Recommendations of the Editorial team
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is considered the court painter and chronicler of his time, but in his more important pictures he dissected the human soul. Some say that in an era full of upheavals to the eraser, he grabbed the spring or sword like others. His pressure graphics – etchings, aquatians and lithographs – tell of a world in political crisis.
Voice of a torn Spain
All 287 print graphics Goyas are combined in a new work band – including the series “Los Caprichos”, “Los Desastres de la Guerra”, “La Tauromaquia” and “Los Disparates”. The band “Goya. The Complete Prints” also contains state prints from previously unpublished series. They document Goyas’s lust for experimentation.
Born in 1746 in Fuendentodos near Zaragoza, trained in Madrid and Italy, Goya rose early to the highest circles of the Spanish art world. In 1786 he became the court painter, but Goya combined courtly elegance with creeping dissonance. From the 1790s at the latest, his art became increasingly subversive.
The Caprichos from 1799 mark the turning point. A series of surreal image allegories about hypocrisy, superstition and social corruption. Here Goya formulated his famous guiding principle: “Imagination without reason creates monster.” But it was only in the “Desastres de la Guerra”, created between 1810 and 1820, that he shows himself as a picture rapporteur of horror. He showed the cruelty of the Spanish War of Independence from the victim’s perspective.
Etching as an outcry against injustice
In the “La Tauromaquia” series (1816), Goya explores the archaic fascination of bullfighting. Not as glorification, but as a reflection of violence, honor and death. The later “disparates” finally, between 1815 and 1823, were created all earthly covers. In these nightly visions, madness becomes the measure of all things. That seems terrifyingly truthful.
Pockets
- Goya. The Complete Prints
- Taschen.com
- Hardcover in the Schuber, 24.3 x 30.4 cm, 3.78 kg, 600 pages
- € 100