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Saint Louis Art Museum, The Marian Cronheim Trust for Prints and Drawings
7:2015
rancisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish, 1746-1828; plates from portfolio The Disasters of War, 1810-1820, published 1863; etching and lavis; 8 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 1 3/8 inches
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Saint Louis Art Museum, The Marian Cronheim Trust for Prints and Drawings
7:2015
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish, 1746-1828; plates from portfolio The Disasters of War, 1810-1820, published 1863; etching and lavis; 8 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 1 3/8 inches.
3 of 4
Saint Louis Art Museum, The Marian Cronheim Trust for Prints and Drawings
7:2015
rancisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish, 1746-1828; plates from portfolio The Disasters of War, 1810-1820, published 1863; etching and lavis; 8 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 1 3/8 inches.
4 of 4
Saint Louis Art Museum, The Marian Cronheim Trust for Prints and Drawings
7:2015
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish, 1746-1828; plates from portfolio The Disasters of War, 1810-1820, published 1863; etching and lavis; 8 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 1 3/8 inches
It is a sad commentary on humanity that 200 years after Francisco Goya y Lucientes created his second collection of prints, The Disasters of War, the subject remains so relevant. On display at the Saint Louis Art Museum as part of a larger exhibition, "Impressions of War," the full set of the Spanish artist’s prints are on view in St. Louis for the first time.
Ironically, considering he was largely forgotten outside of Spain after his death, Goya now ranks as one of the most influential artists of the turn of the 19th century, whose paintings and prints inspired the likes of Édouard Manet and other avant-garde artists in the tumultuous decades after the Napoleonic Wars. Working for the hapless Charles IV, whose ancestors had been installed by Louis XIV of France after the War of the Spanish Secession, Goya seemed to be chafing in the cultural mediocrity of the Bourbon king. Louis XIV, intent on removing the threat south of his border that had dogged past French kings for centuries, had proven too successful, and the once-great Spanish Empire had fallen into a sleepy malaise. Goya’s work as court painter for Charles IV is competent, but hardly a harbinger of his future greatness; in his famous Portrait of the Family of Charles IV from 1800, the artist quotes from his 17th century predecessor, Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Standing in the shadows, looking out from behind his huge canvas, Goya seems to almost be asking, “Why couldn’t I have been born in greater times?”
Goya would soon find his opportunity for relevance by living through one of the most chaotic periods in Spanish history: the Napoleonic invasion in 1808, and the resulting warfare that raged across Spain and Portugal in what is now known as the Peninsular War. Charles IV, rightfully seen as an ineffective ruler of Spain, had foolishly accepted the invitation of Napoleon for a joint re-conquest of Portugal, which had slipped out of the kingdom’s hands in the waning years of Hapsburg rule. One should be wary of French overtures for partnership, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Milanese patron, Duke Ludovico Sforza had found out the hard way centuries before; history repeated itself as France proceeded to occupy Spain, installing Joseph Bonaparte as the new king.
Amazingly, many Spaniards welcomed the French occupation, placing their hopes on an end to incompetent Bourbon rule and the promise of Enlightenment-based government. Considering the state of Spain’s fortunes at the time of the invasion, one can understand their desperation. But the honeymoon, if there ever was one, ended quickly. The Spanish people rose up against the French army, and as Goya claims to have personally witnessed, soon realized that their supposedly enlightened overlords were far from the civilized, reason-based soldiers they claimed to be. To the rescue came a British army, led by the future Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, whose relatively obscure career fighting in various colonial wars around the world hardly portended his future role in world history. But as we shall see with Goya, Wellington found his calling in the Peninsular War, scoring numerous victories against the French army, tying up critical forces Napoleon could not spare as he floundered during his failed invasion of Russia. Indeed, the Peninsular War lasted until 1814, when Napoleon abdicated following his loss to the Sixth Coalition. The Duke of Wellington, painted by Goya around 1812-14, had become a national hero.
The Peninsular War ended up being one of Goya’s most fertile periods of his career; spurred by his outrage of his beloved Spain laid waste on a tyrant’s whim, he began to produce of flurry of intaglio prints, capturing the “forgotten” war of the Napoleonic era. In fact, one wonders if the atrocities committed by the French from 1808-1814 would even be remembered as they are if it had not been for Goya. But the rage captured in his new prints for The Disasters of War is clear; the compositions are harsh, brutal, ugly and extremely violent. Should they be any less, considering the atrocities that he witnessed?
The series of 80 prints are divided into three unequal parts, with the first section containing the most famous scenes of Spanish guerilla warfare and French atrocities. Walking through the gallery, the numbered prints, each with their own dose of Goya’s grim commentary written in Spanish at the bottom of each plate, follow a seemingly random narrative trajectory through scenes of horror and destruction. The first print, Sad Forebodings of What is Going to Happen, almost seems to serve as the equivalent of today’s news media’s “Editor’s Note: This video contains graphic content.”
And graphic content is what Goya shows; in perhaps what is one of the most poignant plates, They Don’t Like It (No. 9), an elderly woman, knife in hand, comes to the aid of a young woman being assaulted by a French soldier. One assumes the next scenes contains “graphic content” as the grandmotherly woman fatally stabs the foreign assailant. Curiously, and seemingly randomly, a water wheel is visible behind the figures; did Goya or another person witness this event in front of a grist mill, or does it allude to the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria? While most prints follow in a seemingly arbitrary order, in this case the following prints continue the macabre story with Neither do These (No. 10) and Neither do Those (No. 11).
Also, it is interesting to see Goya return repeatedly to scenes of execution, the eventual subject of his seminal painting The Third of May, 1808, where a row of faceless French troops kill Spaniards arrayed helplessly against a blank wall in the eerie glow of a box lantern. There’s No Help For It (No.15) and Barbarians (No. 38), which both show scenes of soldiers executing Spanish partisans, almost seem like outtakes for what would be the final composition of The Third of May. Goya returns throughout the series to these graphic scenes; one wonders if his sense of fairness was particularly insulted by these hopeless deaths. He clearly relishes engraving scenes of Spanish defiance, such as in What Courage! (No. 7), where a woman commandeers a cannon after her male compatriots have either fled or fallen in the heat of battle.
Less well known, but certainly just as relevant, is the second third of the series, the scenes of the 1811-1812 famine in Madrid, where battles between the Spanish and their British allies against the French army caught the capital in between the opposing forces’ stalemate. In scenes sadly reminiscent of today’s world, Goya shows piles of emaciated bodies or focuses an individual, anonymous person, such as in There Was Nothing to Be Done and He Died (No. 53), where one man, starved to death, lies prone on the ground. In Unhappy Mother! (No. 50), Goya’s dark title seems contradictory; the mother is dead, theoretically relieved of unhappiness, while her small child, weeping, follows the cruel retinue.
The final third deals with the return of the Spanish king, and Goya’s profound disappointment that nothing seemed to have changed in the country’s politics, even after the valiant suffering of so many of his fellow Spaniards. Goya’s mastery of allegorical wit returns, as seen in his earlier, Enlightenment-themed Los Caprichos prints; a malevolent, rampant Foghorn Leghorn beast of a bird thunders across the page in The Carnivorous Vulture (No. 76), perhaps representing the folly of the aristocracy trying to put their oppressive Humpty Dumpty kingdom back together again. A veritable Pandora’s Box of Spain’s problems pours out, wreaking havoc on the country Goya loves so much; in the penultimate print of the 1863 edition (two more prints, 81 and 82 were added later), Truth has Died (No. 79), a glowing woman, representing that critical virtue, lies deceased as her monstrous enemies crowd around maliciously. In Will She Live Again? (No. 80), the final print shows Goya gravely concerned for his country’s future; the title is a question, not a statement. Goya wonders if Truth will ever return to Spain.
As powerful as these prints remain, two centuries after their creation, Goya did not publish the series in his lifetime; it was actually a generation later that The Disasters of War finally reached a broader audience. One wonders what Goya would think of modern Spain. Without a doubt, those civic and philosophical virtues he wanted so much for his homeland have finally been embraced. Spain is now a successful democracy; Truth lives again.
The same violence that Goya spoke against so eloquently still rears its ugly head today. Instead of Madrid, it is now Aleppo, a place where photographers capture similar images of murder and starvation. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any Duke of Wellington appearing to save the day. And sadly, shamefully, The Disasters of War remains as relevant today as it was 200 years ago.
Disasters of War runs through February 17, 2017 as part of "Impressions of War," an exhibit featuring the works of Jacques Callot, Max Beckman, and contemporary printmaker Daniel Heyman. The Saint Louis Art Museum is located at 1 Fine Arts Drive in Forest Park; for more information on the exhibit, go to slam.org.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
