A Portrait of Goya December 22, 2021
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 f...
He Painted It Black October 07, 2020
Francisco Goya y Lucientes was a mass of contradictions. He was a liberal, initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, who liked nothing better than to go hunting with successive absolutist monarchs of Spain. He was deputy director of the Royal A...
Goya and the Art of Survival September 22, 2020
Agood time for thinking about Francisco Goya is while the world stumbles. Crisis becomes him. “Goya: A Portrait of the Artist” (Princeton), a biography by the American art historian Janis A. Tomlinson, affords me a newly informed chance to reflect on...