The Distant Origins of Modernist Art: Reason, Madness and Reversal in Goya's Painting and Etchings

This lecture explores the public turmoil and private illness that prompted Goya to embody a new kind of art whose strangeness energized spectators through the eeriness of the artist’s imagination and his astounding skill at handing what was then the new media of engraving and lithography. Since etching entails a literal reversal not only of the design but also of black and white tones, Goya rejoiced in depictions of figures flipping, spinning, and dropping. These effects also reflect the values of the traditional European pageant of the Carnivalesque which, after the French Revolution, was no longer an annual safety valve for revolutionary ferment, but a state of perpetual reversal of the status quo. Hence Goya’s Romantic vision of the artist out of control, the victim of inner and outer compulsions, but also the facilitator of the viewers’ imagination rather than the slave of his patrons’ power. Hence the courage of…