Volume 50, Number 19 · December 4, 2003
The Art of Disaster
By Christopher Benfey
Goya
by Robert Hughes
Knopf, 429 pp., $40.00
Of the three towering figures in Spanish painting—Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Pablo Picasso—Goya seems to have a special appeal for imaginative writers. Too little is known of the life of Velázquez, Goya's seventeenth-century idol. Velázquez has, as Robert Hughes notes, 'next to no personal myth.' Of Picasso, whose Guernica owed so much to Goya's searing depictions of war, we know perhaps too much; the sheer weight of the facts impedes our power to give them meaningful shape. It is difficult for us to feel the intimacy with these imposing artists that we do with Goya, who seems, though he worked two centuries ago and died in 1828, to combine accessibility and mystery, tradition and modern sensibility, in his person and in his pictures.
Review, 4192 words
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