A NOTE ON GOYA
ByWILLIAM M. IVINS, JR.
NO other artist in black and white has ever exhibited such tremendous vitality as Goya. Look back along the line, and there is no maker of prints who has put into them the same exuberant, full-blooded delight in life. For sheer physical strength Mantegna only may be compared with him. And, strangely, with this often almost delirious overflow of animal spirits there is the most remarkable sensitiveness to the significance of gesture. Who, except Hokusai, has ever expressed, in black and white,weight—the heaviness of tired bodies, the leaden fall of an unconscious woman’s arm, or the buoyancy of excitement—as this Spaniard? Who has ever made motion so moving—made young limbs so supple, elastic, and graceful? His every line is kinetic—he does not relate motion, he exhibits it—and in art as elsewhere deeds are worth more than words.
For sensitiveness to the beauty of the human body, for curious research in the esthetic inversion, the beauty of the hideous, Goya stands alone. No one, not even Leonardo, has plumbed so deep in the hidden shadowy parts. No one has so picturedfear—theatricalities a plenty—but only here real terror.
Goya. Love and Death“Here is a lover who, like those in Calderon, because he could not refrain from mocking his rival, is dying in the arms of his beloved, and by his temerity has lost all. It is not well to draw the sword too often.”From “The Caprices” (Lefort No. 10).
Goya. Love and Death
“Here is a lover who, like those in Calderon, because he could not refrain from mocking his rival, is dying in the arms of his beloved, and by his temerity has lost all. It is not well to draw the sword too often.”From “The Caprices” (Lefort No. 10).
Goya. Hunting for Teeth“The teeth of those who have been hanged are very efficacious in bringing luck. Without this ingredient nothing worth while can be done. Is it not pitiful that the common folk believe such foolishness?”From “The Caprices” (Lefort No. 12).
Goya. Hunting for Teeth
“The teeth of those who have been hanged are very efficacious in bringing luck. Without this ingredient nothing worth while can be done. Is it not pitiful that the common folk believe such foolishness?”From “The Caprices” (Lefort No. 12).
On the purely technical side—the broad massing of sharply contrasted light and shade, the ability to tella tale with the simplest means, the instinctive choice of the pictorially dramatic detail—Rembrandt and Goya stand alone.
On another side that is purely technical, it should be borne in mind that Goya is the only one who has availed himself of all the possibilities of aquatint—the only one who has used the medium with audacity and resolution and success; the only one who has dared use it to express powerful and fundamental things.
Goya, both in himself and for his influence, is one of the greatest artists that the world has seen these last hundred and fifty years—and his greatest work is his black and white.