The New Yorker - USA (2020-09-21)

THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 61

BOOKS

WAVES OF CHANGE

Goya and the art of survival.

BY PETERSCHJELDAHL

A

good time for thinking about Fran­
cisco Goya is while the world stum­
bles. Crisis becomes him. “Goya: A
Portrait of the Artist” (Princeton), a bi­
ography by the American art historian
Janis A. Tomlinson, affords me a newly
informed chance to reflect on an artist
of enigmatic mind and permanent sig­
nificance. In the tumultuous Spain of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, Goya worked for three kings—
the reformist Carlos III, the dithering
Carlos IV, and the reactionary Ferdi­
nand VII—and then for social circles of
the French usurper Joseph Bonaparte;
for an overoptimistic three­year consti­
tutional government; and, finally, woe
to the land, for Ferdinand VII again.
Goya kept landing on his feet as cohorts
of his friends and patrons toppled from
official favor, or worse. His increasingly
naturalistic portraits—vivid in charac­
terization and unconventionally flatter­
ing, with all but breathable tones and

tints in dusky chiaroscuro ignited at times

by clarion hues—sustained him at court

despite the intrigues of rivals and schem­

ers. It could be argued that the deafness

that befell him in 1793 (possibly from

lead poisoning), when he was forty­seven,

and continued until his death, at eighty­

two, in 1828, provided him some diplo­

matic padding, as he managed his inter­

ests with politic correspondence and the

support of well­situated admirers. He

was firmly prestigious by the time he

took to making works of lacerating wit

and escalating, ultimately horrific inten­

sity. A stormy petrel skimming waves of

change that swamped others, he intro­

duced to history a model of the star art­

ist as an anomalous spirit equipped with

social acumen and licensed by genius.

His nearest avatar is Andy Warhol.

Tomlinson’s dryly written accounts of

the Spanish court are no Iberian “Wolf

Hall,” but they feature arresting charac­

ters, such as the raffish antihero Manuel

de Godoy. A twenty­four­year­old mil­

itary officer when he was elevated by

Carlos IV, in 1791, Godoy came to man­

age Spain’s crazily shifting alliances in a

war with Revolutionary France and, when

that went badly, one in league with France

against Portugal, with Godoy promised

a personal stake in the spoils. Big mis­

take. In 1808, Napoleon occupied Spain,

made his brother the King, and discarded

Godoy, who barely escaped the wrath of

his betrayed fellow­citizens. (They made

do with destroying nearly every available

trace of him, such as portraits by Goya.)

Rumored to be the lover of Carlos IV’s

queen, María Luisa, Godoy may have

commissioned, or at least incited, Goya

to paint his only erotic nude, “The Naked

Maja” (1797­1800). (Majas and their male

equivalent, majos, were flamboyantly

cheeky lower­class dandies.) The Inqui­

sition impounded “The Naked Maja”

and its clothed counterpart in 1813 and

posed stern questions to Goya, which he

seems to have successfully ignored. There

can be a lucky charm, during treacher­

ous times, in being really, really good at

something. Imperilled after the Bour­

bon restoration of 1814 by a purge of col­

laborators with the French regime, Goya

redeemed a painting that he had made

of Joseph I by substituting, or having

someone else do so, the face of Ferdi­

nand VII. He was cleared. The country’s

cultural establishment couldn’t spare

Goya’s gifts, and arrivistes clamored to

be portrayed by him.

T

omlinson addresses, with refresh­

ing clarity, a chronic question of

just how independent, not to say sub­

versive, Goya was of the powers that

employed him. She debunks a common

oversimplification of Goya as a commit­

ted post­Enlightenment liberal. He was

more complicated than that, and ineluc­

tably strange. Uncanniness had to be

part of his magnetism. There’s often

something haunted or haunting in his

portraits and in some of his religious

and allegorical commissions, though not

in the antic cartoons of Spanish life that

were destined for tapestries, an irksome

duty of his early career. It’s as if he al­

ways had something up his sleeve. That

impression affected me strongly on a

visit to the Museo del Prado, in Ma­

drid, last year. Looking at his works can

rouse the sensation of an alarm going off

In “The Family of Carlos IV ” (1800-01), Goya is behind the canvas we behold.