The first academic book I read on Goya was by Fred Licht, for whom Goya distilled the ‘modern temper’ in art. It was thrilling stuff. Goya, it seemed, was a rebel and a nihilist, who profaned the nude, renounced the Enlightenment, mocked the royal family, championed the masses and anticipated war photography. His work contained in embryo much of modern art to come. I didn’t appreciate at the time that Licht’s book, published in 1979, was simply the latest instance of a long-running critical tendency to reimagine Goya for the present moment, whether as a Romantic, a Naturalist, a Surrealist or a democratic revolutionary. All agreed that Goya captured the predicament of modern man: ‘Undoubtedly Goya has shown himself in these works,’ André Malraux wrote of the prints known as Los Disparates, ‘to be the greatest interpreter of anguish the West has ever known.’
