The Black Sun

It stood to reason that Novelist Andre Malraux, onetime fighter pilot with the Loyalists in Spain's civil war, and internationally famed art critic, would eventually zero in on Francisco Goya. An illness deafened Goya in his 40s and turned him from pleasant art to black indictments of man's inhumanity and fate's immutability. Believing that Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 spelled liberation, Goya at first collaborated. Inevitable disillusion further deepened his pessimism. Malraux, too, had a severe comeuppance in middle age when his Communist leanings proved to have been a flirtation with the devil. Thereafter, he turned from adventuring and novel writing to art criticism, became the most eloquent, arrogant, febrile, haunting writer in the silent world of art. His new Saturn: An Essay on Goya (Phaidon; $10) illuminates a dark genius with lightning flashes of insight.

Taming Madness. Goya, the painter of Spanish court tapestries and of such lovable children as Don Manuel Osorio, forever lost the world of sound through his illness in 1792. He feared for his sight as well, and even for his sanity. Slowly he ceased painting charming pictures and embarked on the hard-to-take masterpieces that made him an immortal. His purpose, he wrote, was simply "to occupy my imagination, which was troubled by consideration of my ills." Goya's art, Malraux maintains, consists of "taming madness so as to make a language of it."

To Goya, as to Malraux, the eternal resembled eternal night. "His patches of dark color often seem to represent darkness, but their function is more like that of the golden backgrounds of the Middle Ages; they take the scene out of reality and, as with the Byzantine scene, place it at once in a universe that does not belong to man. This black is devil's gold; it marks out the fantastic as strictly as the golden background had marked out the sacred."

Goya's destiny, says Malraux, "was an imperious one, and the Court which was filled with his name glitters for us lit by the rays of his black sun. But he was uncertain how far he was entitled to his phantoms, and still more uncertain how far his phantoms were entitled to enter the domain of art. He waited twenty years before giving them, in paint, their tyrannous accent."

Granting Life. Saturn, which Goya painted in old age, on a wall of his house near Madrid, is certainly tyrannical. How could he have lived with such images? Apparitions, says Malraux, "stealthy at first, had taken possession of the house as of Goya himself. He had granted them a life by night, something a little more substantial than the life in black and white of his engravings and fancies, a life in monochrome painting . . . Goya knew now that if there is a loneliness where the lonely man is rejected by his fellows, there is also another where he is lonely only because mankind has not yet come to him."

But what was Goya saying? Malraux keeps lunging at the point. In general he argues that the master's art was anti-idealistic, un-Christian and interrogatory: "If Christ is not the very meaning of the world, then the body of an executed felon by the roadside is more significant than a crucifix . . . Christian art was an answer; his art is a question. The Mocking is a pathetic subject but not a ridiculous one because Jesus has chosen to be mocked. The garrotted victims of the Inquisition have not chosen the pointed cap that shakes in their agony; the laughter of soldiers before a tortured body is a question because the body did not choose to die." Goya, Malraux concludes, "was the most eager for the absolute and the most remote from it that art has ever known."

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