, he settled in Madrid in the 1770s and made a gradual but steady ascent as an
artist, attaining illustrious royal appointments, including that of Director of the Royal
Academy at San Fernando in 1795 and First Court Painter in 1799. In technique as in
content, however, Goya challenged the rules of art, preferring a freer style of painting
and drawing, a unique figural language, and a brilliant economy of means.
The hundreds of extant drawings by his hand include both preparatory sheets for works
in other media and independent drawings of diverse subjects executed primarily in ink
and wash and lithographic crayon. Of the latter, the majority — more than 500 — come
from Goya’s “albums.” These are, more precisely, eight distinct groupings of drawings,
sometimes bound, though largely only after Goya had completed the drawings on
loose sheets. The numbers the artist assigned to each drawing, representing its place
in an album, are evident on the extant sheets, which were widely dispersed after his
death. Goya began to produce these cycles a few years after the illness that left him
permanently deaf in 1792–93, while continuing his work as a painter and printmaker.
The drawings, some of which bear captions by the artist, are sometimes characterized
as a form of talking to himself. Whether he kept these drawings or showed them to
friends and family, they served for the last thirty-two years of his life as a primary
outlet for his fertile imagination, intelligent observation, and often biting wit.
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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), A Nun Frightened by a Ghost (Album F. 65),
c. 1812–20, brush and ink with wash,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1935 |
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With the exception of the self-portrait that is the starting point of this installation,
all the drawings by Goya in this exhibition are from his albums. They present the
wide spectrum of subjects he treated, including critiques of the monastic orders and
the nobility, interactions between the sexes, depictions of visions and nightmares,
and allusions to the consequences of war and political oppression. While these sheets
document Goya’s unflinching vision of the human condition and engage with the
turbulent political climate in which they were created, they are also products of the
inventive graphic tradition that took shape in Spain in the seventeenth century. Fantastic figures, supernatural visions, and the presence of the unreal or unusual are
features of countless Spanish drawings, as are the dark realities of history. In addition
to these aspects, many of the drawings on display here are characterized by the centrality of the figure, the incorporation of writing, and a preference for colored
pigments and paper.
The exhibition is organized by Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University;
Lisa A. Banner, independent scholar; and Susan Grace Galassi, Senior Curator at The Frick Collection.
The exhibition is made possible, in part, by the David L. Klein Jr. Foundation, Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
The accompanying catalogue has been generously underwritten by the Center for Spain in America. |
