Tu que no quieres lo que queremos la ley preciosa puesta en bien nuestro
Trdgala!
T rag ala !
T rag ala ! perro !
Dicen que el tragala es insultante pero no insulta mas que al tunante
Trdgala !
T rag ala !
Trdgala ! perro !
Y mientras dure este canalla no cesaremos de decir tragala!
Trag ala !
Trdgala!
T rag ala ! perro !
You who don’t want what we seek — the precious law made for our good,
Swallow it, swallow it, swallow it, dog!
They say the Tragala is insulting, but it insults only the idle crook, And while this canaille lasts, we won’t stop singing Tragala! . . . Swallow it, swallow it, swallow it, dog!
What the dogs had to swallow was the Constitution of 1812. So ran the Trdgala, song of the exaltados of the 1820 Revolution. It echoes the caption to Goya’s ferociously anti-clerical Capricho of 1799. The song itself echoed.
During the revolution of 1936 the no less ferociously anticlerical workers’ militias sang it again. They did not need to change a word.
‘Spain is a country tied on an historical rack - the symbolic equivalent of its own Inquisition’s instrument of torture.
It is stretched between the tenth and the twentieth centuries.’ So John Berger, in his essay on Picasso. 1 This is metaphor.
What it expresses is a concrete reality - the terrible continuity of the Spain of the necessary but impossible revolution.
Some continuities are patent. In his Dream and Lie of Franco (1937) Picasso drew directly on the Goya of the drawings and the Disasters , as he did in his preparatory work for Guernica. Goya looms equally visible behind Picasso’s painfully personal late drawings. 2 Who can fail to recognize the acrid and alien flavour of Goya in so many of the films of Luis Bunuel? On another plane, the tiny Communist Party of Spain, in the early 1930s, based itself on Lenin’s 1905 analysis of ‘backward’ Russia in order to get to grips with the problematic opened by Jovellanos’s Informe of 1795. In the embattled Madrid of 1937, ‘front line of the war against fascism’, as gifts for the Republican President Azana, Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, the Calcografia produced superb editions of all Goya’s great engravings.
It is this permanence of the peculiarly Spanish dilemmas which accounts for the alien and archaic character which so much Spanish self-examination presents to observers from societies which have at least reached a modus vivendi with their own history. Much Spanish historical writing seems peculiarly hallucinatory in character. So much of it is the work of exiles. The afrancesado emigration of 1814 was the first of a sad sequence which attained tragedy in the heart-rending diaspora of 1939. There was something remote, disturbing and yet all too real - in the style of the Black Paintings - in the spectacle of Spanish historians grouping themselves into factions as the rivals Americo Castro and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz ranged the whole sweep of Hispanic history in a brilliantly desperate search for Spain’s autentico ser — from exile. A recognizably modem historian, a European master of his dark and sullen craft, Jaime Vicens Vives (a Catalan) seemed, in his one-man revolution in Campomanes style, a lone and uneasy ilustrado in a culture whose public architecture celebrated Philip II and whose public memory cherished Ferdinand VII.
The shuffle towards modernization begun in the eighteenth century did not reach its destination. Spain seemed imprisoned in yet another paradox, a ‘permanent’ state of transition. It is probable that the explosive modernization of Spain in the middle years of the twentieth century will write finis to this story and eradicate the permanent challenge which Spanish experience has presented to Europe. But the cycle which opened in the late eighteenth century proved to be, in terms of objective historical process, a cycle of frustration.
Whatever the subjective realities and socio-political immediacies of Bourbon modernization, its objective function in Spanish history was the function performed by the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in France and Britain. For reasons rooted in the history of Spain, that species of revolution proved to be as impossible as it was necessary. Spain, like its American derivatives, turned itself into a living folk-museum of contradictory polities, with its half-formed and unarticulated ‘classes’ inhabiting different historic time-scales.
The young Karl Marx, wrestling out of Hegelianism, faced a Germany in 1843 whose condition in one particular was not dissimilar.
If we wanted to start with the German status quo itself, the result would still be an anachronism even if one did it in the only adequate way, i.e. negatively. Even the denial of our political present is already a dusty fact in the historical lumber room of modern peoples. Even if I negate powdered wigs, I still have unpowdered wigs. If I negate the situation in Germany of 1843, I am, according to French reckoning, scarcely in the year 1789, still less at the focal point of the present.
He called his Germany of the necessary but impossible bourgeois revolution ‘the comedian of a world order whose real heroes are dead’. 3 Bourbon Spain fits - perhaps one explanation for Marx’s rather unexpected perspicacity on the war of 1808—14!
John Berger, in seeking to locate Picasso, writes: ‘What I want to establish is that the Spanish middle class, among whom Picasso was brought up, had - even if they wore the same clothes and read some of the same books - very little in common with their French or English or German contemporaries. Such middle-class virtues as there were in Spain were not created of necessity ; if they existed, they were cultivated theoretically. There had been no successful bourgeois revolution.’ 4 How much more true was this of 1800 than 1900, at the initiation of that impossible revolution whose non-fulfilment confronted the young Spanish Picasso with a complex of contradictions not essentially dissimilar from those which confronted Goya on his emergence into an historic identity in the 1790s.
Marx transcended his problem in 1843 by the creation of what was then a largely abstract concept — the proletariat
a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, a social class that is the dissolution of all social classes, a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings, and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular wrong but of
wrong in general. This class can no longer lay claim to an historical status but only to a human one ... it is the complete loss of humanity.
From this perceived totalism he transferred himself physically, out of German unreality into Anglo-French actuality, and conceptually, by means of a decisive intellectual rupture, into a new problematic which located a real proletariat in the historical process and the social formation.
96. The family connexion. Caprichos, 57, 1799
There was, of course, nothing remotely parallel in Goya’s achievement of historic identity. Nevertheless, if one takes the totality of Goya’s work from about 1800 onwards (as opposed to that relatively minor fragment of it which was actually published), the first, immediately obvious and effectively determinant feature of it is the centrality of the pueblo.
This mirrors, of course, the historical experience of the
97. Student-frog, drawing, 1797-8
ilustrados , which in practice reduced itself to a dialogue of the deaf with the pueblo and in 1808—14 to a brute and contradictory confrontation. Already, in the Goya of the 1790s crisis, in his masks and mirror drawings, there is an instinctive awareness of the ‘role-carrying’ function of individuals within a particular structure of social living, an opaque sensitivity to the historical nature of individuality [96,97]. From about 1800 onwards his work is a continuous exploration of Spanish people. It is not simply a matter of proletarian paintings or of peopling an atrocity scene. There is precious little representation in it, precious little reportage.
It is the exploration of a predicament, conscious and directed,
though with the nerve-ends of the imagination exposed.
In consequence he, too, effected a rupture. An ilustrado , indeed, in some respects an exaltado by conviction, a man of the pueblo by ‘temperament’ (also historical in formation), he was, whether consciously or not, trapped like his fellows in the impossible revolution. He found no escape. But he found an essential focus. Outside the relatively minor fringe of contingent and commissioned work after 1800, it is the ‘people’ who engage his mind and who shape his work around the central Caprichos-Disasters axis. Later and more secure individualities in more anchored and integrated societies identify these ‘people’ as ‘humanity’ in timeless relevance.
The perception of his ‘people’ as ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ is itself historically conditioned. His ‘humanity’ is in fact historically specific: it is the Spanish pueblo. And it is here,
I think, that we can grope after some explication of both the power of his work and its apparently transcendental quality.
It is first of all necessary to distinguish between the subjective and the objective. In the Caprichos of 1799, growing out of his first major experimentation with drawing, for example, there is little doubt that Goya’s central subjective preoccupation was with his craft , with the imperative drive to find a form for a personal vision in the materials, techniques, skills of his ‘mystery’, with the translation of that elusive quality in him we call ‘genius’ into an artefact.
The ‘subject-matter’ was the material created in the communication between himself, his experience, direct and vicarious, his memory, his perception of experience and memory and transmutation of them, including his discourse with Jovellanos, Moratin and other ilustrados. Objectively, however, the Caprichos were unmistakably an iconography of Censor enlightenment. Intended for publication, they were also a commodity produced for sale, though admittedly, the Inquisition made the market something less than perfect!
Similarly, it is necessary to distinguish between Goya, a particular Spaniard working in a particular Spain, and the possible role his production could play within a problematic, the possible function it could serve within a social formation. Goya’s four major series of engravings were, or were intended to be, commodities produced for sale. The fact that, as commodities, they all failed or were still-born, is itself some indication that their problematic and function were not those of ‘their time’, the chronological time in which they were produced, of that ‘time’ as it was perceived by a particular society. In this sense they inhabited a different historic
‘time-scale’. The ‘time’ they inhabited has in fact proven to be that which twentieth-century observers in Europe perceive as their own. It was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and, more especially, in the twentieth century, that they came to play a recognizable role in a problematic, to serve a comprehensible function within a social formation.
In subjective terms, the comprehension of Goya the human being is no longer possible; the evidence is insufficient.
A few basic and apparently permanent traits may be detected. There was his preoccupation with money. It was central in his early days, punctuated and measured his sense of his own achievement. How far this in turn was itself a measure of achieved status and recognition it is difficult to say. The 15,000 reales of the royal painter were certainly also a moral compensation for the snub from Saragossa!
The King’s Painter felt it was ‘undignified’ to listen to popular music. By the late 1780s this vulgar sense of self- importance was running into and becoming indistinguishable from the driving need to assert his own creativity. He was protesting at the ‘burden’ of commissioned work as early as 1788; in 1790 came the psychological ‘disorder’ which led to his revolt of 1791 and prefigured the collapse of 1792.
The artisan had become an ‘artist’. Certainly, there is in later years little or nothing of the bouncing, self-indulgent, self-revelling new-rich baturro of the 1780s.
The shrewd concern for money, however, persisted.
Even in his crisis of 1792-3 he went to rather comic lengths of amateur deception to disguise his flight from Madrid and to preserve his salary. One notes the jewellery of the 1812 inventory. At the end of his life he was making hazardous journeys from exile to Madrid to secure his pension.
There is nothing very rewarding in these observations, except perhaps some indication of a populist (‘artisan ,
‘peasant’, ‘bourgeois’ seem equally apt - and equally revealing in this context!) insecurity. His father the gilder had
died intestate.
It does run parallel, however, with other character traits — a sense of ‘coldness’ or ‘detachment’ which many commentators have noticed. Perhaps Aragonese are baturros? This is most noticeable in his public roles, where he was quintessentially a politique. Even the Caprichos did not, in the particular conjuncture of 1798—9, demand an unusual courage. Throughout his life Goya seems to have been publicly non-political. It was, after all, his imperative self-regard which had carried him into the ilustrado fraternity in the 1780s,
when they represented respectability and establishment.
The shocks of the 1790s, which displaced and ultimately destroyed this particular species of respectability, do seem to have been a significant factor in his intense personal crisis.
On the other hand there are outright contradictions to be noted. He did publish the Caprichos , after the clericals had broken Jovellanos. He did try to escape to ‘a free country’ in 1812. As soon as he attained some financial independence in 1800 he did devote himself almost wholly to the elaboration of his own art, an obligation to which he remained true despite occasional spurts of self-preservation. Above all, there is the evidence of his personal drawings from 1814 onwards, which stamp him as a committed, near-fanatical, anti-clerical liberal or radical, which constitute a f accuse! the equal of any in history and which afford glimpses into an inner life that was tumultuous, breathtakingly imaginative, passionate, fierce and large.
It was precisely this self-concern which ran into, married and eventually powered his obsession with his craft, in which he achieved a qualitative breakthrough. He was always an original. His youth yields ample evidence of a bubbling creativity before he subjected it to the royal tapestry works.
His attitude before his forties, however, was episodically unexacting. Throughout his life, commitment was necessary to him for full achievement. Ebbs in that commitment no doubt account for the inadequacies in his work, which are unusually numerous for a painter of his stature. Through the late 1780s, however, there is evidence of a deeper commitment developing out of and transcending an artisan concern for a job well done. From the 1790s his work became a passion.
It is difficult to think of anyone who could rival him in his readiness to learn, to teach himself, to experiment. The range of his techniques and experiments is staggering. £ Still learning’ he scrawled on a drawing of an ancient at the end of his life; he taught himself the new lithography on the lip of the grave.
That growth into passion was punctuated by major illnesses. All three of them register a change of direction.
In 1777-8 a serious disorder followed several years of derivative, decorative painting and took him direct to his first original engraving, which dramatically anticipates his later work. His desperate illness in 1819 was perhaps less ‘creative’; desperate illnesses are an occupational hazard of a man’s seventies. Nevertheless, it was followed by the Black Paintings. Central, of course, and central to the decisive
‘mystery’ of Goya’s emergence as an historic identity , was the illness of 1792-3, whose inner meaning will now always remain a mystery. Its objective meaning in the trajectory of his work, however, is clear. Organically connected to his newer commitment to work itself and to the unhinging shock of the displacement of ilustrado culture, its demotion to a dissident sub-culture, its effects interpenetrated with those of the Alba affair and the developing crisis of Spanish polity.
In the years that immediately followed, the historic Goya took shape, committed intellectually and in increasing passion to the values of the ilustrados , committed by temper and experience to the exploration of the human and social realities of unregenerate people, committed of necessity to a developing and ever more affluent style, in drawing, engraving, genre painting, the study of violence, which was of necessity dual, a dichotomy, a dialectic of reason and unreason in a specific human context. His drawings begin at Sanlucar in 1796 and are henceforth the very motor of his work. As soon as he was rich enough and as soon as clerical pressure grew too intense around 1800, he withdrew. Outside work in future he undertook when he had to, or thought politic - which amounts to the same thing. His real identity, his historic identity, crystallized around the Caprichos-Disasters core. Following the inner if unperceived but necessary logic of the ilustrado predicament (a logic not unlike that which propelled the young Marx in 1843) his work, of necessity, came to focus on the pueblo.
From this point, it is possible to approach his work as an objective reality. Its trajectory can be established in quantitative terms. Gassier and Wilson’s superb catalogue pinpoints the early 1790s as the point of rupture, the early 1800s as the emergence of the new problematic. Of his total production, graphic work accounts for no less than two thirds, drawings alone for nearly a half. This is the core of the historic Goya, and, virtually in its entirety, it dates from 1792, in fact from 1796. The most productive period of his life was that between 1808 and 1819. Half his known portraits date from the period 1792-1808. In fact, commissioned portraits and paintings dwindle very rapidly and quite massively after 1800-3; they are surpassed by paintings and portraits done for friends and kinsfolk and for his own service. There is, in truth, a wholesale shift into the private and the graphic; the great engravings and the major paintings grow out of this ground.
In objective terms, it is possible tentatively to suggest
function. Portraiture, of course, underwrote and idealized the chosen social role of the sitter; it celebrated a social role and warranted the structure which determined that role. To quote John Berger, ‘The portrait must fit like a hand-made pair of shoes, but the type of shoe was never in question.’ 6 This, self-evidently, was the character of the great majority of Goya’s commissioned and bien-pensant portraits. That several of the major artists on occasion startle and delight in portraits by their insights, their psychological penetration - as Goya so often did - implies personal, sometimes obsessional interests on the part of the artist which transcend his professional function. These paintings, which approach self-portraits in their tension, are in effect autobiographical. 7 That most of Goya’s portraits fall within these categories and that their specific weight in his total work diminishes sharply after 1800 or so are facts that speak for themselves.
In a different category were the paintings of his friends, the leading ilustrados , which he made in the 1790s virtually as a political statement, and the paintings of the bourgeois Madrilenos he produced in the 1800s, together with the many ‘gift and recognition’ portraits he executed in later years.
These in fact approximate to what became a common mode in the nineteenth century when The Artist had emerged as an ‘autonomous’ and generally ‘alienated’ creature in bourgeois society. The values implied are those of friendship - with a ‘creative genius’ - or those of the subjection of the sitter to such a genius; in each case, what matters is the artist’s ‘vision’ and personality. 8 Again the shifting relative weight of these two types of portraiture within Goya’s work after 1800 or so speaks for itself: it runs parallel to the themes of his drawings where the Censor ideology, with its intense and painful ambivalence before the pueblo , escalates into the exaltado passion of 1820. In terms of function, this work ‘celebrates’ (to use the word as Goya used it about his priapic priest in the suenos preliminary to the Caprichos [46]) that ‘bourgeois’ transformation of values which
in Spain was ‘impossible’.
* '•
But a deal of Goya’s painting and much of his portraiture and work which approximates to portraiture cannot fit into either category. Here some comments by John Berger on the work of the French artist Gericault seem almost intolerably apposite. He talks of
two or three extraordinary portraits of lunatics by Gericault, painted in the first period of romantic disillusion and defiance which followed the defeat of Napoleon and the shoddy triumph of the French
bourgeoisie. The paintings were neither morally anecdotal nor symbolic: they were straight portraits, traditionally painted. Yet their sitters had no social role and were presumed to be incapable of fulfilling any. In other pictures Gericault painted severed human heads and limbs as found in the dissecting theatre. His outlook was bitterly critical: to choose to paint dispossessed lunatics was a comment on men of property and power; but it was also an assertion that the essential spirit of man was independent of the role into which society forced him. Gericault found society so negative that, although sane himself, he found the isolation of the mad more meaningful than the social honour accorded to the successful. He was the first and, in a sense, the last profoundly anti-social portraitist. The term contains an impossible contradiction. 9
The relevance of this comment to Goya’s essential work is striking. Much of it falls precisely into this paradoxical ‘anti-social portraiture’. If the notion of portraiture be extended into his drawings and engravings, as I think it can be, since many are in fact miniature ‘portraits’ - the figures are collectivities and subjects for comment on the ‘human’, but they are not anonymous - Berger’s characterization of Gericault could apply to much of Goya.
The centrality of Goya lies in that area of work defined by the Caprichos at one pole and that cluster of drawings and engravings which form one multiple capricho around 1820 at the other; drawings occupy the heartland and paintings and engravings emerge from it. The dramatis personae are ‘people’, ‘ordinary people’. Through them, what Goya evidently thought of as the ‘human predicament’ is explored, in a tense and creative dialectic of the rational and the non- rational. Even the most fantastic and grotesque of his productions have this purpose. Their guignolesque theatre is ultimately a human theatre.
This is the first, perhaps controversial, point which has to be made on the objective character of his work. It has to be called humanist, provided the word is not used in an optimistic sense. The religious sense appears to be weak in Goya. Some of the earlier religious works have power and panache, but it is difficult to locate this in a specifically religious sensibility. It is surely not religious feeling which gives the frescoes in San Antonio Florida their character.
Most of his religious work is unconvincing. The exceptions, significantly, come late in life, and their Christs and saints are squarely in the tradition of human crucifixion which runs through the Disasters and the drawings [67]. As for the grotesque, the maniacal, the occult, the witchery, they are
98. Good counsel, drawing H4, c. 1824-8 (drawn in Bordeaux)
••• •:
precisely the product of the sleep of human reason; they are human nightmares. That these monsters are human is, indeed, the point. No, the universe of Goya’s drawings is delimited by the scribbling, blind and skeletal corpse of his Disasters - Nada. Nothing, that’s what it says [74],
Within this human world, it is the pueblo which is central; this not merely in the sense of ‘ordinary people’, but very often in a more specific sense, that of the menu peuple in France, the popular classes of pre-industrial society, so many of whom lived outside and often against the law of that society. In a considerable number of Goya’s drawings and engravings, the bourgeoisie, in a fairly specific sense, distinguished by tall hats and respectable dress, are present as onlookers, outsiders, spectators. This is very striking, of course, in his famine scenes and in his drawings of plebeian massacres of afrancesados, but it is a frequent presence.
This pueblo is not consciously picaresque; nor is it treated in any paternalist manner. It is delineated ‘straight’.
The frequent appearance of physical deformity served a purpose in comment, of course, but it was hardly any deformation of actual reality, any more than the gipsy-like and semi-bandit styles were. This was what the pre-industrial plebs generally looked like. More striking, they are not anonymous. These crowds have faces. Exactly how Goya achieved this effect it is difficult to say, but even among the collectivities one is conscious of the individuality of these little figures. A few touches bring a man or woman to individual life in a manner which is quite surprising, given the role in comment that he has assigned them. It is in his personalized treatment of these faces in a crowd that Goya, paradoxically, breaks out of his own prison of the first person singular.
His pueblo is, of course, marshalled to serve the comment he wishes to make [98]. He is commenting on what he conceives of as ‘mankind’; verbal comment itself, deepening the ambivalence, is essential to the engravings. The many couplings reinforce the point. They all, even the victims in the Disasters, even the monsters, serve his capricho.
That Goya, by the logic of his enterprise, should be driven to confront the pueblo, is symptomatic of the ‘impossible contradiction’ in the objective historical situation of those friends in whose shared exile he died. The Spanish pueblo was not only an expression of their dilemma, it was one of the terms of the equation. In a sense it was determinant.
About Goya’s superb proletarian paintings there is something
more than Breughel’s confidently bourgeois celebration of work [50,51,52]. They are monumental; there is a certain affirmation in them. What structure do these ‘portraits’ serve? What problematic do they open?
Unlike Marx, however, Goya made no breakthrough, achieved no transcendence. He is irredeemably pessimistic. The positive assertion, the optimistic in his work, rare at the best of times, tends to be tactical rather than strategic.
Liberty is hailed, prisoners are freed, disrobing monks celebrated, but these sparse and spare instances lack the power and intensity of the more characteristic pieces.
The ‘affirmation’ at the close of the Disasters , for example, with its peasant looking like a Tolstoyan muzhik, and its plump and banal Truth, is singularly unconvincing — as unconvincing as most of his religious paintings. It is promptly followed by an Unholy Trinity of chained prisoners of the Inquisition. Nada. That’s what it says.
In terms of its objective function, of its role in a problematic, the meaning of the essential art of the historic Goya seems fairly clear. It is the iconography of a necessary but impossible revolution. Hence, no doubt, its resonance in the twentieth century.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. See Nigel Glendinning, ‘Portraits of War’, New Society, 19 March, 1970.
Chapter 2
1. See R. Herr, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958) pp. 20ff; Laura Rodriguez, ‘The Spanish Riots of 1766’, Past and Present, 59 (1973). In the developing social history of this period, the riots have become the subject of controversy between Laura Rodriguez and Pierre Vilar in Reviste de Occidente, 107, 121, 122 (1972—3); and see josep Fontana, Cambio economico y actitudes politicos en la Espaha del siglo xix (Barcelona, Ariel, 1972). Rodriguez believes that the riots in Madrid, unlike those in the provinces, were politically manipulated; certainly the Crown made scapegoats of the Jesuits.
2. R. Herr, op. cit., pp. 220-28. For the background, see the comprehensive J. Sarrailh, L’Espagne eclairee de la seconde moitie du xviiie siecle (Paris, 1954).
3. A. Machado, ‘A orillas del Duero’ in Campos de Castilla. I have used the Coleccion Austral edition (Espasa-Calpe, Buenos Aires, 1946).
4. Of the more accessible texts, basic are Raymond Carr, Spain 1808-1939 (O.U.P., 1965); Jaime Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, trans.
F. M. Lopez-Morillas (Princeton, 1969); Karl Marx, Revolution in Spain (International Publishers, New York, 1939); E. J. Hamilton, l^ar and Prices in Spain 1651-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947); A. Dominguez Ortiz, La sociedad espahola en el siglo xviii (Madrid, 1955); M. Menendez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxes espaholes (Santander, 1947—8); R. Herr, op. cit.; J. Sarrailh, op. cit.
5. On economic history, see in particular, the magisterial and seminal work of J. Vicens Vives. There is relevant material in the critical analysis of the nineteenth century by Jordi Nadal in Fontana Economic History of Europe, ed. Carlo M. Cipolla, vol. ii (1973) and in D. R. Ringrose, Transportation and Economic Stagnation in Spain 1750-1850 (Durham, N.C., 1970); recent work by Spanish historians is opening up the field; see, for example, Gonzalo Anes, Economia e ilustracion en la Espaha del siglo xvui (Barcelona, Ariel, 2nd edn, 1972) and Las crisis agrarias en la Espaha modema (Madrid, Taurus, 2nd imp., 1974), Josep Fontana, op. cit., and La quiebra de la monarquia absoluta 1814-20 (Barcelona, Ariel, 1974).
(y On Catalonia, see the monumental work, Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans VEspagne moderne (Paris, 1962).
7. On Olavide, see M. Defourneaux, Pablo de Olavide ou ‘ VAfrancesado’
(Paris, 1959).
8. On the enlightenment, see the works of J. Sarrailh and R. Herr already cited. There is an admirable essay on eighteenth-century writing in Nigel
Glendinning, The eighteenth century, A literary history of Spain, ed.
R. O. Jones (Benn, London, 1972).
9. There is an interesting picture of the majo in F. D. Klingender, Goya in the Democratic Tradition (Sidgwick & Jackson reprint, London, 1968), pp. 15ff.
10. The appearance of the first full catalogue raisonne of his work has superseded most biographies of Goya. See the massive and magnificent study of Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, Goya, His Life and Work, ed. F. Lachenal (Thames & Hudson, London, 1971).
11. Apart from the works of R. Carr and R. Herr cited above, see Carlos E. Corona Baratech, Revolucion y reaccion en el reinado de Carlos IV (Madrid, 1957). Karl Marx, op. cit., offers a brilliant and caustic commentary.
12. Karl Marx, op. cit., pp. 56ff and especially pp. 63ff.
Chapter 3
1. See Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1963) pp. 118ff.
2. See, in particular, her study Trasmundo de Goya (Madrid, 1963) and her collection of essays, Jovellanos y Goya (Taurus, Madrid, 1970). I thank my friend Joaquin Romero Maura for having introduced me to the scholarly and sinewy work of Edith Helman, which is decisive.
3. Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 199-200, and ‘Los Chinchillas de Goya’, in Jovellanos y Goya, pp. 183—97.
4. Edith Helman, ‘Don Nicolas Fernandez de Moratin y Goya: sobre Ars amatorial, Jovellanos y Goya, pp. 219—35.
5. On Goya’s relationship with Jovellanos, see both books by Edith Helman and Gassier and Wilson, op. cit.
6. See N. Glendinning, ‘The Monk and the Soldier in Plate 58 of Goya’s Caprichos’, Journal oj the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxiv (1961), and Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 87-8.
7. Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 72ff for a convincing discussion of this theme.
8. Edith Helman, ‘Cadalso y Goya: sobre caprichos y monstruos’, Jovellanos y Goya, pp. 125-55.
9. On Moratin and Goya, see Edith Helman, ‘The Younger Moratin and Goya: on Duendes and Brujas’, Hispanic Review, xxvii (1959), also in Spanish in Jovellanos y Goya-, ‘Goya y Moratin hijo: actitudes ante el pueblo en la Ilustracion espanola’, Jovellanos y Goya, pp. 237-56; ‘Goya, Moratin y el teatro’, ibid., pp. 257-71; Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 178ff.
Chapter 4
1. Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 30-3. Jose Ortega y Gasset,
‘Goya y lo popular’, Obras completas (Madrid, 2nd edn, 1964) vii, 521-36, and comments in Papeles sobre Velazquez y Goya (Madrid, 1950).
2. On this question, see Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., p. 79; Jose Gudiol, Goya (New York, 1964), pp. 23, 45, 83.
3. See Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 17-26, and ‘Identity and Style in Goya’, Burlington Magazine, cvi (1964), also in Jovellanos y Goya, pp. 111-23.
4. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 22, 48-53; Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, passim.
5. See Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 51—68, and the brilliant essay by Edith Helman in Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 20ff, 163ff.
6. Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 33—4; Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 22-3, 71, 106.
7. The evidence is set out clearly in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 105-6. The key source is Valentin de Sambricio, Tapices de Goya (Madrid, 1946).
8. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 62ff.
9. Edith Helman, Trasmundo de Goya, pp. 98ff.
10. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., p. 68.
11. These works have been the subject of controversy: the Yard with Lunatics disappeared from view after a sale in 1922 and was published as a rediscovery in 1967. The argument is set out in full in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., catalogue and notes, pp. 161 and 169, text, pp. 105-13. A basic source is Xavier de Salas, ‘Precisiones sobre pinturas de Goya, El entierro de la sardina, la serie de obras de gabinete de 1793-4, y otras notas’,
Archivo Espahol de Arte, xli (1968).
12. The placing of these eight paintings of the Romana collection remains difficult. F. j. Sanchez Canton, ‘Como vivla Goya’, Archivo Espahol de Arte, xix (1946), first identified them with the ‘horrors of war’ inventoried in Goya’s house in 1812. The argument, following Jose Gudiol, for placing them in the 1790s is discussed in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., notes to catalogue III, 914-21, p. 254, where the ‘savages’ are also considered.
13. The Alba affair is most sensibly treated in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 114—17.
14. The albums are magnificently handled in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 117ff and reproduced in miniature on pp. 171-6.
15. Miniatures of the suehos, the Caprichos and the preparatory drawings may be found in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 176-88.
Chapter 5
1. Tomas Harris, Goya: Engravings and Lithographs (Oxford, 1964) i, 140.
2. Inventories analysed by F. J. Sanchez Canton, ‘Como vivia Goya’,
Archivo Espahol de Arte, xix (1946), and the issue fully treated in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 246-50.
3. The catalogue created by Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., fully documents this statement.
4. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 154—8 and catalogue, pp. 200-1.
5. An entertaining story summarized in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., p. 261.
6. Basic on the crisis are the works of Miguel Artola, Los origenes de la Espaha contemporanea (Madrid, 1959) and La Espaha de Fernando VII (Madrid, 1968). A social history of the crisis is in the making in Spain, deriving in part from the work of J. Vicens Vives and marxist or marxisant in tone (with Maurice Dobb and Edward Thompson major influences); see, for example, the works of Gonzalo Anes and Josep Fontana, op. cit.; but much Spanish writing on the crisis tends to be notable for quantity rather than quality. Useful are Carlos E. Corona Baratech, op. cit., M. Izquierdo Hernandez, Antecedentes y comienzos del reinado de Fernando VII (Madrid, 1963). Most illuminating are the early chapters of Raymond Carr, op. cit. (where Azanza is quoted), a few all too brief remarks in J. Vicens Vives, Approaches to the History of Spain, trans. Joan Connelly Ullman (Berkeley, 1970) and the short but memorable pieces which Karl Marx wrote for the New York Tribune, collected in Revolution in Spain (New York, 1939).
7. The narrative of the rising and the guerrilla war (which still lacks an adequate historical analysis) has to be pieced together from a wide range of sources which vary greatly in quality. Central is the detailed narrative of the Count de Toreno. I have used the French version - Histoire du soulevement, de la guerre et de la revolution d’Espagne (Paris, 1836).
8. The best approach to the period in English is by Raymond Carr, Spain 1808-1939. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Spain under the Bourbons
1700-1833 (London, 1973), prints, from p. 198 onwards, a number of illustrative documents in English translation, including a classic cri de coeur of Spanish liberalism in Quintana’s letter to Lord Holland of November 1823.
9. The narrative of Goya’s life in this period in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 205-344, supersedes all others.
10. The subject is fully treated in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 246-9.
Key sources are Valentin Sambricio, Tapices de Goya, F. J. Sanchez Canton, ‘Como vivia Goya’, Archivo Espanol de Arte, xix (1946) and Vida y obras de Goya (Madrid, 1951), revised in The Life and Works of Goya (Madrid, 1964) and Xavier de Salas, ‘Sur les tableaux de Goya qui appartinrent a son fils’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, lxiii (1964).
11. E. Lafuente Ferrari, Goya: El Dos de Mayo y los Fusilamientos (Barcelona, 1946), p. 23, n32; Pedro Beroqui, El museo del Prado (Madrid, 1933),
p. 101; Gassier and Wilson, op cit., p. 257.
12. M. Nunez de Arenas, ‘Manojo de noticias - La suerte de Goya en Francia’, Bulletin Hispanique (Bordeaux) 3 (1950); Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., p. 335.
Chapter 6
1. Goya’s drawings are for the first time fully published and annotated in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., catalogue and notes, pp. 171-88, 194—6, 267-96, 325-7, 329-30, 363-71; text commentaries are on pp. 117-31, 217-22, 227-39, 301-4, 308-12, 333-49.
2. Reproduced in Anthony Blunt, Picasso’s Guernica (O.U.P., 1969), p. 10.
3. This paragraph is based on a close analysis of the argument and specimens fully deployed in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., catalogue and notes, pp.
254, 263-5.
4. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., catalogue, notes and specimen miniatures pp. 254, 264, and 195 (for the drawing after Flaxman).
5. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., catalogue, notes and specimens, pp. 254, 262-3; Jose Lopez-Rey, ‘Goya’s Still-Lifes’, Art Quarterly, xi (1948).
6. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 227-9, 276-81 (catalogue).
7. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 308-12, 325-7 (catalogue). Among the best reproductions of Goya’s four major series of engravings are
E. Lafuente Ferrari, Goya: the Complete Etchings, Aquatints and Lithographs (New York, 1962) and Tomas Harris, Goya: Engravings and Lithographs, 2 vols., (Oxford, 1964).
8. Tomas Harris, op. cit., ii, 365-407.
9. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 310, 325; F. D. Klingender, Goya in the Democratic Tradition, pp. 208-9 (London, reprint 1968).
10. The cogent and convincing argument is set out in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 313-18; see also Appendix vi; the catalogue, notes and specimens are on pp. 323, 327-8; see also F. J. Sanchez Canton, Goya and the Black Paintings (London, 1964).
11. For his work in France, see Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 333-54, and catalogue on pp. 356-72.
12. On this period in his life, see chapters 4 and 5 of F. D. Klingender, Goya in the Democratic Tradition ; while these range with extraordinary abandon over time and space, they are also extraordinarily powerful and evocative and seem to me to have the heart of the matter in them.
Chapter 7
1. Art historians generally seem to me (as a mere common-or-garden historian) bland in their nonchalant acceptance of the excision of these three small prints, in the teeth of Goya’s explicit statement. Their
criteria are presumably ‘artistic’ rather than ‘historical’.
2. The entire argument of this chapter is based on a very close and particular examination of the eighty-five prints of the original Fatal Consequences capricho, set out in detail in Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., catalogue, notes and specimens on pp. 257, 268-76; text treatment, pp. 217-21;
this study was correlated with work on contemporary drawings, engravings and paintings and related to other detailed studies of the series. Of major significance are E. Lafuente Ferrari, op. cit., and Los desastres de la guerra de Goya y sus dibujos preparatories (Barcelona, 1952); Tomas Harris, op. cit.; and the very full collection (though still without the chained prisoners) in The Disasters of War, introduction by Philip Hofer (New York, 1967).
3. Gassier and Wilson, op. cit., p. 221.
Chapter 8
1. John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso (Penguin, London, 1965), p. 22.
2. See Anthony Blunt, op. cit., and J. Berger, op. cit., pp. 114, 187-202.
3. Karl Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
( 1843-44 0, most conveniently located in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Early Texts, Blackwell’s Political Texts (Oxford, 1971), p. 117.
4. J. Berger, op. cit., p. 20.
5. Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 127 (I have used some elements of the older translation).
6. John Berger, ‘The Changing View of Man in the Portrait’, in The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles (Pelican, London, 1972', p. 38.
7. See the argument in John Berger, op. cit., p. 36.
8. John Berger, op. cit., p. 39.
9. John Berger, op. cit., p. 38.