The First Modern Artist
The name of Francisco Goya is familiar to all of us. He was, after all, one of the alltime great visual artists. We are all familiar with the court paintings he did for Spain's first Bourbon king, Fernando III, with the designs he did for the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, with his half-hearted religious paintings and his prodigious prints. And let's not forget, of course, his celebrated portraits of the Duchess of Alba, The Nude Maja and The Maja Dressed. But have we stopped to consider that this 18th-century Spanish artist from a nondescript Aragonese village is the precursor, if not the very inventor, of modern art as we know it?

Goya opened new inroads in diverse aspects of what we consider today "modern art." In his artistic maturity he exercised absolute freedom in his choice of subject matter. He tended to the abstract; if you look closely at his later work even the figurative images have a lot of the abstract about them. He dealt with real contemporary issues, not just the religious and mythological themes which had been the stuff of the visual arts until his time. But more than anything else, his art was human centered. Goya said he acknowledged three masters: Velázquez, Rembrandt and nature. He might well have added, "human nature," because no artist before Goya had delved with so much insight into the darkest recesses of man's character.

The Essence of Goya's Modernity
This, I submit, is what made Goya so modern, his sombre, many-sided vision of his fellow human beings, practically premonitions of the horror that was to ensue in the following 250-odd years. If Goya didn't actually forsee the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of cities, the senseless injustice of Vietnam and the truculent events of the Balcans, he certainly identified the flawed gene which gave rise to-and continues to foment-all of them.

Could Picasso have attained the level of his "Guernica" without standing on Goya's shoulders? Where would Van Gogh, Ensor and Munch have started from? Or Kafka, Yeats, Kavafis, Conrad, Baudelaire or Sartre, for that matter? For all of these artists participate, in greater or lesser degree, in Goya's seeming infra-red ability to see into the murky waters of the human soul. Do you doubt it? Take another look at Saturn Devouring His Son, then re-read Heart of Darkness, The Trial, The Second Coming or Fleurs du Mal. No time for re-reading the classics? Turn on the television.

Inauspicious Beginnings
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes was born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, in northeastern Spain, but his family soon moved to Zaragoza, the provincial capital, where his father worked as a humble gilder. At 14 the young Goya was apprenticed to a local painter and later made his way to Italy where he paid his way by selling his paintings. By the time he was 25 he was back in Zaragoza, where he painted frescoes for the Catedral de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. His reputation thus established, he married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of a Zaragoza painter, and fathered a large family, though only one of his sons lived to adulthood.

The formative years from 1775 to 1792 were spent painting "cartoons" for the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, where he rendered his first scenes from everyday life. ("Cartoon" is a mistranslation from Spanish of "cartón," or "cardboard" on which his fabric designs were painted.) He was elected to the recently established Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1780. It is here at the academy's Calcografía Nacional on Madrid's Calle Alcalá, just a couple of blocks off the Puerta del Sol, where they still keep and display the master's plates and prints in a dignified, almost reverent atmosphere. In 1786 he was named painter to King Fernando III and was made court painter in 1789.

The Master Turns a Corner
The onset of Goya's deafness occurred in 1792 as a result of a serious illness and marked a turning point in his life and his career as an artist. Though this deafness represented a devastating personal setback for the artist, one suspects that it was an extraordinary stroke of luck for the history of art. Goya was 46 years old at the time, had experienced his fair measure success, tasted the intrigue and frivolity at court and had seen most of his children die in childhood. His vision was that of an experienced artist and mature person with a finely developed critical sense who was fully conversant with both folly and suffering.

Not surprisingly Goya's work started to change as he began his voyage into his own particular world of visual and moral chiaroscuro. It changed radically in attitude, in content, in treatment and in his chosen medium: the acid etching ("aguafuerte"). He went on to produce more than a thousand prints and drawings, work which was to change the way in which modern men and women perceived the world around them. The medium of etching, and especially the recently discovered technique of aquatint were uniquely suited to his new pared-to-the-bone form of expression.

First Prints: Los Caprichos
His first series of etchings, Los Caprichos,(The Follies) dates from early 1789. It consists of 80 plates in which the artist, working with complete freedom, expresses, in his own words, "the censure of human errors and vices." The series was offered for sale in the Gaceta de Madrid newspaper but, after the Inquisition "inquired" into this scandalous new form of free expression, was quickly and quietly withdrawn from the marketplace.

It was not till 12 years later that it reappeared on the royal inventory. Goya had ceded the 80 plates and all the existing prints to the crown in exchange for a stipend for his son, Javier. By then, however, the cat was out of the bag. Sets of prints of the Caprichos series had been circulated outside of Spain with powerful impact. This, it was agreed, was a refreshingly direct new form of expression, impossible to repress and destined to change the course of visual communication.

The first 36 prints of the series deal with love and prostitution, insufferable children, marriages of convenience, maternal cruelty and the greed and gluttony of friars. It's no wonder the Santa Inquisición reared its revered head. Prints 37 to 42 portray stupidity through images of donkeys in different ass-backwards situations. The rest of the series abounds with ironic representations of witches, ghouls, devils and perverse clergymen, a fair selection of late 18th-century Spanish reality and concerns. Some of the prints allude to contemporary figures at the court of Fernando IV.

One hundred thirteen of the preparatory drawings for the Caprichos are preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, along with a wealth of other priceless Goya documentation, sketches, proofs, editions and commentaries. The plates are in the Calcografía Nacional, the institution created by Fernando III as a department of the Royal Academy of San Fernando as the national repository for etching plates. It was located at the time next door to the royal printshops. The printshops disappeared long ago, but the Calcografía remains in the same palace, just a short walk up Calle Alcalá from the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.

Go to Part II