64 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
and Goya simmered down.) So there
was a limit, though a porous one. The
pair revelled in bawdry and exchanged
drawings of male and female genitalia.
Tomlinson discounts a sexual liaison on
the ground that the men were too dis-
creet to risk the possible scandal. But
she confirms that the darkest turn in
Goya’s emotional life coincided not with
his deafness or any other recorded mis-
fortune but with Zapater’s untimely
death in 1803. The open-heartedness (ex-
ceedingly rare for Goya) in portraits that
he made of his friend, which radiate mu-
tual affection and trust, plunges me half
into love with the sitter myself. For the
record, I doubt a sexual relation, for want
of more than speculative evidence. In
Goya’s one later painting that bespeaks
male intimacy, “Self-Portrait with Dr.
Arrieta” (1820), we see the artist, drasti-
cally enfeebled, being attended to by a
doctor who is almost comically virile,
competent, and concerned. It’s a picture
to make you smile through tears.
We come at last to the Black Paint-
ings (untitled by Goya), of which Tom-
linson gives a bracingly investigative
account: fourteen pictures that Goya
painted in oils on the plaster walls of
the house in Spain where he lived from
1819 to 1824, before a sojourn in France
and his final four years among Spanish
exiles in Bordeaux. (His expatriation
was elective. He could—and twice did—
revisit Spain.) The works vary in size
and format, from panel to panorama.
Though effectively installed in an ob-
long room at the Prado, they arouse a
retroactive ache to have seen them in
situ before they were transferred to can-
vas, in the nineteenth century, and, judg-
ing from early photographs, in some
cases coarsened by clumsy restoration.
There’s no getting used to the jolts
of a darkling procession of the immis-
erated and the insane: a crazed giant
(traditionally assumed to be Saturn, but
who knows?) devouring a human body;
two men buried to their knees in a bar-
ren landscape and fighting to the death
with cudgels; witches and a goat-headed
demon in sinister excelsis; a little dog
about to perish in what looks to be a
tide of shit. Tomlinson surmises that
an oddly ladylike giantess is Goya’s maid
and companion, Leocadia Weiss, whom
he met after the death of his wife, in
- That image was situated next to
the front door of the house, welcom-
ing visitors to a peculiar scheme of in-
terior decoration.H
ow do we square the courtier art-
ist with the tour guide to Hell? It
may be easier than it seems. For starters,
what if the Black Paintings are in the na-
ture of a joke? Tomlinson cites the possi-
ble influence of contemporaneous horror-
mongering entertainments by showmen.
And do the grotesqueries fundamentally
contradict Goya’s prior imaginative pro-
cess? (I had thought, before my most re-
cent visit to them, that I must be inured
to those paintings. But no. Still and again,
I cowered.) Mere squeamishness may im-
pede thought on the question. Relative
snowflakes that we are today, we can start
by adjusting to the thicker skins of the
culture that shaped Goya. Think of the
cult of the bullfight, which he adored and
immortalized in sensationally informa-
tive, visceral engravings and technically
innovative lithographs that beggar Pi-
casso’s superficial homages a century and
a half later. Goya was an avid hunter, once
apologizing for having missed one shot
of nineteen that had brought down two
hares, a rabbit, five partridges, and ten
quail. Tomlinson hazards that, for a so-
cial climber, hunting with aristocrats was
that era’s version of golfing with C.E.O.s.
She admirably keeps the mysteries of
Goya’s character distinct from its self-serv-
ing machinations. He was unremarkably
bourgeois, though salaried by royalty. (Pay-
ments kept arriving until the end of his
life.) The boring parts of his story are sal-
utary, framing the discontinuous dramas.
Goya’s relationship with Weiss seems
to have been tempestuous, but he was
enchanted by her daughter, Rosario,
whom he deemed, from the age of eleven,
an artistic prodigy and promoted to ev-
eryone he knew. He had no other fol-
lower in art—unless you count, indirectly,
most artists since. With a knack for min-
iaturist portraits, Rosario set an example
for Goya that he took up and, of course,
surpassed, with virtuosic miniatures of
his own. Competitiveness consumed him.
(Rosario went on to a meagre career as
a copyist of paintings and was not above
the odd forgery.) Ruling him, too, was
humor, if that’s the right word for sabo-
taging anyone’s presumption to know his
mind. I’ve compared the effect of the
Black Paintings to unfriendly laughtercoming out of a well. Don’t kid yourself
that he cares about connecting with you.
But the works test, in the depths of the
incommunicable, the degree of anyone’s
courage to envisage the bad in life, the
worse, and the almost inconceivably abys-
mal. Whether he was driven by perver-
sity or by obsession, there’s an unholy
glee about what Goya watched himself
doing in and to his domestic haven. That’s
what keeps us returning to the works, as
sorry as we may feel, yet again, to have
come. One thing’s for sure: the series
marks no mental disintegration. Goya
worked at top form, though reduced out-
put, after moving to Bordeaux.
I believe that the Black Paintings
distill, to a hundred proof, Goya’s singu-
larity. You can perceive tinctures of it in
his best portraits, which register person-
hoods—specific existences—with curi-
ous dispassion. They attract obliquely.
That’s their eeriness. Be the sitter the
Duke of Wellington (posing at stately
ease while looking a bit tired, after his
triumphal entry into Madrid, in 1812) or
a gussied-up little boy (Goya was great
with children, savoring their innocence
of their preassigned social status), you
sense him, when done, gathering his
brushes and going home. Something has
happened—the live capture of a person-
ality, if not a soul—but it was engendered
by a job, not by a divination. The qual-
ity of a remote regard, transposed from
reality to fantasy, extends to even the most
bizarre or tragic of his satirical subjects.
No other artist possesses such a capacity
to feel and to not feel, at a go. The Black
Paintings simply—simple for him!—po-
larize torridity and iciness at simultane-
ous extremes that we would otherwise
not suspect possible. Goya’s cynosure is
detachment regardless of the degree of
pressure, professional or psychological,
he may have been under. He leaves his
subjects alone, as he was alone, and he
leaves us alone with them. Rarely consum-
mate in the ways that we associate with
great art—Goya cranked out lots of so-so
pictures—he is an outlier’s outlier in the
canon. His legacy isn’t a commanding
body of work but a homing beacon for
worried people in worlds that are subject
to unpredictable changes, perhaps sud-
denly and soon. Goya knew the problem
and let slip the solution, which is to keep
in mind that there is no solution, only an
immemorial question: Now what?