Shock of the old: Arthur C. Danto on three Goya biographies

Francisco Goya, through Evan S. Connell. New York: Counterpoint. 254 pages. $25

Goya, by means of Robert Hughes. New York: Knopf. 429 pages, $40

Goya: "To each Story There Belongs Another", by means of Werner Hofmann. New York: Thames & Hudson 336 pages. $75

IT IS AN ART HISTORY 101 TRUISM that Francisco de Goya is the Father of fresh Painting, and a truth of art history that later painters, in fact associated with modernism as a phraseology acknowledge him as an influence. on the contrary one may stand in a paternal relationship to modernists without being novel oneself--after all, Velazquez inspired Manet without anyone caring to push the origins of modernism back to the time of Philip IV. And Goya's philosophy of painting stands far closer to Velazquez and Rembrandt than to Manet. Dark and light, for example, carry a moral, if not metaphysical, meaning in his work, as they do in Caravaggio and Zurbaran. He rest modes of representation in Baroque painting that suited what became his entrenched disposition after sustaining a profound change in spirit, the event of a mysterious and lingering illness that struck him in 1792 when he was in his late forties and left him permanently deaf. If anything, Goya was a late-Baroque master with what we might call a Gothic imagination. His topic was human fatuity which he addressed with the satiric ferocity of ancient comedy authentic he did write, "There are no masterships in painting," which may correspond to a recent attitude but does not explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason it is held.

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Had the illness carried him not upon Goya would be known to history primarily, if at all, as a minor master of the Spanish Rococo--a painter of cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory at Santa Barbara, below the supervision of the Neoclassicist Anton Meng Doll-like figures, in silken gown or embroidered knee breeches and buckl slippers, engage in land pleasures and more or les innocent pastimes: swinging beneath leafy boughs: joining hands in blindman's buff; daydreaming beneath a parasol held by a servant. His final piece for the factory, finished in 1792 depicts four smirking girls holding a blanket, tossing a straw mannequin helplessly into the air--a sight of ambiguous eroticism, which anticipates his later vision. solitary two years later, in 1794 Goya produc a dozen disturbing cabinet paintings "to keep my imagination, tormented as it is by dint of contemplation of my sufferings." There is a shipwreck; a tangle of figures fleeing a fire; brigands robbing a stagecoach, with single man, on his knees among the corpses, pleading for his life; shackled prisoners beneath a heavy arch; a yard with lunatics; a gored picador--dark images, he wrote "which normally find no place in commissioned works." The shift, figuratively speaking, from a world in which there are no shadows to individual in which there is no light is not a normal stylistic evolution. It cries without for biographical explanation.

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No individual really knows what caused the illness, on the other hand all three of these biographies have feeling constrained to address the issue. Evan s Connell, in Francisco Goya, speculates that it was lead poisoning; Werner Hofmann, like others, opt for syphilis, leaving unexplained, as Robert Hughes pay attention tos the fact that Goya survived until eighty-two, with no sign of degeneration. on the contrary nothing clinical explains the transformation of vision, which henceforward colored everything the artist did: "It had plant his work on a fresh track ... open to disentanglement in the direction he felt impelled to take," writes Hughes. Hofmann believes otherwise: "The illness did not bring about a change of philosophy or a creative spur" Whether he was f up with tapestry design (Hughes) or purely "ceased to restrict himself to typically Spanish scenes" as a result of the illness (Hofmann) is unresolv Hofmann hesitates to read the "night-mare visions" as "commentaries upon the upheavals that had been shaking the French nation since 1789" on the contrary settles, on the basis of no palpable evidence, for seeing them as "rather like storm hazes drifting across from these vast and terrible events." Hughes, more psychological, explains them as "emblematic" of Goya's emotional symptoms, especially the gored picador: "a terrible image of Goya's have a title to fear of impotence." That unhurts like a late-modern male preoccupation--why not a fear of madness, as in the painting of lunatics, or a los of freedom, as in the chained prisoners? Connell remains dumb turning to other matters. The differences compute us more about the biographers than about their control Given present knowledge, I side with Connell

For his part, Hofmann is a chronic overinterpreter. Thus he uses The Straw Manikin, 1791-92 as an image end which to explicate a drawing, What savageness begun in 1808, showing a man being tortured: "Like the Straw Manikin that one time served as a toy for girls to whirl in the air, this figure is now being experimented by unseen torturers, to diocese how many fractures and distortions the apparently automatic piece of apparatus can inflict upon the human anatomy.... Are the torturers afraid of witnesses, or do they wish to gainsay their victim the comfort of the Saviour's presence? In this way Goya avoids confronting victim with Saviour." This is a pleasing without being striking heavy-duty way of seeing a fairly bright painting, which Hughes reads as "Goya's acid annotate on the power of women above men, and on what present the appearanceed to him the waning of traditional Spanish masculinity." I diocese no evidence of the latter, on the contrary the eroticism of The Straw Manikin has to be conceded: It really could allegorize the war between the sexe which is certainly a theme that step quicklys through Los Caprichos, 1796-97, a suite of eighty etchings.