The Black Paintings - Francisco Goya

I am also seduced, as are many others, by Goya's dark vision. It always intrigued me how perfectly he expressed things, which sometimes I feel. I had and still have my own visions - altered states in which I see reality in different light. Some of them could be torturous, if not for the presence of light and awareness of the show quality to this phenomenon. I have to frankly admit - I am against any war, since I see them as a product of the human ignorance. There is more to life than possessing things and this is exactly the core of all wars. Long time ago I saw Goya's painting Fight with Cudgels and it stuck in my memory as one of the best expressions of senseless conflict and hopeless imposition of will over each other - ignorance in its full swing along with these cudgels. I can't understand people who are saying that they are followers of Christ in one breath and in the other are supporting wars or are acting in a undignified, spiteful way. They go to church, pray and are ready to drag anybody to their beliefs, but never really thought through themselves. You go to sleep, the mysterious power is keeping you alive while your mind is wandering in different realms. It's waking you up, moving constantly your lungs to keep you alert. Each of your hands has five fingers to hold your coffee in the morning - how did you came up with this design? Everything is already just done for you. Do you have maybe a question about yourself?

As far as I've noticed every period in art brings forth some individuals who, empowered by talent, insight and eloquence, are able convincingly to pass to next generations the very spirit of the time.They are able to establish a new language for contemporaries to speak about the same old truth - the unchangeable human nature. They are refreshing the question mark that ends the same universally old question - who are we? Art reveals our past in a very peculiar way, beyond the scope of conventional history: adding to it, completing the picture and enriching our understanding. Art whispers about the complexity of life, which lies beyond the intellect. From all the heritage of Goya's work, the best illustration and good example of this point, will be the fourteen, so called Black Paintings. The paintings in its highest form - intensely intuitive and very personal. Narrative elements and the way they were executed are creating one hypothesis after another.

It's difficult to be indifferent to his work. It brings a feeling of helplessness, although very painful, it wake ups a recollection or nostalgia for the lost paradise. Goya painted The Black Paintings at the age of seventy-four. They consist of fourteen paintings with different subjects, connected more by intuitive and dark moods, rather than rational and narrative story. They were located on two levels of his countryside retreat. Their titles and location in the Quinta, were recreated from the inventory of Goya's contemporary - Antonio de Brugada. Painted in a technique called al secco - an oil paint on a plaster surface or wall. Later, after Goya's death, were transferred onto canvas and basically considered to be oil paintings. In Goya's more realistic work, the "psychological realism" is of high standard; in his more free and imaginative work, the ambivalent feelings, mystery, poetry, humor, sarcasm and irony are prevalent. The wide range of subjects points to his broad interests, indicating compassionate views on life and the phenomena of human behavior. His subjects ranged from commissioned portraits, religious and genre paintings to spiritual and mystical themes as well as scenes from bullfights, carnivals and madhouses. The insanity, the dark and magical are the themes running through his work, culminating in The Black Paintings and the most intense of them - Saturn painting.

To penetrate the annoying, irrational feelings emanating from them, I let myself in a sketchy way to know a little bit about the painter and his time, which intersected to leave behind testimony of the torment. Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in the village of Fuendetodos in a modest family and brought up in Saragossa. His times were very crucial for Spanish development and its position within the European community. The Industrial and French Revolutions, Napoleon's Empire and its sudden expansion, with the modern ideas of enlightenment, crushed the backward Spanish Monarchy. It was already enough corrupt and weak to lose in economic and political competition against modern industrial approaches in other European countries.

The tension between the old social and institutional structures (the Church, with its enormous influence; the Inquisition; and the idle ignorant sector of the nobility) and the new attitudes manifested itself in many ways, from a wide-ranging battle of pamphlets - public, when freedom of press existed, and clandestine when censorship was imposed - to the most violent forms of physical confrontation and of cruel repression that the triumphant reaction would impose in Ferdinando VII's time.²

Goya was the official Court Painter with the good salary and basically able to live moderately well. On February 17, 1819, he bought Quinta del Sordo - the suburban Madrid piece of property with an impressive villa in which The Black Paintings were created. The name of the villa, owing to the previous owner, who coincidentally was also deaf, translates as "Country-house of the deaf man". Goya's association with the King's Family and its degeneration, which he skillfully depicted in group and individual portraits, let him developed the sense of the political complexity of the time. It also stimulated his own feelings and provoked thoughts about the culture, political system and human condition in general. A few other events might be important in evaluating his work - an illness in 1792-3, which left him deaf, probably owing to lead poisoning known as encephalopathia saturnina, to the effect well expressed in words: ‘When he was reasonably well again - although almost deaf - he was a changed man: bitter at times, secretive, far less exuberant.’ ³ The Black Paintings followed another serious illness in 1819, when Goya narrowly survived a brush with death. Another important fact could be his association with the provocative and seductive Duchess of Alba, which provoked him to visual reflections on corrupt and pretentious life in Spain, in the form of etchings - Los Caprichos.

In a series of etchings mentioned above and Disparetes and Disasters of War, his wit, philosophical and artistic talents manifested in the form of powerful and mysteriously ambivalent - at moments humorous - images. The emotions in those prints range from light and grotesque to horrifying and bizarre. They are very much in the spirit of the Inquisition time, when superstition mingled with the rational, and general paranoia was amplified by war atrocities.

In the case of The Black Paintings, their subject reflects strange cross between the group and individual. In relation to Goya's other work, they push the mesmerized viewer into the sublime and otherworldly reign.To me, they carry the stigmata of his own soul's confession and, I guess, they were done for none other than Goya himself. Whatever statement I can make about this work, it's finally very personal in character, almost like an intimate psychoanalytical session, nevertheless very conclusive concerning the background of Goya's artistic achievement. The Jungian school, for example, interpreted The Dog - one of the Quinta paintings as “the artist's foreshadowing of his death” since "in many mythologies dogs appear as guides to the land of the dead."⁴

The Black Paintings, in terms of its size and emotional quality, were his last big project completed before death in 1828. Painted with very expressive, masterfully-handled brushstrokes, virtuosity of color and the rest of the formal solutions, they are entirely focused on the bizarre subject. They presented poetry of a dark night flying into the place, where the beauty met with extreme ugliness. This is the heritage of a human genius and sleepless passions. Among the thousand other appealing things in those paintings, this is the essence which gave uniqueness to this particular cycle. Fred Licht in his book Goya, quotes Jean Cayrol's words:

I think with horror of the refinements that will be introduced into tomorrow's concentration camps, of their even more extraordinary nature, where man will be deprived even of the gift of suffering.⁵

In his work suffering is very human and looked at with the compassionate eye, making the viewer feel the reality of meaningless violence and stubborn ignorance. His dark paintings and etchings evokes the realization of the forces, which though within the human domain, are still beyond our control. It brings for me a deep reflection and the authentic impersonal feeling of humility.

The Black Paintings derived from a certain tradition. They transformed it and expressed once again Goya's potential for enhancing the new. It was done not only on technical, formal and stylistic levels, but on the intellectual level as well. The combination of genres in his work, points to Bosch and Bruegel in the Shakespearean depths. His ability to visualize the people's psyche equals to Rembrandt, since Goya's portraits have the same sort of aliveness and uniqueness of the individual soul. They are magical. In fact, he was called "Shakespeare of the Brush" ⁶ in his own time, in response to a dimension achieved in painting, which equals one in literature.

I saw disasters of war, the reality of hell, the fallen angels and damned souls, the foolishness of human kind in Bosch, Bruegel, Michelangelo and many others. I witnessed atrocities carved in woodcuts from medieval times, the metaphors of good and evil, so than, what is so new about Goya? The way it was done again is what makes it new, powerful and fresh like life itself. For me, the key to Goya, his mark and breakthrough, is the freshness, which still screams to people today "Hey, that's real". Goya didn't conceptualize the war or suffering, neither he used it as means to impress or achieve something else. Maybe the very fact of this strange "purposelessness" is what gives it such a power. His work has real journalistic quality of the witness, because he has no agenda. His art enclosed the simple statement - "I saw it".

As Priscilla E.Muller suggests, The Black Paintings could have some ‘entertaining” or therapeutic purpose, since the house was his retreat place. Could be, that Goya painted them in reaction to "religious darkness" and Inquisition, as well as a pursuit of the sublime in subtle opposition to the ideas of industrial rationalization of the Age of Enlightenment. Whatever was the motivation, the paintings went beyond the ordinary, and their full meaning will always belonged to the author himself. Goya's rich life, his depth of perception and social status let him penetrated more than ordinary life usually required. The sickness in combination with his knowledge and understanding of contemporary political problems produced this original body of work. Originality was essential for him. His admiration for and devotion to Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Nature above all, were products of this pursuit and giving his work recognized uniqueness. He joined the pantheon of philosopher-artists.⁷

For me personally, in a subtle way, Saturn is central to this cycle and in it the essence of madness found its full expression. “Saturn, god of melancholy, and emblem of the aged artist's own pessimism, was seen to dominate the scheme.”⁸ What if, in a severe mental state of suffering there is no sufferer, no object or subject of the suffering except suffering itself? This painting conveys something of that realm. It possesses compulsive quality, as if it was done under invisible pressure and taken from some archetypical place, to which everybody has access, but only few can really go. Saturn - is a depiction of the blind, destructive force. It reveals its content with blurry anatomy, and expressive brush strokes, which left smeared colors as in a trance or fever. The painting is oblivious to esthetic rules of the time and is worthy of Willem de Kooning or some other Abstract Expressionist from the 20th Century. The ability to depict any kind of expression or inner quality of his subject was one of the characteristic features of Goya's genius. A good example - the arrogance of Ferdinand VII captured in a very masterful and subtle way, even though the portrait was commissioned by His Majesty himself.

In Saturn, the universality of the madness and its expression, are done in a virtuoso way. The painting flashes sheer terror with every aspect of its existence. Simplicity and intensity are the primary and major aspects of the work. On the dark, mostly black background, a huge figure of a madman is consuming a human body, frozen in a strange half kneeling position. Realities of the visible and metaphorical are blending extremely well, merging into so terrifying vision, that we can't immediately place its reality. The bulky eyes of Saturn are oblivious to the screams of the viewer, his open mouth is devouring the human body. His vacant expression contains more of the animal world and at the same time, so much of the human primal instinct of hunger. Hanna Arendt once said that the most paralyzing feature of evil is its banality. Here in Goya's terrifying scene, it is difficult not to see the horror in the grotesque silhouette of Saturn.

The mouth is the gate of hell. Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Bruegel's Dulle Grit and many others also employed its symbolic meaning. In Goya's Saturn it's an expression of ultimate destruction and the tool of horror and suffering. In Dante's "Inferno", Lucifer or Dis, consumes traitors like Judas, which has been illustrated by many artists over different periods of time. The devouring human body demons on Tibetan “tancas”, Balinese images of the malign demon Rangda ⁹ and other demons who fill the pages of the Bible and Mahabharatas stories point to universality and commonality of expression across cultures. Also the Duke of Alba, the Spanish Catholic and invader of the Netherlands, was portrayed in a XVIc woodcut as Saturn devouring a baby with his mouth. ¹⁰ The painting done by Peter Paul Rubens deals with the same myth of a jealous god eating his own sons in blind competition for power. But Goya's Saturn is more universal, uneasy, enigmatic and exact in its depiction of madness.

Many interpretations can be read out of The Black Paintings, but the Saturn, although the simplest one, leaves a wide range for possible conjecture. The emotional quality of the painting carries the testament of authentic experience. For me, it's more experiential than metaphoric. I can see the Jungian shadow and eternal struggle between father and son, or the metaphor of a ruler and his subjects, or even go as far as to see in it the cruel aspect of Existence itself. Whatever led to the execution of this body of work will be forever mystery, we can hypothesize links and exercise our intuition. Granted - Goya's life and thought is very complex. He was a sophisticated man tied to contemporary political powers. Dona Leocadia Weiss, Goya's latest mistress, whose portrait is among The Black Paintings, is she a help in his magical journey to explain the life threads from a different point of view - the more prosaic one? Her ambivalent and probably sometimes tense relation with her husband Isidoro Weiss, her association with Goya could possibly add to some of the moods in The Black Paintings. Could it be that some of those vivid distortions in The Black Paintings are the outcome of some medicine? Difficult to say, but we are intrigued by the vision, its expressions and distortions of caricatured faces, as in The Vision of the Pilgrims of San Isidro, The Great He Goat, The Sabbath, The Witches Brew, Fight with Cudgels also called Duel with Cudgels or Holy Office. Goya's interest in madness and insanity is documented in earlier paintings like Lunatics or Madhouse. The artist witnessed atrocities done by the Inquisition and then by French soldiers on Spanish guerrilla. Even Napoleon Bonaparte concluded “I admit that I started off on the wrong foot in this whole business. The whole thing remains ugly.... and yet posterity would have commended my deed if I had succeeded.”¹¹ The Goya's sickness in 1819, arrogance, cruelty, stupidity and total corruption of Ferdinand VII together with his betrayal and greed for power as well as the pressure from his side, which made Goya leave his retreat, Quinta del Sordo and Spain in 1824, could also add to black visions. The Black Paintings with Saturn are the ultimate expressions of the blind ignorance and evil itself.

Goya's genius and authenticity of expression in his paintings let me see today the realism of historical figures, the endless ignorance and suffering as a part of the human condition. On the more personal note, I can find in it my own visions, so masterfully painted in distorted, nightmarish ghosts' faces. Goya's visions and technique made him the first "modern” artist in Western Art. He had an impact on later generations and on artists like Edouard Manet, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Luis Bunuel, whose movie The Shade of Liberty starts from the scene entirely made out of Goya's painting The Third of May 1808. I hope that the greatness of his art liberated him forever from the spell of the demonic world, since is known, that after his exile to France, he never came back to Quinta del Sordo, or to the dark subjects of The Black Paintings.

written by Adam Rupniewski ©