2008 Woodie Awards
Goya's Los Caprichos Opens at The Fleming
18th century artist criticized the corrupt and thoughtless upper class in Spain
Dana Keith
Issue date: 2/21/06 Section: News
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Museum. The University of Vermont is honored to have this 80-print black and white series on campus, considering the intricate history surrounding these works. As a court-commissioned painter for Charles IV, Goya had to be cautious about undercutting the very people who supported his art.
Therefore, from 1797 to 1799, Goya worked in secrecy on these subversive etchings, which employed witches and warlocks as representations of the Church and State. These grotesque figures did, in fact, verge on caricatures of the aristocracy.
In February of 1799, Goya released a newspaper advertisement in Diario de Madrid announcing the sale of Los Caprichos; however, just two days later, he took the prints off the market. While there is speculation that Goya was being pressured by the Inquisition to do so, there is no evidence that this was the case.
By 1803, Goya had sold 27 sets of the prints to patrons and then removed Los Caprichos from the public eye by giving the rest of the plates and remaining prints to King Charles IV.
UVM Art History Professor Judith Stone explains that Goya is difficult to categorize stylistically, in part because his life straddled the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Nevertheless, she feels comfortable classifying him as both Romantic and proto-Realist, the latter as a result of his "uncompromising, unyielding attitude toward satirizing the absurdities in aristocratic Spanish society."
Fleming volunteer and UVM art student Amanda Friedman suggests that Goya was a precursor to surrealism, with an influence on artists like Dali and Redon, who focussed on the life of the unconscious and dreams.
"He tapped into something that wasn't quite defined yet; nightmares, monsters, fairies. He was using strange items and objects as allegories for the problems going on in his generation."
On reflection, it seems that Goya was a modernist before his time. As Professor Stone notes, "Goya 's work is a step into the modern age. For example, he frequently eliminates background detail altogether in his figural painting, so that you can focus intensely on the faces and facial expressions of his characters."
He was a social critic who "was fair about condemning everyone," says Fleming Curator Evelyn Hankins. This portrayal of the darker side of human nature through caricature made him an ancestor to the famous French caricaturist Honore Daumier.