Eyewitness: Goya (Eyewitness Books)

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Summary: An eyewitness tour of Francisco Goya's artistic dualities
Review: I was not sure how well the Eyewitness format would serve in a volume focusing on a single artist, such as Goya, as compared to looking at an art movement like Impressionism or an art form like Watercolors, but Patricia Wright makes this tour on the artist and his work quite enjoyable. The book ends up being structured by Goya's life, with key chapters focusing on the development and perfection of his artistic technique. For me, those are the most interesting chapters as I indulge in my little foray into art appreciation.

Goya is a complex figure because his art is defined by a series of key dualities: public and private, light and dark, beautiful and grotesque. Wright attempts to relate the changes in his art to Goya's life and the times in which he lived, and several connections seem fairly obvious. But it is still the changing course of his art, from religious art and tapestry cartoons, to fashionable portraits and royal commissions, to the "Black Paintings" of his later years that proves so captivating as Wright brings together biography and artistic analysis. This book works better for those who have some degree of familiarity with Goya's rather works, rather than serving as an introduction to the artist.

Yes, the art reproduced in this book is but a fraction of this artistic output, but the guiding rule here is to select works that represent a key development in technique or which show how Goya handled a particular subject. So we examine "The Parasol" for how it undermined the conventional traditions, the freedom he explored in his great fresco at the church of San Antonio de la Florida, and his fascinating "Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta." I prefer the more in-depth analysis of specific paintings more than I do the quicker looks at a half-dozen paintings from a particular period. Although the book is heavily illustrated with Goya's artwork, there are also examples of the tools with which he painted and the world in which he lived.

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Summary: A very nice monograph on Goya.
Review: Janis Tomlinson, the writer of this book, seems primarily concerned in showing that there is a continuity in Goya's work, that it did not suddenly change from light-hearted to dark after Goya went deaf. For the most part, I feel she achieved this end, I for one am convinced. I wish she wrote more on Goya's technique and his personal life, both of which she does not go into much. The 300 or so colour reproductions of Goya's work are excellent, and there are many good close-ups. Unfortunately, Goya produced around 1,800 works, so it is disappointing that only a fraction of them are in this book.

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Summary: A thought provoking book... but come to your own conclusions
Review: This was my introduction to Goya. The great thing about this book (and about all the books in Phaidon's Art & Ideas Series) is that it does an excellent job of putting the artist in historical context. I think this is really important, because Goya (like David in France) really is inseparable from his time, and we simply can't understand his images if we don't have any idea about what was going on in Spain and the rest of Europe at the time. "The Disasters of War", for example, means so much more to me now that I understand what happened when Napoleon invaded Spain. I was also glad to see that pictures by some of Goya's contemporaries are included, pictures that would otherwise be pretty hard to find.

Some of the author's interpretations, though, annoyed me. Intellegent readers shouldn't have any problems drawing their own conclusions, but I'm a little more concerned about readers who aren't very good about questioning authors. For example, when talking about "The Second of May 1808" and "The Third of May 1808", Symmons says that the figure stabbing the horse in the first painting is the same man lying dead in the heap of bodies in the second one -- and then she says that repetition of figures like this is a major theme in Goya's works. It is, but apart from the fact that both of these men are wearing green coats, there's no way of saying they are the same man. Maybe Goya said they were, but if he did, the author hasn't pointed that out. Seems minor, but it isn't. Another quirk is the author's search for Goya's sources. I understand that artists borrow motifs from each other every now and then, but when Symmons tries to tie in a couple of Goya's images with political prints by James Gilray, for example, simply because some of Goya's poses (which really aren't that unusual) vaguely resemble some of Gilray's, I think she's going out on an awfully big limb. Maybe Goya did take them from Gilray, but he could have taken them from a thousand other places just as easily, and without more substantial proof of Goya's sources, I just don't see what the author is trying to accomplish. This is a very useful book, but leave room for forming your own opinion about Goya.