The Black Paintings by Goya (Part One): Great Art Explained

In 1819, Francisco José De Goya y Lucientes,

commonly known as Goya was a successful and celebrated artist.

Then suddenly he withdrew from public life, left Madrid and the Royal Court behind,

and moved into a farmhouse in the countryside.

His wife and most of his friends were dead,and he had become isolated.

He was 73 years old, sick and completely deaf.

His long life was coming to a close.

But... he wasn't finished yet.

The man who had once painted crucifixions, Miracles, Saints and Priests, now painted terrifying,

demonic, raw and brutal works.

Works without even a hint of God.

Francisco Goya's 'Black Paintings' were created during his later years in Spain - from

around 1819 to 1823

and convey his deeply pessimistic view of humanity.

He went from being the most famous painter in the country,

idolised by an adoring public,

to an artist who created his works in total isolation,

on the bare walls of his secluded Farmhouse,

which were never intended for public viewing.

To understand his black paintings we need to understand how Goya went from Royal

portraits,

to the horrors of War, to arrive at this endpoint.

Goya was a man from a humble background who Rose through the ranks to

reach the upper echelons of high society.

In 1775 he arrived in Madrid from Zaragoza.

At first he worked on tapestry 'cartoons' for the Royal residences,

creating painting designs to be woven into tapestries for Royal palaces,

which gave him his first contact with the Spanish royal family.

It was in the tapestry Factory that he learned to tell a story.

In 1789 the year of the French Revolution he would be appointed court painter

and eventually worked for three Spanish Kings;

First Charles III, the great reformer, then his son the inept Charles IV,

and then his son, the Tyrant Ferdinand VII.

In between, he would work for the occupying French King, Joseph Bonaparte.

In his forties, Goya was financially and socially secure, respected and newly Bourgeois.

But just as he was getting too comfortable, his health took a Sinister turn.

While at the same time,

Spain went through some of the most enormous political

and social upheavals in its history -

and Goya was in the thick of it.

He had started life at the Royal Court

as a naturalistic painter of the upper classes,

but slowly he underwent an unexpected revolution of his own - from the light

to the dark.

In 1792, when Goya was 46 he developed a mysterious illness.

He survived but went completely deaf.

This profoundly impacted his art, and he began to explore a more personal Vision.

He started to produce his most subversive work.

He created 'Los Caprichos' in his 50s,

The Disasters of War were produced in his 60s,

and then the Black Paintings he made in his 70s.

His later works were mostly produced in secret,

while he was still an employee of the Court.

Then in 1808 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain, and ousted the recently crowned Ferdinand VII.

Goya remained in Madrid during the occupation by the French

and even worked for them.

For many Spanish liberals like Goya, the French invasion was complicated.

Like many dictators - then and now - Napoleon came in with talk of "restoring democracy".

Ferdinand was a despised dictator

and Goya and his liberal friends had initially supported the aims of the French

Revolution.

They saw French rule

as the great hope of liberalisation

and Enlightenment and in fact one of the first things Napoleon did was to

abolish the hated Inquisition.

But the truth is that under occupation, Goya's opinion of the French changed,

after personally witnessing the violent subjugation of his countrymen by occupying troops.

The war and its ensuing atrocities affected him and his work deeply,

and we start to see a darker subject matter,

emotional work which shows deep fear for Spain's future.

After a brutal suppression,

Spanish Rebels started a campaign of Guerrilla warfare there would be repercussions,

but eventually Napoleon was forced out in 1813,

and King Ferdinand VII who was living in Exile was reinstated.

Goya had started his Royal career with Ferdinand's grandfather, the Beloved Charles III,

a king who believed in religious reform and a constitutional monarchy.

The painter and the King had much in common following many of the principles

of "The Enlightenment",

an intellectual and philosophical movement that had spread throughout Europe,

that placed reason over Superstition and science over religion. all over the world,

great thinkers were talking of a "wall of separation" between church and state.

But, Ferdinand VII declared himself "Absolute Monarch" and put Spain into reverse.

He rejected any type of modernisation, reinstated the Inquisition, revoked the Constitution,

clamped down on dissent with an Iron Fist,

and began the process of dragging Spain back to the Middle Ages.

When Goya produced his series on the monstrosities of war

and human behaviour called "Los Desastres de la Guerra"

or "The Disasters of War",

he wrote on one of them: "No se puede mirar",

or "one cannot look at this" To this day,

some of his work is hard to look at.

In some strange way his deafness and the isolation that came with it,

gave him freedom to work in a more experimental vein,

rather than something a patron had demanded.

His darker work however,

would either be censored or not even see the light of day.

Francisco Goya was a truth teller but not everybody wants to hear the truth.

This work was painted just before Goya was struck deaf. (silence)

And this was painted after. from 1792 on,

Goya's private world would be stripped of colour

and Light Goya said he saw scenes like "Yard with Lunatics" in the Asylum

at Zaragoza.

It shows a scene of violence occurring in an open courtyard of an insane

asylum,

but despite the yard being open to the skies,

the inmates are shrouded in darkness.

The dark subject matter and the use of Shadow to represent ignorance,

would prefigure his later etchings.

On the 6th of February, 1799 the popular newspaper Diario de Madrid,

carried an ad from Francisco Goya,

announcing the publication and sale of a series of new etchings.

He stressed in this public announcement that:

"In none of the compositions

that form this collection has the author proposed to ridicule the particular faults of

one or another individual".

In other words, the work came with a disclaimer.

Goya published a series of 80 etchings and aqua tints,

called "Los Caprichos" or "The Caprices" in

which he took the opportunity to show the hypocrisies

and Follies of an unenlightened population,

while critiquing the vanity and ignorance of contemporary Society.

The technique of aquatint is an etching process

that allows artists to create a "watercolour look"

and Goya became a master at using a broad range of contrasting tints to

reveal the shadowy world of ignorance.

Goya may have started them

as early as 1795

when even pre-Napoleon the political situation in Spain had changed dramatically.

The reign of Charles IV was dominated by crisis after crisis.

Wars with revolutionary France and then England weakened Spain's economy.

The government attacked the press and censored political news,

but interestingly social satire like "Los Caprichos" flourished.

Goya had not long been struck deaf,

and in recovery he developed a personal interest in "The Enlightenment" - these ideas

were almost certainly an inspiration for his most famous plate from Los Caprichos:

Number 43, "The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters".

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the man whose words inspired the French revolutionaries,

and he was now inspiring a Spanish court painter.

Words which were censored by both the Spanish church and the crown.

The frontispiece of Rousseau's 1793 edition of "Philosophie" bears a striking resemblance to Goya's

etching,

and it is quite possible

that it was this book

that sowed the seeds for Goya's own personal Enlightenment.

The distraught man slumped over the desk,

is the artist himself - we know this from an earlier Preparatory sketch.

Goya shows the struggle between Reason and Imagination,

his audience would have recognized the menacing bats

and owls as symbols of ignorance

and Evil.

In Los Caprichos, no member of Spanish Society was spared his acid pen;

Superstitious peasants and prostitutes, belief in witches, the ignorance of the ruling class,

and most shockingly of all the Catholic Church, were all targets.

Goya satire of religion was particularly dangerous.

Here we see a drunken priest pulling up his trousers after consummating an unspecified

sexual act.

This plate has a group of clergymen getting drunk beside an enormous barrel of

beer and Goya has them saying:

"No-one has seen us".

We need to remind ourselves of the religious oppression in Spain,

where the Inquisition remained a force until 1834!

The church had complete control and decided what could be read and what couldn't,

what could be taught and what couldn't, and what art was and wasn't acceptable.

And if you went against these teachings, you could be persecuted by the Inquisition.

Inevitably Goya WAS reported to the authorities and only two days after publication,

he withdrew the Caprichos from public sale.

Luckily for us, in 1803 Goya gifted the original copper plates to the king

who gave them to the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts.

In France, the political revolution inspired by the enlightenment evolved into violence,

leading to Napoleon becoming Emperor of France which would have direct consequences for Spain.

After the Napoleonic Invasion, spontaneous rioting broke out, and on May the 2nd 1808,

Spanish citizens rose up against the French occupiers.

The next day, the French struck back at dawn,

and hundreds of Spanish citizens were rounded up and shot.

Goya's painting of one of those executions,

will stand in for all the brutalities of War.

We can debate the ethics

(or otherwise) of Goya working for the occupying Napoleonic court,

but we must remember he was the court painter and he needed to survive.

Being in Madrid meant he could bear witness to the horrors of War perpetrated

by Napoleon's armies.

And so he started working in secret on new etchings

which would be called "The Disasters of War".

Some of the ideas from the etchings would inform his "Third of May" canvas.

When Napoleon was driven out and Ferdinand VII was on his way back in,

Goya approached the provisional government with a request to paint two enormous history paintings.

One depicting the Spanish rebellion, and another set the following day.

This was six years after the event took place

and at a time

when Goya's loyalty to the Spanish Crown was being questioned.

The paintings were done extremely quickly, within a couple of months!

Goya had a lot to prove.

"Third of May 1808" is set in the early morning after the uprising.

The painting features two groups of men.

In the shadows is the anonymous firing squad of the French army,

melded together as a single unit - an instrument of War.

We cannot see their faces, emphasising the anonymity of oppressors.

The contrast between the passion of the pleading victims,

and the cold mechanical firing squad, is what makes this work so intense.

The central "Christ-like" figure is an anti-hero who is about to be executed on

the side of the road like a dog,

as bodies of slaughtered citizens pile up beneath him.

Goya uses him as a symbol of martyrdom, of man's inhumanity to man,

and the whiteness of his shirt is there to represent the innocence of ALL

victims.

The scene is lit by a lantern on the ground,

which if you look carefully is actually only throwing light on the main figure.

As well as the crucifixion pose his hands show the wounds of the Stigmata

which Picasso will reference for Guernica,

his anti-war painting, along with the pose of the central figure.

Light, candles and lanterns are often tied into images of martyrdom in Christian art

- as a metaphor for the presence of God.

But in Goya's painting,

the light is there to make an easy shot for the firing squad

and to force us to witness the atrocity.

Goya subverts the whole concept of light and takes God out of the equation.

The artist broke all the "rules" of art by creating a war painting

that has no Heroes,

that shows a powerful State exacting revenge against ordinary citizens.

War paintings have always been about opposing armies, about Victory.

But this is a complete break from heroic symbols of war.

The figures, including a friar, are not heroic,

but cower in fear as a mass of blood seeps into the sand.

Once more, Goya shows us "The Truth", but as I said before,

not everyone wants to hear the truth.

And when Ferdinand VII returned to Madrid in 1814 - six years after he left,

Goya's paintings were put in storage -

and they would remain hidden from view for over 40 years.

The last thing the newly restored King wanted,

was to remind ordinary citizens

that they also had the power to overthrow their oppressors.

This painting is the one against

which all future paintings of conflict will be measured,

a powerful statement on tragedy and abuse of power, in the name of "Liberation".

A statement that is

as important today as it was 200 years ago This was a difficult time

for Goya.

Despite the two paintings,

he was still under investigation for his role during the French occupation,

and commissions dried up.

So in 1819, at the age of 73,

he moved to a farmhouse in the countryside,

where isolated from the Spanish Court in complete secrecy he created some of the

most extraordinary images in the history of art.