Goya

Loan exhibitions attract attention not only because they show the work of great artists but because they give the public a chance to view intimately the trappings of private wealth. Both these attractions were powerfully present last week in Manhattan when Knoedler Galleries opened what many critics considered the peak of the season's shows--a loan exhibit of Goya paintings. The pictures came from the discreet walls of Andrew William Mellon, Harrison Williams, Oscar B. Cintas (American Car & Foundry), Eugene G. Grace, Edward S. Harkness, J. Watson Webb. Mr. & Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson (Joan Whitney) sent their Don Vincente Osorio, Count of Trastamara as a Child from their huge living room in Manhasset. Jules Bache lent his often exhibited Don Manuel Osorio, an engaging infant half-surrounded by three cats, a bird cage, a tame magpie. Chicago's Art Institute was represented by six small canvases showing a monk accurately and amusingly shooting and capturing a bandit. All the other pictures were portraits: the aloof La Tirana, an actress whom legend has included among Goya's mistresses; Mr. Mellon's gravely beautiful Senora Sabasa Garcia; and the duchesses, generals, noble children with toys or animals whom a court painter must paint but which Goya immortalized.

The Spain upon which Francisco Jose Goya y Lucientes first opened his feral eyes was carelessly crumbling in vice and cruelty. Its population had dropped in 300 years from 12,000,000 to approximately half. The Inquisition had burned 30,000, imprisoned ten times as many. The court aped the worst of France. Duchesses dressed as servants and snooped through the streets or tore their mantillas fighting for title to a bullfighter. One nobleman explained his kindness to his servants by inquiring: "How can I be sure my real father is not among them?" There were riots every day in Madrid except during the Siesta. Across the Pyrenees in France, Voltaire and a Swiss-born neurotic called Jean Jacques Rousseau were mouthing strange phrases that were to mean a revolution, Napoleon, and the conquest of Spain. But in Madrid and throughout the land they reveled and stabbed and hoped only to see the morrow. Francisco Goya was born in 1746 of a remotely noble mother and a farmer father in Fuentodos. a tumbling village in Aragon. When he showed a facility for drawing, small Francisco was sent to nearby Saragossa, capital of Aragon, to study under one Luzan, a painstaking baroque copyist. There were rival churches and rival gangs and Goya, a husky, loud youth of 20, already a swordsman and perhaps a bullfighter, quickly joined the disputes. When three men were found dead in the streets one grey morning, he thought it advisable to go to Madrid. Here he drank and fought, observed the ritual of singing under windows, gained greater fame for this than for his occasional painting. On another morning he was found in the gutter with a knife sharp as an etcher's needle in his back, was smuggled to Rome by friendly bullfighters.

In Rome he managed to win an art competition prize, to climb the dome of St. Peter's and carve his initials higher than any previous vandal. He remained there two years or less; an alert guard caught him climbing a nunnery wall and he returned to Saragossa where he was promptly given a commission to decorate a church.

In 1775 he married Josefa Bayeu, sister of an influential painter, who unobtrusively bore him 20 children (only one of whom reached maturity) and who as unobtrusively died when she was through. Shortly after his marriage, through his brother-in-law he got a commission to draw cartoons for tapestries. Instead of classical subjects, Goya chose contemporary incidents, then an innovation. The tapestries established his fame, his social position. Goya said he had only three masters: "Rembrandt, Velasquez and Nature." Be cause his work only superficially resembles the first two, critics have generally agreed that the last was his best teacher. No mere portrait painter, he was able at his best to make a face reveal a biography. Of his portrait of Charles IV and his family Theophile Gautier said that it looked like a butcher's family that had just won a lottery prize. He expressed his restless virility best in etchings and drawings which showed movement -- street scenes, bullfights. Blues, browns and greens were his favorite colors but he was not afraid to be brilliant: one of his self-portraits shows a palette of ten colors with white and red together and most prominent. During his last years he experimented with impressionistic back grounds. These as well as his choice of subjects were a major influence in the great French group which immediately followed him and included Courbet, Delacroix, Daumier, Manet. As a portrait painter, Goya was a quick, fashionable success. The nobility crowded to his studio, recklessly tossed him com missions which he invariably accepted. At 40 he was making big money and spending most of it. He bought himself a two-wheeled carriage, a thoroughbred horse. On his first trip he fell, spraining his ankle. On a subsequent trip the carriage tipped over, killed an onlooker. Goya sold the equipage, bought a pair of mules and a carriage with four wheels. In 1788 Charles IV came to the throne. Interested only in hunting he allowed his ugly, lecherous wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, and her lover, Manuel Godoy, to run the country. Goya became court painter and the lover of the Duchess of Alba whom he painted nude and copied clothed to fool her jealous husband (Maia Desnuda, Maia Vestida, now in the Prado at Madrid). One night when her carriage broke down on an Andalusian hill, Goya built a fire, welded the axle with his hands, caught a chill which deafened him for life. Coarse, snub-nosed, his face creased by excess, Goya, in spite of his duchess who used to come to his studio to be rouged by him, worked incessantly. He painted courtiers, decorated churches, produced Los Caprichos, his most famed etchings. These showed madmen, convicts, prostitutes, gluttonous monks, himself enticed by a two-headed Alba. Outraged, the Inquisition tried to imprison Goya, was stopped by the King. When Napoleon descended upon Spain, Goya remained in Madrid, helped King Joseph Bonaparte select 50 Spanish paintings for the Musee Napoleon in Paris. But when Wellington (whom he painted) restored the Bourbons and Ferdinand VII took the throne, Goya retired from the capital to a village near a church he had decorated with court characters and street walkers. Nearly blind as well as deaf, Goya produced another series of fantastic etchings, painted a Saturn devouring his children. Ferdinand, who was trying to restore the Inquisition's power, was glad when Goya asked leave to go to Bordeaux. There in a tall grey hat and a white neck tie the old man entertained friends by telling such stories as his decoration of a church in three months (using sponges to fill in spaces more quickly) or his painting of one of the French massacres with a spoon. He returned to Spain only once -- to get a pay check. He was 82 when he died and was buried in Bordeaux, 106 years ago last week. Some years later his grave was opened for reinterment in Spain. Two skeletons were found, only one skull. The French Government shipped everything it found to Spain where everything was reburied.

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