Prospero | Goya’s drawings

Album of the year

A new exhibition reveals Goya's private preoccupations

By K.S.C.

AN OLD woman, back bent and teeth buckled, kneels on the floor; beside her lie two vessels and a shallow bowl and spoon. Her gaze is misted and sad, but her eyes meet the viewer’s; in her arms, about to be devoured, is a newborn baby. In a picture nearby an elderly couple fly up into the air together, her arms clutch his legs, his outstretched hands clack castanets, associated with music, sensuality and sex. Their faces are angled towards each other, crimped with glee. The walls of the Courtauld Gallery in London are currently crowded with similar images: unsettling and superstitious, erotic and grotesque.

“Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album”, an ambitious new exhibition, opened this week. It marks the first time an institution or individual has tried to reconstitute one of Francisco Goya’s sketchbooks, which were broken up in 1826 after his death. The curators scoured the individual sheets of paper, looking for clues to their original order, such as pigment transference, age and type of paper. Walking around these two small rooms is as close as you are likely to get to flicking through the artist’s imagination.

Goya began making his private “journal albums”, as one scholar has called them, at a crucial point in his life. Approaching 50, this prominent Spanish court painter had contracted a severe illness that was to leave him permanently deaf. He produced eight albums in total, but the majority of the images here come from just one, which was given the title “The Witches and Old Women” (c.1819-23) by a later collector because of the coherence of its subject matter. The 22 works (one has been lost) are small, and were created from washes of ink without any preparatory drawing; mistakes were either left intact or razored off later. They were never intended to be made public. Goya made them for himself, or possibly friends, in the time left over between working on commissions and other large works. Many of the themes in “Witches and Old Women”–the absence of reason, nightmares, perverted eroticism and fear–echo those found in the artist’s 14 so-called “Black Paintings”, which were created at the same time.

The drawings give visitors a new way of appreciating the subversive power of Goya’s imagination, from which they seemingly sprang, fully formed. Those wanting to know the meaning of such grotesque visions—and Juliet Wilson-Bareau, one of the show’s curators and a Goya scholar, says they are all "tinged with irony"—will need to delve into their own imaginations. Best, though, to cast interpretation aside and simply revel in the man's ribald humour.

“Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album” is at the Courtauld Gallery in London until May 25th 2015

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