A photograph by Isabel Muñoz inspired by Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, part of Territorio Goya’s collection. Photograph: Courtesy of Territorio Goya
Two hundred years after he covered the walls of his house near Madrid with febrile visions of Saturn devouring his son, a witches’ sabbath and a slowly drowning dog, Francisco de Goya has been summoned home to help reverse the fortunes of the poor, remote and underpopulated Spanish region where he was born in 1746.
The painter, printmaker and fascinated, appalled chronicler of war, cruelty and reason’s frequent slumbers, studied in Italy and painted for the court in Madrid before dying in Bordeaux in 1828. But he was born on the other side of the Pyrenees in Fuendetodos, a small town 27 miles (44km) south of Zaragoza in the north-eastern Spanish region of Aragon.
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Since 1999, Sean Scully’s Landline paintings have led a transition from what John Caldwell called ‘the asceticism of his earlier black paintings’ towards the ’emotion, space, colour and physicality’ [i] of a more expressive style that has traced the world’s contours. As Scully says, ‘I change, of course, and hopefully expand’. In the Landline series, Scully seeks to paint his ‘sense of the elemental coming-together of land and sea, sky and land … the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other.’ [ii]
The series works as a guide for how to look at or feel the natural world
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Francisco de Goya has been cast in many roles: the liberal thinker satirising the monarchy; the court painter bent on self-promotion; the proto-modernist rebelling against the academy; the deaf madman daubing the walls of his country estate with ghoulish fantasies. In
Goya: A Portrait of the Artist, Janis Tomlinson sets out to write a biography without embellishment or romanticisation. For this she turned not to the artworks, as almost every previous biographer has done, but to the archive, compiling all known documents – letters, invoices, wills etc. – concerning Goya’s movements and using them as points on a map to guide us through his complex life. Tomlinson acknowledges the difficulties of this approach in her introduction: ‘Having written a first draft […] I realised that without going further, the book did no more justice to Goya than a curriculum vitae does for any individual.’ The version that made it to the printers is noth
In more than 100 drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the brilliant Spanish artist navigates the turbulence of politics and looks deep within the chambers of his heart.