Goya's Last Works - The Frick Collection

Francisco de Goya's luminous 1824 portrait of a woman known as María Martínez de Puga has always held a special place in the artist's oeuvre as one of his most direct and candid works, radical in its simplicity. Acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914, the painting is the inspiration for the special exhibition, Goya's Last Works, the first in the United States to concentrate exclusively on the final phase of the artist's long career, primarily on the period of his voluntary exile in Bordeaux from 1824 to 1828. The exhibition presents more than fifty objects including paintings, miniatures on ivory, lithographs, and drawings borrowed from public and private European and American collections. These works reveal the vitality and irrepressible creativity of an artist who, at age seventy-eight, in frail health and long deaf, pulled up roots in Madrid, his home for the preceding half century, and started over in France.

His final works have little in common with those of his contemporaries in France and Spain and had almost no impact on the generations that immediately followed. In fact, they remained little known until the early twentieth century. It is only in retrospect that we can appreciate the extent to which a painting such as the Frick's María Martínez de Puga seems to anticipate the stark modernist style of Manet. The Frick is the exclusive venue for Goya's Last Works, organized by Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Susan Grace Galassi, Curator of The Frick Collection. On public view from February 22 through May 14, 2006 in the Special Exhibition Galleries and Cabinet, it is accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue and public programs.

Comments Susan Grace Galassi, "The work that Goya created for his own pleasure in Bordeaux has long been appreciated by scholars of Spanish art and artists, but is little known to the public. Our goal is to bring this forward-looking final chapter of a great artist's work to light in all of its diverse aspects." Jonathan Brown adds, "In the final four years of life, Goya confronted the challenges of old age, ill health, and family conflict with paintbrushes and crayons in hand. This twilight period is illuminated by innovative works that record what he saw, what he felt, and what he imagined."

Goya, Last of the Old Masters and First of the Moderns
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) has been referred to as the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns. He was born near Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon. His father was a master gilder and his mother a member of the minor aristocracy. Goya received his early training with the local artist José Luzán. By 1774 he was settled in Madrid, where he eventually rose to the post of Painter to the King, serving in various capacities under the last three Bourbon monarchs (Charles III, Charles IV, and Ferdinand VII), as well as Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Joseph, who ruled during the French occupation of 1808-13. For his royal patrons Goya produced tapestry cartoons depicting vivid scenes of everyday life, religious paintings and frescoes, and official portraits, to which he brought his unerring eye for character analysis. He also painted inventive portraits in an English manner of the men and women of the Spanish Enlightenment, among them the Duke of Osuna, whose image from the 1790s was acquired by the Trustees of The Frick Collection.

Through contact with his sitters, Goya absorbed the Liberal ideas flooding into Spain from France and England. A catastrophic illness in 1792-93 left the forty-three-year-old Goya totally deaf for the rest of his life. His work now took a more inward turn, and he began to delve more deeply into his imagination, exploring such subjects as superstition, dreams, madness, and sadism. In 1799 he announced the sale of his prodigiously inventive series of etchings Los Caprichos (The Caprices), a satire on people's follies and vices, which breathes the spirit of the Enlightenment. The last decade of the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth were marked by great political instability and antagonism between progressive and conservative forces. Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 and the abdications of Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII initiated five years of French occupation and continual patriot resistance.

Goya commemorated the horrific events of the Peninsula War with his series of prints, The Disasters of War, begun in 1810, a searing indictment of man's brutality to man. With the retreat of the French in 1813, many of Joseph Bonaparte's sympathizers left Spain, a large number of them settling in Bordeaux. A constitutional monarchy had been declared in 1812, but with the return of Ferdinand VII in 1814, the constitution was abolished, and a period of absolutism and repression followed.

In 1819 the artist, then seventy-two and widowed for some years, sought a more secluded life and moved from Madrid to the Quinta del Sordo, a house on the outskirts of the city, a transition that marks the beginning of his late period. Living with him were his much younger companion, Leocadia Zorrilla y Weiss, and her children. Toward the end of the year, Goya suffered another near-fatal illness and commemorated the experience in his Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta of 1820, one of his most original and moving works. The artist portrays himself as pale and lifeless, supported on the arm of his young physician. A kind of secular ex-voto, the painting
bears a lengthy inscription in which Goya thanks his friend for saving his life. A military coup in 1820 reinstated the constitution of 1812 and rendered the monarchy impotent, and a three-year Liberal interlude and period of optimism followed. Goya recovered his health, and his renewed energies are immediately manifest in his portrait of the architect Tiburcio Pérez y Cuervo (below, left). Goya captured his young friend in vigorous strokes of his brush and palette knife in subdued tones of black, gray, and white, with a touch of red. Standing before us in his shirtsleeves, glasses in hand, Pérez embodies the spirit of a new era in his
casual stance and stylish disarray. The restrained palette and sense of immediacy that Goya achieves initiate his final style in portraiture. He painted other portraits between 1820 and 1823 and in a burst of creative activity, covered the walls of the Quinta del Sordo with fourteen phantasmagoric scenes known as the Black Paintings.

Ferdinand VII returned to power in 1823, letting loose a brutal purge of Liberals, who fled to France in legions to escape persecution. Although Goya's political sympathies were with the Liberals, he was treated with generosity by the king and was granted permission to take the waters in Plombières in France for his health. Distrustful of the situation, the artist took advantage of the leave to join his friends in the thriving Spanish expatriate community in Bordeaux, where he spent the last four years of his life.