I'm Mark McDonald.
I'm thrilled to invite you to a virtual tour
of Goya's Graphic Imagination.
Francisco Goya is possibly the most famous Spanish artist
from the 18th century.
He's known for his portrait paintings,
his frescoes,
and also mainly for his prints and drawings.
He plumbed the depth of humanity,
issues such as conflict, personal pain, and social foibles.
So many subjects that are now so pertinent in our day.
Come join me on a virtual tour
to see some spectacular prints and drawings.
Goya is sometimes called the last of the old masters
and the first modern.
From the 1770s through 1828,
he experiences so many changes in politics, in thinking,
enlightened thinking.
He is very much embedded in a society of change.
And he is a witness to his time,
and also a witness to his own thought processes.
And so how he thinks is expressed
through prints and through drawings.
And there's no other artist who embraces so much
through graphic art.
Goya's Graphic Imagination addresses two things.
Firstly his art on paper, prints and drawings.
These are two mediums which the artist spent
his entire career devoted to.
A second point is his imagination.
These are not commissioned works.
As such, they provided a platform for original thought
and to convey profound meaning
through an extraordinary range of images.
In the 1770s, Goya embarked on a series of etchings
after Velásquez, a famous 17th century painter
who was thought of as being the most talented,
most outstanding Spanish artist ever.
Goya started exploring the paintings
through a series of carefully articulated drawings
he then transformed into etchings.
We see here, A False Bacchus,
a painting from the 1630s by Velazquez.
And it shows figures bowing down to a false god.
Goya is not trying to translate
or imitate the painting exactly.
He's interpreting it.
And we see things such as a broad smile, open mouth,
a costume, the hats.
So he is trying to update the expression
to appeal to an 18th century audience.
This small, intense self-portrait
shows the artist examining himself so closely.
It's made in 1796, two or three years
after he turned totally deaf.
At that time, he was almost 50 years old.
So turning deaf at such a late age
must have impacted him profoundly.
It is the most moving, intense study.
It shows the artist analyzing himself so carefully.
He's examining not so much his appearance,
but his state of mind.
In the 1790s,
Goya turned his attention to making drawings in albums.
They allowed him to explore intimate subjects
for his own purposes.
They are not meant for a public,
they are not meant to be seen,
apart from a small circle of his friends.
The first such album is Album A, made in Madrid.
There are 18 known drawings from Album A
and they all show females performing various tasks.
Some are cleaning, some are sleeping
and some appear to be inside a bordello.
Album B also dates from mid-1790s.
It's a far more ambitious album.
There are 98 known drawings,
and they show a far greater spread of subjects.
These drawings span from social relations,
to drunkenness,
to debauchery,
to masquerades, through temper tantrums.
They're an album of drawings
that explored in a broader sense human interactions,
how people act privately and publicly,
and the captions they tend to approximate
his inquiring mind.
If there were no captions,
the meaning of these drawings would be impenetrable.
So the captions open a small door to possible meaning.
Many of the drawings from Album B form a basis
for The Caprichos, a series of 80 aquatint etchings
published in 1799.
The term, "caprichos," means fanciful subjects,
asserting artistic imagination and skill.
A first part of the series focused far more
on social customs and folly and vanity.
And the second part transforms to subjects
and themes of say far darker superstition.
More monsters,
witchcraft practices,
and ignorance.
Aquatint is a surface tone
that varies in intensity from a pale
and transparent surface tone to a thick, dark cloud.
Throughout the series, Goya employed many shades,
many intensities of aquatint to evoke emotional state.
Plate 43, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
is the most famous print from the entire series.
It shows a slumbering artist
and the nightmare visions emanating from his dreams.
It refers specifically to how,
if there is no clear thinking or reason,
monstrous forces emerge.
Alongside the print is the preparatory drawing.
The drawing is similar to the etching, but not the same.
The self-portrait clearly shows the artist
inserting himself into the vision.
In the print, he transcends, moves on
for a strict self-portrait
to a far more universal statement,
where these things affect not just the artist
but the entire society.
From the 1810s, Goya started making Album C,
also known as, The Inquisition Album.
So many of his sketches from Album C
address the repressive church,
the repressive authorities,
and the fear a government might impose
more restrictions on Spanish people.
The range of subjects throughout Album C is so impressive,
it's seen as a key to the artists thinking in that period.
Album C and Album F overlap.
This drawing shows a girl,
perhaps dancing or tearing her hair.
There's no clear subject as such.
Those seated around her,
some pay attention to her and some don't.
It is a drawing that exemplifies
and shows so clearly his imagination,
and how might these figures, might these settings,
say tend to multiple subjects and far more universal themes.
The 33 aquatint etchings
known as, The Tauromaquia,
were published in 1816.
They showed the evolution of bullfighting in Spain,
from ancient times to the early 19th century.
They pitch man against beast.
So there is a contrast between a brutality of subject,
and the superb treatment of the figures and space.
The 33 etchings were published two years
after the end of the Napoleonic war in Spain.
So in a sense, the entire series seems to underscore
a far greater concern for violence and conflict.
This print shows the mayor of Torrejón
being impaled by a bull.
And figures flee from the rampaging animal.
Side by side we see a sketch and the etching.
The steps between a drawing and the final etching
shows the artist rethinking
of the entire space.
It's far more abstract, and certain parts are far emptier.
It makes us imagine a passage of a rampaging animal
from the left hand side
into the bleachers and impaling a town mayor.
Of interest is a small figure in the background.
This might be a self-portrait of Goya witnessing the scene.
In 1807, Napoleon's forces entered Portugal.
In 1808, they entered Spain,
initiating a six-year conflict
that had so many victims, caused so much chaos,
and tore Spain apart.
The series of 82 aquatint etchings
responds to that conflict.
The first section embodies conflict,
killing, violence,
the injustices inflicted on average Spanish individuals.
A second section addresses a famine in Madrid
from 1811 to 1812.
Here are scenes of starvation and death.
And the third section addresses bad government
and the corrupt church.
They're close-up views.
There's no say drawn-out narratives.
They're intense snapshots, call them,
and he focuses on showing the pain of the ordinary person.
Throughout the entire series,
the artist changes his technique to suit certain subjects.
In the first section, the small flecks
on the skin of the individuals who've been shot
or stabbed underscores their pain so powerfully.
The sheet of paper,
not all areas are etched equally.
Some are unetched,
and certain parts are over-etched, dense and black.
And so the contrast between spot-lit areas,
spot-lit figures, underscores their pain.
In the second section of a famine,
the aquatint forms a thick curtain of sadness
and drenches entire scene.
And the prints from the third section,
the allegories are far more open in their technique.
They aren't as careful,
they're far more abstract in a sense.
The series was made from 1810 to 1815,
and not published until 1863.
I suspect there was simply no appetite
for etchings of this subject
in those awful times.
And as such, they are a personal platform for Goya.
They are him thinking through things he'd seen.
A Seated Giant is my favorite print
of all the artist's images.
It's made all in aquatint,
there's no etching here.
And the medium effects a smoky, ambivalent,
strange, moving, omnipresent atmosphere.
A giant sits there in a landscape,
a naked giant.
He turns towards us,
and something seems to have caught his attention.
He sits atop a plateau
in this undulating and desolate landscape.
The curve plateau seems to suggest
possibly the top of the world.
He is being illuminated by the rising sun.
And so the strong muscular forms, the shiny patches,
add to a sense of transition.
And it might encapsulate Goya's sadness
or his despondency at the six year conflict in Spain.
Landscape is made from 1807 to 1810.
It's a simple image with unsettling qualities.
Similar to the giant,
there's a strange sense of unease in this print.
There are two large forms on each side,
flanking the figures in the foreground.
On the right hand side, there is this huge alarming rock
and trees sharply bisect that rock.
On the left hand side, there's cloud banks
formed through aquatint.
These two strong, forward-moving forms seem to tower
over the unsuspecting figures in the foreground.
To me, the print presages the invasion of Spain
by the French troops.
The calm before the storm, so to speak.
For me, the 22 etchings forming The Disparates
are the strangest series of prints ever made.
The title, Disparates, means follies.
Now follies might mean anything from the stupidity
to violence,
to non-thinking.
The entire series seems to address
strange, intense situations.
The aquatint forms a strong sense of a liminal zone.
It's neither nighttime nor daytime,
neither dusk nor dawn.
A series seems to have been made from say
1815 through to say 1819.
After 1814 when the war ended, there was still such poverty
and such suffering.
And from 1815 onwards coincides with Ferdinand VII's
violent despotic government.
As such, this series of prints
seems a take on that ongoing suffering
from a more imaginative, non-narrative angle.
It is the artist thinking and dreaming out loud on paper.
In 1824, Goya move to France on a self-imposed exile.
In Spain the 1820s was a time of uncertainty,
unsustainable politics, poverty,
and still immense social unrest.
He moved to France possibly through fear
of repercussions for being a liberal.
He was 78 years old and stone-deaf.
So the move must have caused great anxiety to him.
In France, he made two albums of drawings.
They show him with such focus,
drawing subjects such as madness and drunkenness
and stupidity,
age-old themes which so absorbed him.
He also turned his attention to lithography.
And he made five spectacular prints called,
The Bulls of Bordeaux.
These are large-format prints showing fights from memory,
in these large sweeping views
and crowded spaces,
thought of as some of the most striking images
in this medium ever made.
So many of these subjects are so pertinent nowadays.
Ongoing conflict, violence, superstition, fear.
What does it mean to act and to be in this world?
These same concerns still affect and afflict us now,
making his insight, his artistry,
his monumental achievement
seem equally as pertinent now as in the 18th century.
The Met is so interested in themes and subjects
that are, in a sense, universal.
How art can express what it is to be human.
And there's no artist more interested
in understanding our fears, our motivations,
things that drive us,
than Francisco Goya.