The New York Times
Robert Hughes's dazzling new study of Goya not only conveys the range and prescience of the artist's work with enormous acuity and verve, but also conjures the world of 18th- and early 19th-century Spain with vivid, pictorial ardor. — Michiku Kakutani
Publishers Weekly
A long life and vast works make fitting subjects for the epic-minded Hughes (The Shock of the New, etc.). Born in Aragon in 1746, Goya weathered the Peninsular Wars (1808-1814) in Spain and lived to the age of 82, when he died in self-imposed exile in France. Hughes denies the popular image of the artist as a die-hard iconoclast, painting court portraits while winking behind his patrons' backs. Staying close to the visual evidence, Hughes shows Goya was not above flattering his royal subjects (aggrandizing midget count Altamira), waxing patriotic (as in the famous Third of May) and taking commissions from the Bonapartes under the French occupation. In middle age he was struck deaf by an unidentifiable illness, at which point his pictures turned darker-a bullfighter gored before eager spectators, the inmates of a madhouse clamoring for respite. His Desastres de la guerra rendered the mute, gaping horror of guerrilla combat. Under a picture of refugees fleeing the French, he inscribed, "I saw it." Whether or not this much debated act of witness really happened, for Hughes it is Goya's urgent visual economy that "invented... the illusion of being there when dreadful things happen." Given his intimate understanding of the painter, one regrets that Hughes's diligent catalogues of the Caprichos and Pinturas Negras (among the 115 color and 100 b&w illustrations) often forgo in-depth analysis for textbook thoroughness. But he compellingly insists on Goya's prophetic genius, arguing that, for an age that has produced few great paintings in response to modern terrors, Goya's pictures anticipate disasters unheard of but yet to arrive. (Nov. 10) Forecast: With a first printing of 75,000 and a first serial in Vanity Fair, the bet clearly is that readers will agree with Hughes's assessment. A new survey of Goya's oeuvre by former Kunsthalle Hamberg director Werner Hofmann, also titled Goya, is scheduled to arrive two weeks after Hughes book, and includes 253 color illustrations. (Thames & Hudson, $75 336p ISBN 0-500-09317-2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Two masters of historical-literary prose have seized on the life and art of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya for their latest works. For Hughes, a life of Goya is the culmination of a writing lifetime as an art critic and historian (The Shock of the New; Barcelona; The Fatal Shore). This is his first extended work since a near-fatal car crash in 1999 (see "Must-Reads for Fall," LJ 9/1/03, p. 41). The subject of Goya allows Hughes to employ his gifts for social portraiture (especially in his vivid picture of the Spanish court) as well as relishing the great works themselves, whose continued power he does not assume but articulates in context. Anytime Goya is off the biographical stage, Hughes has some fascinating bit of social observation to explore (such as the effect of a 1766 royal ban on long capes and wide sombreros, whose enforcers wielded "scissors of sartorial doom," or the figurative meanings of Goya's women tossing a stuffed pellele manikin). Out of such wonderful background Hughes finesses but does not fake his way across the acknowledged gaps in Goya's historical record. By the book's end, when Goya dies deaf and exiled in France, Hughes summons a genuine feeling of loss from the reader. Unlike Hughes, for whom a Goya biography represents a career progression, Connell comes to the Spaniard's life by the zigzagging route of wonderful period novels (Mrs. Bridge; Mr. Bridge) among many other books. However, the writer who so memorably re-created Custer's fatal battlefield in the nonfiction Son of the Morning Star never finds his way comfortably into Goya's world of Bourbon Spain. Too often, Connell mocks the silly or antiquated theories of previous Goya scholars and leaves the narrative there. To compare the Hughes and Connell books directly-on the subject of Spanish majo culture, for instance, or on the artist's patchy early years or derivation of his famous Caprichos series-is to weigh a formidable, exultant work of biography against a comparatively unpassionate extended essay. Chattily composed (lacking details about Goya's wife of 39 years, Josefa, Connell explains that his own family's housekeeper had been a "placid, expressionless, overweight farm girl" named Josefa), Connell's stylish work is neither revisionist nor particularly heroic but simply goes on in its clipped, sometimes winking prose until the Old Master's breath runs out, with an epilog about Goya's pilfered skull. The result is a skimpy introduction for those already in love with the artist's work; libraries would do much better with the Hughes, which is highly recommended.-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Time’s art critic and cultural pundit (A Jerk on One End, 1999, etc.) finally produces his decades-in-the-making consideration of the Spanish painter. Hughes had been "blocked for years," he admits, before a 1999 car crash in his native Australia landed him in the hospital for more than six months and gave him direct experience with the "fear, despair, and pain" that Francisco Goya (1746—1828) excelled in depicting. Despite opening on this personal note, the text overall is simply another demonstration of Hughes’s always impressive ability to write about art for the general public without either pandering or putting on airs (American Visions, 1997, etc.). The prose is vigorous and opinionated—swipes at "the animal-rights faithful" and Hemingway’s "kitsch writing" during a discussion of Goya’s bullfighting etchings, for example—but no more so than usual for this writer. And the firmly expressed opinions don’t convey a more private engagement with the material: exegeses of Goya’s scathing series on The Disasters of War or his great painting of political martyrdom, The Third of May 1808, are intelligent, thorough, and involved without achieving that additional intimacy accessible only to an author more willing to sound vulnerable than Hughes is. We wouldn’t miss this quality if the opening pages hadn’t seemed to promise it; Goya smoothly blends art, cultural, and political history with biography to cogently capture its subject’s wide-ranging genius, reminding us that the creator of such searing images of human cruelty, duplicity, and stupidity as the Caprichos etchings was also a perfectly contented, if slightly bored, painter of sedate royal portraits for three generations ofSpanish monarchs. (The reactionary Fernando VII finally drove him into self-imposed exile in France in 1824.) For all Hughes’s fluid exposition and astute character assessments, it remains a mystery how this "man reasonably at ease in the world" could cast such a cold eye on its horrors. A solid work of art history, though not the revelatory summing-up the author appears to have aspired to. (215 illustrations, 115 in color, color not seen) First printing of 75,000; first serial to Vanity Fair
