Furious Spaniard

It was the biggest Goya show ever seen in the U. S. Chicagoans laid aside their war-headlined newspapers and went to look at pictures, in the ponderous, heavy-walled Chicago Art Institute. The exhibition last week was a record of war and revolution. Its pictures showed hangings, ax-murders, mutilations, bloody massacres of innocent civilians, trains of plodding, bewildered refugees, the indecisive faces of weak, shambling statesmen, vacillating, incompetent rulers. They showed chaos, panic, famine. The savage, flaming scenes, more than a century old, had a familiar, contemporary look, for the world as it looked to Spain's great painter and social satirist Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was as gruesome as the world of 1941.

Son of an Aragonese peasant whose wife claimed kinship to a tattered strain of impoverished Spanish nobility, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born in the bedraggled, hard-bitten village of Fuendetodos, near Saragossa, in 1746. He grew into barrel-chested manhood, fighting ruffians and bulls with equal recklessness and gusto. Brawling and wenching his way to Rome, he studied there the shimmering rococo canvases of Tiepolo and Francesco de Guardi, returned to Madrid to work his way up as court painter to Spain's dissolute Charles IV.

Goya's Spain was as rotten and bankrupt a monarchy as Europe had ever seen. Leprous beggars and pockmarked peasants scratched their lice and wallowed in filth unmatched since the Middle Ages. Degraded courtiers wasted themselves lewdly in fashionable excesses copied from the French court of Louis XVI. The harlot Queen Maria Luisa, a green-complexioned, toothless masterpiece of stale flesh, wore herself out with dissipation, while her doltish husband hunted serving wenches and rabbits. (Of Maria Luisa Napoleon said: "Her character is written on her face; it surpasses anything you dare imagine.") Spain's strong man was Don Emmanuel Godoy, a half-educated, country-born ex-guardsman, who had become Prime Minister through his prowess as Queen Maria Luisa's lover.

Resourceful, ruthless and self-assured, Goya rode the crest of this cloacal flood. A ram-headed man of enormous appetites, he ate himself to the verge of apoplexy, begot 20 legitimate children (only one survived the plague-ridden rigors of Spanish life), became the lover of the beautiful and powerful Duchess of Alba, a favorite of the harlot Queen, the most sought-after society portraitist of his time.

But though Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes gorged himself on Spain's decay, the diet made him sick. Savagely he etched and painted its hidden social sores and the festering minds of its leaders. When generals and duchesses commissioned him to do their portraits, he painted them, not as they would like to look, but as they really were: droopy, anemic cuckolds, smug gangsters, smirking strumpets. He etched bloated priests abusing women and embracing money bags, barely escaped the ire of the Inquisition by labeling them with trite moral maxims. On the walls of churches he gave angels the faces of well-known prostitutes, growling as he did so: "I will cause the faithful to worship vice." He painted bag-bellied Queen Maria Luisa as a superannuated barmaid, made her portraits glow with the oily iridescence of decay. When he drew the peasants, soldiers, beggars and trollops who swarmed in Madrid's dusty streets, he was less subtle, but no less furious. When, on the bloody Second of May (1808) Napoleon's General Murat. with 25,000 French soldiers, massacred the rioting civilians of Madrid, Goya calmly started to work with his hot etching needle, setting down a record of butchery that still horrifies queasy eyes.

In the censor-ridden Spain of the early 1800s, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes could say in paint what few dared say in words. But, for all his bitter satire and savage realism, Goya was no reforming idealist. When Napoleon kicked out Goya's Bourbon patrons and set his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, Goya quickly came to terms with the new regime, and took to painting Bonapartist officials, as he had previously painted Bourbon courtiers. When, a few years later, the Bourbons were restored. Goya changed his coat again. Roared Bourbon Ferdinand VII: "You deserve exile, you merit hanging, but you are a great artist, and I will forget everything.''

But Ferdinand VII and his inquisitors were slow at forgetting, and life in Spain for the aging, ailing Goya became increasingly irksome. Stone deaf and myopic at 78, he got permission to leave the country, traveled to Paris "to see the world," finally settled among a group of Spanish refugees in Bordeaux. There, in 1828, still painting and drawing with all his old vigor and many a new-found trick, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes died. A scene he would have enjoyed came on a subsequent fantastic midnight when ghoulish phrenologists stole his skull from the Bordeaux graveyard. He left behind him as searing a legacy of propaganda as has ever come from the mind of a single man. Goya's propaganda was not aimed at causes and political parties, but at death, waste, destruction, stupidity, avarice, pretension. Unlike most propaganda, it outlived the turbulent age that gave it birth.

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