A Despairing Assault on Terminal Evil

By ROBERT HUGHES

No artist has ever been so eloquent about his society, or seemed so eager to speak beyond the grave to ours, as Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The idea of a universal painter, capable of addressing humanity in general rather than this or that time and culture in particular, may be a pious fiction, but Goya comes as close to fulfilling it as anyone has ever done. We see his face pressed to the glass of our terrible century, mouthing to make his warnings understood.

There has never been a complete retrospective of Goya's work, but the next best thing may be the exhibition "Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment," which was shown at the Prado in Madrid last fall, opened last week at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and will be seen from May 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Organized by Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, director of the Prado, and Eleanor A. Sayre, the eminent Goya scholar who is curator emeritus of drawings, prints and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, the show is a curatorial masterpiece. Its catalog, with essays by Perez Sanchez and Sayre as well as other art historians such as Boston University's Fred Licht, is both a summary of existing Goya scholarship and a breaking of much new ground. Its theme is explicit: to show Goya's role in the Spanish Enlightenment, to present him as a man immersed in the values of liberal thought, to amend his reputation as a solitary fantasist who did sardonic court portraits on the side.

The difficulty with Goya is that for the past hundred years and more, he has been somewhat obscured by the Goyaesque. Our idea of him has been so much shaped by the Romantic sensibility that pervaded Europe after his death that we still like to see him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his - temperament against his times -- the first skeptic of art, the titanic ancestor of surrealism. "It is when Goya abandons himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable," wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in making black clouds, filled with vampires and demons, rolling in the warm atmosphere of a stormy night." The effect of this has been to pluck Goya out of his own age and put him in our own.

There is a case for Goya as the first great modern artist, because of his fascination with the irrational and his critical rage against church and class. Indeed, the inscriptions on two of his prints -- Y no hai remedio (And there is no remedy), referring to the shooting of bound prisoners in the series titled Disasters of War, and El sueno de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason brings forth monsters), the title page of his Caprichos -- seem as fixed above the wars, pogroms and massacres of the 20th century as Dante's words "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" were on the adamantine gates of hell.

But only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho, the 18th century "mob," a many-headed beast capable of every atrocity and stupidity as well as sublime moments of collective courage.

Had he been asked, amid the intellectual and political convulsions that tore Spain asunder between 1790 and 1815, "Whose side are you on?", he would have answered, "Reason's." For Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the gilder's son from Aragon, did not have the education of a Diderot or a Rousseau, but he was completely a figure of the Enlightenment; his paintings and prints, with their obsessive imagery of the conflict of light and darkness, are perhaps its supreme metaphorical expression in European art outside of the classically formalized work of Jacques-Louis David.

But what they do not possess -- especially not the Caprichos and the Disasters of War -- is the sense of intellectual decorum and poise that the well-born, French-reading illuminati of Madrid preferred the discourse of images to have. Goya was not good at optimistic allegory. His large painting of the adoption of the liberal constitution of 1812 -- the constitution as a maiden in white presented by Father Time while pretty Clio, the muse of history, takes notes -- is one of his few real pictorial failures.

Moral reflection, in Goya's prints and not a few of his paintings, moves from being a philosophical exercise into a sort of frenzy, a despairing assault on a world of terminal evil. Greed, whoring, pederasty, witchcraft and the religious bigotry that was its mirror image, the brutality of the low and the myopic arrogance of the high, and above all the limitless cruelties inflicted in the name of orthodoxy (by the Inquisition) and political conquest (by the invading French and their guerrilla opponents): these possess him as they have possessed no other artist before or since. Seen through his encyclopedic vision of folly and cruelty, Goya's Spain is more like Dean Swift's Ireland than Voltaire's Europe.

Some of the best of the portraits in which Goya celebrated the nation's distinguished liberals are also in the show. There is his impressive if slightly servile early image of Floridablanca, Prime Minister to the liberal Carlos III and, by 1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon, pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty white mass of sprigged muslin, to the level, sagacious gaze of his friend the art collector Sebastian Martinez, Goya left on record an extraordinary sequence of human presences.

Perhaps the most moving of these -- a Spanish equivalent, in its effort to embody intellect, of David's portrait of the Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty.

It cannot be an accident that Goya adapted Jovellanos' pose for the dreaming figure in The Sleep of Reason. He had no illusions about the distance between liberal hope and the possibility of its fulfillment. But even though present-day Republicans and their flacks have corrupted the American air with babblings about the L word, as though liberalism were something to be ashamed of, Goya's beliefs, so passionately held, still testify to the liberal conscience as the best hope of Western man in the past 200 years.