From Publishers Weekly
A long life and vast works make fitting subjects for the epic-minded Hughes (The Shock of the New, etc.). Born in Aragon in 1746, Goya weathered the Peninsular Wars (1808-1814) in Spain and lived to the age of 82, when he died in self-imposed exile in France. Hughes denies the popular image of the artist as a die-hard iconoclast, painting court portraits while winking behind his patrons' backs. Staying close to the visual evidence, Hughes shows Goya was not above flattering his royal subjects (aggrandizing midget count Altamira), waxing patriotic (as in the famous Third of May) and taking commissions from the Bonapartes under the French occupation. In middle age he was struck deaf by an unidentifiable illness, at which point his pictures turned darker-a bullfighter gored before eager spectators, the inmates of a madhouse clamoring for respite. His Desastres de la guerra rendered the mute, gaping horror of guerrilla combat. Under a picture of refugees fleeing the French, he inscribed, "I saw it." Whether or not this much debated act of witness really happened, for Hughes it is Goya's urgent visual economy that "invented... the illusion of being there when dreadful things happen." Given his intimate understanding of the painter, one regrets that Hughes's diligent catalogues of the Caprichos and Pinturas Negras (among the 115 color and 100 b&w illustrations) often forgo in-depth analysis for textbook thoroughness. But he compellingly insists on Goya's prophetic genius, arguing that, for an age that has produced few great paintings in response to modern terrors, Goya's pictures anticipate disasters unheard of but yet to arrive.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
When Jean-Paul Sartre thought about the Disasters of War, the Disparates and the so-called Black Paintings (Pinturas negras) of Goya's later years, he concluded that what Goya was really depicting was the horror of being Goya. Like the two authors of these most recent biographies, Sartre had charged himself with finding the true Goya behind the oeuvre that had challenged so many thoughtful moderns. But also like them, he was inevitably thrust back upon his own interpretation since, other than the works themselves, there is scant documentary material (such as Goya's letters or written remarks) to support any conclusions. What almost all commentators agree upon is that somehow Goya stood at the beginning of the tendencies that we call "modern," particularly in the visual arts, since painters from Delacroix to Manet to Guston have been visibly haunted by his imagery.Robert Hughes, whose passionate diction gives his rendering the force of a tidal wave, tries to keep close to the work, but he, like every other recent writer on Goya, cannot resist trying to get inside Goya's persona in order to assert his personal view of who Goya really was. Hughes's accent of the events in Goya's life is always dramatic and, as he insistently admits, based on his own terrifying nightmares after he almost perished following a frightful automobile accident. He therefore places too much emphasis on a single episode in Goya's life: the long, mysterious illness at the age of 47 that struck him down for months, and from which he emerged totally deaf. Others have understood Goya's emphatic turn into the dark realm of rapine, murder and witchcraft as at least partially circumstantial: He lived in one of the most tumultuous and agonizing periods in Spanish history.Both Hughes and Evan S. Connell offer well-informed outlines of the astoundingly rapid public disasters that punctuated the lives of everyone at the time, commoners and courtiers (as Goya was for some forty years) alike. By the time Goya, a boy from the provinces, had definitively arrived in Madrid, after completing the obligatory artistic sojourn in Italy and church commissions in Saragossa, he was almost 30 and ambitious for worldly success. With the help of Francisco Bayeu, his brother-in-law and a figure already well established in Carlos III's court, Goya was soon at work in the royal tapestry industry designing cartoons. The Bourbon king, skillfully described by Connell and faintly praised by Hughes for his occasional notice of the vast social problems in Spain -- a devastated country in the grip of a triangle of exploiters: the powerful Church, the idle upper nobility and the Crown itself -- was, it seemed, chiefly concerned with hunting, as was his successor Carlos IV, Goya's patron. Both kings feared the increasing influence of enlighteners in France and mistrusted the small but forceful group of noble families that insisted on being informed about events there. Goya, as both authors relate, was clearly one of the afrancesados -- those who admired forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau and other Enlightenment French authors -- although he successfully, most of the time, ingratiated himself with his royal employers.From the outbreak of the French Revolution, when Goya was in his mid-forties and had reached the pinnacle of his career as painter to the royal chamber, the Bourbons, like other monarchs in Europe, had become increasingly nervous. Their response was to heighten official repression, empower anew the Inquisition and cower in their palaces, oblivious to the increasing chaos in Spanish life. It was probably the pressures of perilous political events, rather than his deafness, that provoked the keen observer Goya to turn to darker subjects in the late 1790s. He no doubt genuinely believed, as one of his legends for an etching declared, that "Devils are those who do evil, or prevent others from doing good, or who do nothing at all."He was obviously a complex man. Hughes tries to reveal all of Goya's idiosyncrasies and obsessions through close readings of his work. Connell dwells more on the milieu in which he navigated. He speaks of the intellectuals, playwrights, philosophers and cultured women who were the artist's friends. If we want to know the setting and menu for a noblewoman's dinner party, or which fashionable toreadors they cultivated, or the reactions of travelers such as Casanova, Theophile Gautier or Lady Holland (and they are valuable), it is to Connell we must turn. But if we want to know how Goya worked as a printmaker, a medium in which he was both an aesthetic innovator and a deviser of new techniques, then we must listen to Hughes. Similarly, if we want to know about the two duchesses who clearly intrigued Goya -- the Duchess of Osuna, an exceptionally intelligent presence in intellectual circles, and the Duchess of Alba, more noted for other propensities -- we can find them as described by various contemporaries in Connell, and as perceived by Goya, with brush in hand, by Hughes. Naturally, both authors speculate about the nature of Goya's relationship with la Alba, as he called her, as has every other commentator for two centuries. Hughes, with his usual aplomb, judges that there was nothing sexual between them, while Connell is not so sure. What is certain is that Goya's great critical cycle on the mores and grotesqueries of contemporary Spain began as he was working at her country estate. Called Caprichos, ("caprices"), this series was briefly marketed, then prudently withdrawn after only 27 sets of some 300 were sold, probably (although Hughes doesn't seem to think so) because the long arm of the Inquisition loomed and because Queen María Luisa's favorite (and perhaps lover), Manuel Godoy, was not pleased.Beginning with the Caprichos, Goya's work requires the kind of close inspection that Hughes, with his background as an art student and his long experience as an art critic, is better equipped to handle than Connell. Here we may argue with his judgments, but only after entering, with him, Goya's tenebrous world as he went from the Caprichos to his later graphic works: the harrowing Disasters of War, the Tauromaquia and the Disparates. "Yo lo vi" Goya wrote beneath one of the Disasters -- "I saw it." Hughes conscientiously describes the circumstances of the Napoleonic invasion and the subsequent Peninsular War in order to sort out what Goya might have seen and what he merely imagined. But more important, he analyzes the prints themselves, offering interpretations not only of Goya's style (surprisingly incorporating neoclassic ideals of an earlier period) but also of the echoes of other artists' works, stressing the singularity of Goya's vision, so apposite to our own moment in history.Only a few years before the Napoleonic calamity, Goya had painted his much-discussed portrait of the royal family. Hughes rehearses all the arguments surrounding this curious ensemble of not very prepossessing figures, including the tendency to think of this painting as a satire, an idea he calls the merest nonsense. Connell thinks it all depends on the viewer. In any case, the painting was clearly Goya's response to Velázquez's Las meninas, and its composition, as Hughes sees it, is almost as enigmatic:"The surface is Goya at his most energetic, a free, spotted, impasted crust of pigment that keeps breaking into light, full of vitality with never a dull touch. Far from being an exercise in satire, this amounts to an excited defense of kingship: not its divinity, to be sure, but what later ages would call its glamour, its ability to bedazzle the commoner and the subject."This was to be Goya's last tribute to his employers. In almost all the works that follow, he seemed to be enacting his radical belief that, as he told the Academy of San Fernando in 1792, "There are no rules in painting." Hughes is in top form when he discusses what he calls Goya's "two great propaganda pieces, the Second and Third of May." They were painted, Hughes thinks, because "Goya needed to affirm his credentials as a good, loyal anti-French Spaniard now that Fernando [VII] was back in the saddle." He calls them Goya's "climactic utterances on war." Like many other Goya commentators, Hughes is awestruck before the Third of May, almost rendered speechless (although that could obviously never happen to him) by the majesty of this revered large painting. He dutifully traces possible iconographic connections, stressing the Christ-like aspect of the central victim. This "stocky little martyr-of-the-people is one of the most vivid 'presences' in all art," he writes, and, after pointing out that the victims have faces, he notes that the killers do not. "With this painting, the modern image of war as anonymous killing is born, and a long tradition of killing as ennobled spectacle comes to its overdue end."It is a different tone of voice that laments and thunders in the celebrated Black Paintings. Hughes fares no better than any other interpreter at offering explanations. They are utterly and eternally enigmatic. As Hughes points out, these large paintings on the walls of Goya's country house have been X-rayed, revealing that the original scheme was almost pastoral. "Why should Goya have switched from what may have been a less fearsome decorative scheme for his farmhouse to one of such surpassing pessimism as the Black Paintings?" he asks. Although both he and Connell consider the possibility that it stemmed from Goya's personal nightmare, they both discuss the immense turbulence of the 1820s and the dire fate of liberals under the restored King Fernando VII. After rebellions, foreign interventions and countless atrocities, the return of this vicious Bourbon would surely have deeply alarmed Goya, who finally fled to Bordeaux.Hughes's accomplishment in this vastly detailed book is to lay out all the possible reasons for considering Goya the first exemplar of modernism, which, he says in his opening statement "has to do with a questioning, irreverent attitude to life; with a persistent skepticism that sees through the official structures of society." Connell, who is clearly not at ease with works of art but has a good ear for ambient gossip, never advances his reasons for writing "a life" about Goya and does not attempt the grand synthesis Hughes achieves. Both writers occasionally drop into their narratives coy and vulgar locutions, such as Connell's characterization of the Duchess of Alba as a "man killer" and his discussion of palace "hanky panky," or Hughes's irritating allusions to Goya's "cuties" and their "cute little shoes." But Hughes's lapses into silly vernacular should be overlooked. His tremendous exuberance and strong opinions sweep us into Goya's landscape, though not, finally, into Goya's deepest preoccupations or his precise meaning for us. For that, readers must turn to the magisterial study by Fred Licht. In Goya, The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art, Licht locates with precision Goya's own temper when he writes: "Living in a time that he perceived to be basically anarchic, he invented a language that conveyed the very principle of anarchy." Reviewed by Dore AshtonCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Australian-born Hughes, art critic for Time and the author of 10 acclaimed books, begins his expert and passionate interpretation of the life and work of the seminal artist Goya with a dramatic account of how, during his recovery from a nearly fatal car crash, he was visited by the great painter in the twilight zone of his pain. This empathic connection with Goya, who suffered his own isolating and debilitating crisis in his mid-forties when a fierce illness left him deaf, enabled Hughes to write a remarkably vital, delectably discursive, and deeply affecting study of an artist whose unique and powerful work grows more significant with each passing year. Goya, Hughes writes, "truly was a realist, one of the first and greatest," but he was also a sly and courageous social critic, creating indelible images of both earthy satire and epic tragedy. Declaring the prolific, "sanguine and ironic" Goya "the last Old Master and the first Modernist," Hughes brings eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Madrid to dynamic life and insightfully dissects every aspect of Goya's ever-evolving paintings and etchings, indelible works that grew steadily darker, more disturbing, and increasingly radical in their indictment of injustice and violence. Hughes' profound appreciation for Goya's genius and "immense humanity" will inspire readers to look to Goya's magnificent, shocking, and clarifying works as to a polestar as we grapple with the inhumanity of our times. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Robert Hughes's dazzling new study of Goya not only conveys the range and prescience of the artist's work with enormous acuity and verve, but also conjures the world of 18th- and early 19th-century Spain with vivid, pictorial ardor.
Writing in fierce, tactile prose, Mr. Hughes jolts the reader into a visceral appreciation of Goya's art.
–Michiko Kakutani, NewY orkTimes
"[Goya] is all you could ask for and more. Sturdy in its organisation, its interpretations, its common sense, it nevertheless fizzes with insights and hops with enthusiasm. There is not a dull sentence... Hughes has found his ideal subject."
–Sebastian Smee, The Spectator

"Hughes has succeeded triumphantly. He has written an exemplary work on an extraordinarily difficult subject: eloquent, scholarly, thorough, full of insight."
–Martin Gayford, London Telegraph

"The prolific Hughes offers a refreshing take on this great artist, about whom so much has been written. His powerful intelligence and eloquence... make this a book that will be widely read and enjoyed... [Goya] leaves us in no doubt that Hughes is one of the most forceful art critics writing today."
–Frances Spalding, Literary Review, London

"[Goya] is right up there with his magna opera–The Shock of the New (1980) and American Visions (1997)–and confirms his stature as the most invigorating writer on art currently at work. A valuable resource for students of Goya–and a must for fans of Robert Hughes."
–Anthony Quinn, London Telegraph


"... a remarkably vital, delectably discursive, and deeply affecting study... Hughes brings
eighteenth- and ninetheenth-century Madrid to dynamic life and insightfully
dissects every aspect of Goya's ever-evolving paintings and etchings,
indelible works that grew steadily darker, more disturbing, and increasingly
radical in their indictment of injustice and violence. Hughes' profound
appreciation for Goya's genius and "immense humanity" will inspire readers to
look to Goya's magnificent, shocking, and clarifying works as to a polestar
as we grapple with the inhumanity of our times."
–starred Booklist review


"… a clever combination of the two genres at which Hughes has simultaneously excelled in his writing–national history and art criticism."
–Waldemar Januszczak, London Sunday Times Magazine

"… Hughes succeeds where others have failed… As far as anyone can, he instinctively understands his man. He also writes beautifully… this book is a marvelous study."
–Michael Prodger, Sunday Telegraph, London

Review
"Robert Hughes's dazzling new study of Goya not only conveys the range and prescience of the artist's work with enormous acuity and verve, but also conjures the world of 18th- and early 19th-century Spain with vivid, pictorial ardor.
Writing in fierce, tactile prose, Mr. Hughes jolts the reader into a visceral appreciation of Goya's art.
?Michiko Kakutani, NewY orkTimes
"[Goya] is all you could ask for and more. Sturdy in its organisation, its interpretations, its common sense, it nevertheless fizzes with insights and hops with enthusiasm. There is not a dull sentence... Hughes has found his ideal subject."
?Sebastian Smee, The Spectator

"Hughes has succeeded triumphantly. He has written an exemplary work on an extraordinarily difficult subject: eloquent, scholarly, thorough, full of insight."
?Martin Gayford, London Telegraph

"The prolific Hughes offers a refreshing take on this great artist, about whom so much has been written. His powerful intelligence and eloquence... make this a book that will be widely read and enjoyed... [Goya] leaves us in no doubt that Hughes is one of the most forceful art critics writing today."
?Frances Spalding, Literary Review, London

"[Goya] is right up there with his magna opera?The Shock of the New (1980) and American Visions (1997)?and confirms his stature as the most invigorating writer on art currently at work. A valuable resource for students of Goya?and a must for fans of Robert Hughes."
?Anthony Quinn, London Telegraph


"... a remarkably vital, delectably discursive, and deeply affecting study... Hughes brings
eighteenth- and ninetheenth-century Madrid to dynamic life and insightfully
dissects every aspect of Goya's ever-evolving paintings and etchings,
indelible works that grew steadily darker, more disturbing, and increasingly
radical in their indictment of injustice and violence. Hughes' profound
appreciation for Goya's genius and "immense humanity" will inspire readers to
look to Goya's magnificent, shocking, and clarifying works as to a polestar
as we grapple with the inhumanity of our times."
?starred Booklist review


"? a clever combination of the two genres at which Hughes has simultaneously excelled in his writing?national history and art criticism."
?Waldemar Januszczak, London Sunday Times Magazine

"? Hughes succeeds where others have failed? As far as anyone can, he instinctively understands his man. He also writes beautifully? this book is a marvelous study."
?Michael Prodger, Sunday Telegraph, London

Book Description
Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.
In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.

From the Inside Flap
Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.
In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.

From the Back Cover
"Robert Hughes's dazzling new study of Goya not only conveys the range and prescience of the artist's work with enormous acuity and verve, but also conjures the world of 18th- and early 19th-century Spain with vivid, pictorial ardor.
Writing in fierce, tactile prose, Mr. Hughes jolts the reader into a visceral appreciation of Goya's art.
–Michiko Kakutani, NewY orkTimes
"[Goya] is all you could ask for and more. Sturdy in its organisation, its interpretations, its common sense, it nevertheless fizzes with insights and hops with enthusiasm. There is not a dull sentence... Hughes has found his ideal subject."
–Sebastian Smee, The Spectator

"Hughes has succeeded triumphantly. He has written an exemplary work on an extraordinarily difficult subject: eloquent, scholarly, thorough, full of insight."
–Martin Gayford, London Telegraph

"The prolific Hughes offers a refreshing take on this great artist, about whom so much has been written. His powerful intelligence and eloquence... make this a book that will be widely read and enjoyed... [Goya] leaves us in no doubt that Hughes is one of the most forceful art critics writing today."
–Frances Spalding, Literary Review, London

"[Goya] is right up there with his magna opera–The Shock of the New (1980) and American Visions (1997)–and confirms his stature as the most invigorating writer on art currently at work. A valuable resource for students of Goya–and a must for fans of Robert Hughes."
–Anthony Quinn, London Telegraph


"... a remarkably vital, delectably discursive, and deeply affecting study... Hughes brings
eighteenth- and ninetheenth-century Madrid to dynamic life and insightfully
dissects every aspect of Goya's ever-evolving paintings and etchings,
indelible works that grew steadily darker, more disturbing, and increasingly
radical in their indictment of injustice and violence. Hughes' profound
appreciation for Goya's genius and "immense humanity" will inspire readers to
look to Goya's magnificent, shocking, and clarifying works as to a polestar
as we grapple with the inhumanity of our times."
–starred Booklist review


"… a clever combination of the two genres at which Hughes has simultaneously excelled in his writing–national history and art criticism."
–Waldemar Januszczak, London Sunday Times Magazine

"… Hughes succeeds where others have failed… As far as anyone can, he instinctively understands his man. He also writes beautifully… this book is a marvelous study."
–Michael Prodger, Sunday Telegraph, London

About the Author
Robert Hughes was born in Australia in 1938. Since 1970 he has lived and worked in the United States, where until 2001 he was chief art critic for Time, to which he still contributes. His books include The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, Nothing If Not Critical, Barcelona, The Culture of
Complaint, and American Visions. He is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes for his work.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
DRIVING INTO GOYA

I had been thinking about Goya and looking at his works for a long time, off and on, before the triggering event that cleared me to write this book. I knew some of his etchings when I was a high-school student in Australia, and one of them became the first work of art I ever bought-in those far-off days before I realized that critics who collect art venture onto ethically dubious ground. My purchase was a poor second state of Capricho 43, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos ("The sleep of reason brings forth monsters"), that ineffably moving image of the intellectual beset with doubts and night terrors, slumped on his desk with owls gyring around his poor perplexed head like the flying foxes that I knew so well from my childhood. The dealer wanted ten pounds and I got it for eight, making up the last quid with coins, including four sixpenny bits. It was the first etching I had ever owned, but by no means the first I had seen. My family had a few etchings. They were kept in the pantry, face to the wall, icons of mild indecency-risqué in their time-in exile. My grandfather, I suppose, had bought them, but they had offended my father's prudishness. They were the work of an artist vastly famous in Australia and wholly unknown outside it, a furiously energetic, charismatic, and mediocre old polymath called Norman Lindsay, who believed he was Picasso's main rival and whose bizarre mockoco nudes-somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley and Antoine Watteau, without the pictorial merits of either and swollen with cellulite transplanted from Rubens-were part of every Australian lawyer's or pubkeeper's private imaginative life.

That was what my adolescent self fancied etchings were about: titillation. Popular culture and dim sexual jokes ("Come up and see my etchings") said so. Whatever was on Goya's mind, though, it wasn't that. And as I got to know him a little better, through reproductions in books-nobody was exhibiting real Goyas in Australia all those decades ago; glimpsing El sueño de la razón was a fluke-I realized to my astonishment what extremity of the tragic sense the man could put onto little sheets of paper. Por que fue sensible, the woman despairing in the darkness of her cell, guilty and always alone, awaiting the death with which the State would avenge the murder of her husband. The prisoners trying and failing to sleep under the thick, atrocious stone arches. ¡Que se la llevaron! ("They carried her off!"): the young woman carried off by thugs, one possibly a priest, her little shoes sticking incongruously up as the abductors bend silently to their work. Tántalo ("Tantalus"): an oldish man, hands clasped, rocking to and fro beside the knife-edge of a pyramid in a despair too deep for words, and, across his knees, the corpse-rigid form of a beautiful and much younger woman whose passion cannot be aroused by his impotence. I could not imagine feeling like this man-being fourteen, a virgin, and full of bottled-up testosterone, I didn't even realize that impotence could happen but Goya made me feel it. How could anyone do so? What hunger was it that I didn't know about but he did?

And then there was the Church, dominant anxiety of Goya's life and of mine. Nobody I knew about in Australia in the early 1950s would have presumed to criticize the One, Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church with the ferocity and zeal that Goya brought to the task at the end of the eighteenth century. In my boyhood all Catholicism was right-wing, conservative, and hysterically subservient to that most white-handedly authoritarian of recent popes, Pius XII, with his foolish cult of the Virgin of Fatima and the Assumption. In Goya's time the obsession with papal authority, and the concomitant power of the Church, was even greater, and to openly criticize either in Spain was not devoid of risk. I remember how my Jesuit teachers (very savvy men) used to say "We don't try to justify the Inquisition anymore, we just ask you to see it in its historical

context"-as though the dreadful barbarity of one set of customs excused, or at least softened, the horrors of another; as though hanging and quartering people for secular reasons somehow made comprehensible the act of burning an old woman at the stake in Seville because her neighbors had testified to Inquisitors from the Holy Office that she had squatted down, cackling, and laid eggs with cabbalistic designs on them. It seemed to us schoolboys back in the fifties that, however bad and harshly enforced they were, the terrors of Torquemada and the Holy Office could hardly have compared with those of the Gulag and the Red brainwashers in Korea. But they looked awful all the same, and they inserted one more lever into the crack that would eventually rive my Catholic faith. So it may be said that Goya-in his relentless (though, as we shall see, already somewhat outdated) attacks on the Inquisition, the greed and laziness of monks, and the exploitive nature of the monastic life-had a spiritual effect on me, and was the only artist ever to do so in terms of formal religion. He helped turn me into an ex-Catholic, an essential step in my growth and education (and in such spiritual enlightenment as I may tentatively claim), and I have always been grateful for that. The thought that, among the scores of artists of some real importance in Europe in the late eighteenth century, there was at least one man who could paint with such realism and skepticism, enduring for his pains an expatriation that turned into final exile, was confirming.

Artists are rarely moral heroes and should not be expected to be, any more than plumbers or dog breeders are. Goya, being neither madman nor masochist, had no taste for martyrdom. But he sometimes was heroic, particularly in his conflicted relations with the last Bourbon monarch he served, the odious and arbitrarily cruel Fernando VII. His work asserted that men and women should be free from tyranny and superstition; that torture, rape, despoliation, and massacre, those perennial props of power in both the civil and the religious arena, were intolerable; and that those who condoned or employed them were not to be trusted, no matter how seductive the bugle calls and the swearing of allegiance might seem. At fifteen, to find this voice-so finely wrought and yet so raw, public and yet strangely private-speaking to me with such insistence and urgency from a remote time and a country I'd never been to, of whose language I spoke not a word, was no small thing. It had the feeling of a message transmitted with terrible urgency, mouth to ear: this is the truth, you must know this, I have been through it. Or, as Goya scratched at the bottom of his copperplates in Los desastres de la guerra: "Yo lo vi," "I saw it." "It" was unbelievably strange, but the "yo" made it believable.

A European might not have reacted to Goya's portrayal of war in quite this way; these scenes of atrocity and misery would have been more familiar, closer to lived experience. War was part of the common fate of so many English, French, German, Italian, and Balkan teenagers, not just a picture in a frame. The crushed house, the dismembered body, the woman howling in her unappeasable grief over the corpse of her baby, the banal whiskered form of the rapist in a uniform suddenly looming in the doorway, the priest (or rabbi) spitted like a pig on a pike. These were things that happened in Europe, never to us, and our press did not print photographs of them. We Australian boys whose childhood lay in the 1940s had no permanent atrocity exhibition, no film of real-life terror running in our heads. Like our American counterparts we had no experience of bombing, strafing, gas, enemy invasion, or occupation. In fact, we Australians were far more innocent of such things, because we had nothing in our history comparable to the fratricidal slaughters of the American Civil War, which by then lay outside the experience of living Americans but decidedly not outside their collective memory. Except for one Japanese air strike against the remote northern city of Darwin, a place where few Australians had ever been, our mainland was as virginal as that of North America. And so the mighty cycle of Goya's war etchings, scarcely known in the country of my childhood, came from a place so unfamiliar and obscure, so unrelated to life as it was lived in that peculiar womb of nonhistory below the equator, that it demanded special scrutiny. Not Beethoven's Muss es sein-"Must it be so? It must be so"-written at the head of the last movement of his F Major String Quartet in 1826. Rather, "Can it be so? It can be so!"-a prolonged gasp of recognition at the sheer, blood-soaked awfulness of the world. Before Goya, no artist had taken on such subject matter at such depth. Battles had been formal affairs, with idealized heroes hacking at one another but dying noble and even graceful deaths: Sarpedon's corpse carried away from Troy to the broad and fertile fields of an afterlife in Lycia by Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and Death. Or British General Wolfe expiring instructively on the heights of Quebec, setting a standard of nobly sacrificial death etiquette for his officers and even for an Indian. Not the mindless and terrible slaughter that, Goya wanted us all to know, is the reality of war, ancient or modern.

What person whose life is involved with the visual arts, as mine has been for some forty-five years, has not thought about Goya? In the nineteenth century (as in any other) there are certain artists whose achievement is critical to an assessment of our own perhaps less urgent doings. Not to know them is to be illiterate, and we cannot exceed their perceptions. They give their times a face, or rather a thousand faces. Their experience watches ours, and can outflank it with the intensity of its feeling. A writer on music who had not thought about Beethoven, or a literary critic who had never read the novels of Charles Dickens-what would such a person's views be worth, what momentum could they possibly acquire? They would not be worth taking seriously. Goya was one of these seminal artists.

The main reason that I started thinking about Goya with some regularity lay in the peculiar culture whose tail end I encountered when I went to live and work in America in 1970. It had almost been eviscerated of all human depiction. Of course it had plenty of human presence, but that was another matter. Here was America, riven to the point of utter desolation over the most bitterly resented conflict it had embarked on since the Civil War. Vietnam was tearing the country apart, and where was the art that recorded America's anguish? Well, there was art-most of it, with a few honorable exceptions like Leon Golub, of a mediocre sort, the kind of "protest" art more notable for its polemics than its esthetic qualities. But in general there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that came near the achievement of Goya's Desastres de la guerra, those heartrending prints in which the artist bore witness to the almost unspeakable facts of death in the Spanish rising against Napoleon, and in doing so became the first modern visual reporter on warfare. Nor did there seem to be any painting (and still less, any sculpture) produced by an American that could have sustained comparison with Goya's painting of the execution of the Spanish patriots on the third of May, 1808. Clearly, there were some things that moral indignation could not do on its own.

What did modernity lack that Goya had? Or was that the wrong question to ask? Was it rather that an age of mass media, our own age, so overloaded with every kind of visual image that all images were in some sense replaceable, a time when few things stood out for long from a prevailing image-fog, had somehow blurred and carried away a part of the memorable distinctness the visual icon once had? Perish the thought. But the thought stuck. It would neither perish nor be resolved. Of course, Goya was an exception. It seems that geniuses (a word that, despite all the pecking and bitching of postmodernist criticism, must survive because there is no other that fits certain cases of human exception) are fated to be. But the fact that at the end of the twentieth century we had (as we still have) no person who could successfully make eloquent and morally urgent art out of human disaster tells us something about the shriveled expectations of what art can do. So how could someone have managed it with such success two centuries earlier? There is no convenient answer, no wrapping in which to package such a mystery, which is nothing less than the mystery of the tragic sense itself. It is not true that calamitous events are bound, or even likely, to excite great tragic images. Nearly sixty years after the bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay opened to release Little Boy, and a new level of human conflict, over Hiroshima, there is still no major work of visual art marking the birth of the nuclear age. No esthetically significant painting or sculpture commemorates Auschwitz. It is most unlikely that a lesser though still socially traumatic event, such as the felling of the World Trade Center in 2001, will stimulate any memorable works of art. What we do remember is the photos, which cannot be exceeded.

Goya was an artist wholeheartedly of this world. He seems to have had no metaphysical urges. He could do heaven, but it was rather a chore. The angels he painted on the walls of San Antonio de la Florida, in his great mural cycle of 1798, are gorgeous blondes with gauzy wings first, and messengers of heaven's grace only second. They would not carry such grace if they were not desirable. For him, it seems, God chose to manifest himself to humankind by creating the episodically vast pleasures of the world.

Goya was a mighty celebrant of pleasure. You know he loved everything that was sensuous: the smell of an orange or a girl's armpit; the whiff of tobacco and the aftertaste of wine; the twanging rhythms of a street dance; the play of light on taffeta, watered silk, plain cotton; the afterglow expanding in a summer evening's sky or the dull gleam of a shotgun's well-carved walnut butt. You do not need to look far for his images of pleasure; they pervade his work, from the early tapestry designs he did for the Spanish royal family-the majas and majos picnicking and dancing on the green banks of the Manzanares outside Madrid, the children playing toreadors, the excited crowds-right through to the challenging sexuality of The Naked Maja.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Robert Hughes turns his critical eye to one of art history's most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya's development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.

In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya's work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes's own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercelybrave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death.

SYNOPSIS

Art critic Hughes examines the life and work of Francisco Goya (1746- 1828), placing each within its historical context. Coverage includes Goya's early works commissioned by the Church, his long career at the royal court, and the sinister and cryptic work of his later years. The volume features 221 illustrations in b&w and color. The author of several books on art history, Hughes is a contributing art critic for Time magazine. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Robert Hughes's dazzling new study of Goya not only conveys the range and prescience of the artist's work with enormous acuity and verve, but also conjures the world of 18th- and early 19th-century Spain with vivid, pictorial ardor. — Michiku Kakutani

Publishers Weekly

A long life and vast works make fitting subjects for the epic-minded Hughes (The Shock of the New, etc.). Born in Aragon in 1746, Goya weathered the Peninsular Wars (1808-1814) in Spain and lived to the age of 82, when he died in self-imposed exile in France. Hughes denies the popular image of the artist as a die-hard iconoclast, painting court portraits while winking behind his patrons' backs. Staying close to the visual evidence, Hughes shows Goya was not above flattering his royal subjects (aggrandizing midget count Altamira), waxing patriotic (as in the famous Third of May) and taking commissions from the Bonapartes under the French occupation. In middle age he was struck deaf by an unidentifiable illness, at which point his pictures turned darker-a bullfighter gored before eager spectators, the inmates of a madhouse clamoring for respite. His Desastres de la guerra rendered the mute, gaping horror of guerrilla combat. Under a picture of refugees fleeing the French, he inscribed, "I saw it." Whether or not this much debated act of witness really happened, for Hughes it is Goya's urgent visual economy that "invented... the illusion of being there when dreadful things happen." Given his intimate understanding of the painter, one regrets that Hughes's diligent catalogues of the Caprichos and Pinturas Negras (among the 115 color and 100 b&w illustrations) often forgo in-depth analysis for textbook thoroughness. But he compellingly insists on Goya's prophetic genius, arguing that, for an age that has produced few great paintings in response to modern terrors, Goya's pictures anticipate disasters unheard of but yet to arrive. (Nov. 10) Forecast: With a first printing of 75,000 and a first serial in Vanity Fair, the bet clearly is that readers will agree with Hughes's assessment. A new survey of Goya's oeuvre by former Kunsthalle Hamberg director Werner Hofmann, also titled Goya, is scheduled to arrive two weeks after Hughes book, and includes 253 color illustrations. (Thames & Hudson, $75 336p ISBN 0-500-09317-2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Two masters of historical-literary prose have seized on the life and art of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya for their latest works. For Hughes, a life of Goya is the culmination of a writing lifetime as an art critic and historian (The Shock of the New; Barcelona; The Fatal Shore). This is his first extended work since a near-fatal car crash in 1999 (see "Must-Reads for Fall," LJ 9/1/03, p. 41). The subject of Goya allows Hughes to employ his gifts for social portraiture (especially in his vivid picture of the Spanish court) as well as relishing the great works themselves, whose continued power he does not assume but articulates in context. Anytime Goya is off the biographical stage, Hughes has some fascinating bit of social observation to explore (such as the effect of a 1766 royal ban on long capes and wide sombreros, whose enforcers wielded "scissors of sartorial doom," or the figurative meanings of Goya's women tossing a stuffed pellele manikin). Out of such wonderful background Hughes finesses but does not fake his way across the acknowledged gaps in Goya's historical record. By the book's end, when Goya dies deaf and exiled in France, Hughes summons a genuine feeling of loss from the reader. Unlike Hughes, for whom a Goya biography represents a career progression, Connell comes to the Spaniard's life by the zigzagging route of wonderful period novels (Mrs. Bridge; Mr. Bridge) among many other books. However, the writer who so memorably re-created Custer's fatal battlefield in the nonfiction Son of the Morning Star never finds his way comfortably into Goya's world of Bourbon Spain. Too often, Connell mocks the silly or antiquated theories of previous Goya scholars and leaves the narrative there. To compare the Hughes and Connell books directly-on the subject of Spanish majo culture, for instance, or on the artist's patchy early years or derivation of his famous Caprichos series-is to weigh a formidable, exultant work of biography against a comparatively unpassionate extended essay. Chattily composed (lacking details about Goya's wife of 39 years, Josefa, Connell explains that his own family's housekeeper had been a "placid, expressionless, overweight farm girl" named Josefa), Connell's stylish work is neither revisionist nor particularly heroic but simply goes on in its clipped, sometimes winking prose until the Old Master's breath runs out, with an epilog about Goya's pilfered skull. The result is a skimpy introduction for those already in love with the artist's work; libraries would do much better with the Hughes, which is highly recommended.-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews