David Malouf opening speech, Goya Disasters of War, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, March 30, 2010.

Because we have such a weak grasp of history we sometimes assume that it is only in the 20th century, under conditions of what we call total war, that civilians have become the major casualties of combat; and it is true that in the past century more civilians have died, been massacred, killed in air-raids or systematically exterminated, than actual combatants.  But nothing in modern times can match what occurred in Germany in the Thirty year War of the early 17th century.  We have pictorial evidence of this in a famous set of etchings, Jacques Callot’s Miseries of War, which was probably Goya’s model for the Disasters, though one should say immediately that Callot’s series, both the Grandes and the Petites are small in scale and panoramic, rather like Baroque theatre scenes; they have none of the boldness, the close-up brutality, the nightmare quality of the Goyas, and as images are hardly memorable.

Goya Disasters of War were produced in 1810 as a direct response to the horror itself, the French invasion and occupation of 1808 and the internecine civil and guerrilla war that followed.  But they were not published till 1863, nearly forty years after Goya’s death, and it is only in the wake of the Second World War that the shocking events they present us with have come to seem not excessive, and morbid or grotesque, but to have something like the same documentary actuality of modern photography or film; to belong, I mean, to the same reality as the Spanish Civil War of the late 30s, the Nazi sweep through Eastern Europe and the Siege of Leningrad, Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, and later the Balkan wars and Ruanda.

The question has always been to what extent Goya’s vision derived from a nightmare world of his own, and to what extent he was drawing on this nightmare vision to make more fully real what he had actually witnessed.

We need to remember that this was a man who, like Beethoven, had been from 1794 profoundly deaf, and cut off in his own world; a man who in 1789 had produced, in the Caprichos, a dark and grotesque and extreme representation of Spanish civil and domestic life. No. 43, the most famous of the series, which has the caption ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’ shows the figure of the artist himself, producing out of his own world of sleep, all the witchlike paraphernalia (bats, cats, etc.) of superstition and dark unreason that is mingled, in the series itself, with the many forms of everyday human folly; all the injustice betrayal, exploitation and casual cruelties of ordinary men and women.  We recognise, because of our own modern theories of the unconscious, what Goya has grasped by intuition:  that reason too has its dark underside and what it is that lurks there.  Goya had seen the Enlightenment, with its liberating cult of reason come to its end in the Paris Terror of 1972-3; and if we need proof elsewhere in his work of Goya’s personal response to all this, there is evidence in three terrifying visions:  The huge naked Colossus, who looks back over his shoulder to where antlike armies clash by night, the Saturn devouring his own child, and the Bitter duel with Cudgels in which two peasants beat one another to death as they sink knee-deep in mud. 

The disillusion and despair of the Disasters, I mean to say, comes out of Goya’s head, out of a bleak and terrible vision of man’s inhumanity to man; they are filled with the pity and terror of things.  Out of the corruption, too, of Spanish government and civil life - Spanish poverty and famine and oppression, and the torture-chambers of the Inquisition, as the knowledge of these things darkened one man’s consciousness.   But Goya also experienced some of these events at first hand I saw it, the caption of no. 44 tells us, And this too, says no. 45.

Bizarre, brutal, excessive -- surreal a later age might say;  all this can be claimed of these savagely powerful works.  But what we are moved by in them is not simply the power of what they have to show, their unflinching truth, but at the level of execution the mixture in them of power and delicacy.  The boldness of the images, yes;  but much of what makes these images definitive and hauntingly memorable comes from the power of their composition, the refinement of line, the restrained but breath-takingly moving use of mezzotint.  If what these works look forward to is what we might see as expressionism, they also look back to where Goya the artist had his roots, in the Rococo with Tiepolo and Fragonard.  There is about some of these works an almost lyrical quality.  I would just point to no. 18 Bury them and keep quiet.  The couple who come over the horizon are faced with a pile of corpses and cover their faces against the smell, or in pity or grief.  But what the scene does present is something like Nature.  The corpses have become part of the landscape, as if they have gone back to earth.  There is something more than documentation here, something more than anger, or horror or pity even.  In the words of a 20th century poet Yeats, what we see here is a “terrible beauty”

COPYRIGHT
David Malouf 2010