Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art

Abstract

Licht believes that Goya was an artist whose attitude toward life and art is 'specially pertinent to the development of Modern art in general and to our times in particular'. Goya was born into a world whose social and economic conditions were undergoing important changes and an artist's role in it was no longer clear and ordained. 'The church and the dynasty, which needed the artist as much as the artist needed them, were no longer there to sponsor art, and the artist was cut off from financial support and from spiritual response. Equally as fateful as the dissociation between artist and public is the dissociation between the artist and a universally understandable spiritual ideal which gives content and meaning to an artist's work.' Separated both from the religious basis of previous art, and separated from religious meaning, 'by grace of reason', Goya's age of reason felt the first effects of the supplanting of faith by reason. This is the presentday condition for many artists and Licht finds Goya also confronted with it. He supports this view by exploring Goya's revolutionary responses to the artistic conventions of his country. The major aspects of Goya's artworks, ranging from tapestry cartoons, religious paintings, the family of Charles IV, the Majas, the Caprichos, the 2nd and 3rd of May, the disasters of War, the Black paintings, Occasional paintings, Portraits to Proletarian paintings, are examined and compared with works by Goya's contemporaries. The anarchic character of Goya's response becomes increasingly clear in each chapter, for example in the one on the family of Charles IV: 'Goya graphically embodies in his royal group portrait man's inability to rise to a higher ideal of himself, man's doubts in the significance of his destiny and in the guiding hand of an all powerful divinity that has ordained the course and tenor of life.' I find Licht has marvelous insights into the meanings behind Goya's art: 'In the Majas, a complete divorce has occurred between virtue and love.' To turn from earlier