Goya - Hardcover

Hofmann, Werner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500093172 ISBN 13: 9780500093177

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 2003

Synopsis

A new and profusely illustrated appraisal of this leading Spanish painter and graphic artist. "As a draftsman and painter, Goya favors the human passions, whether uninhibited or suppressed, repressed or repressing." Thus does Werner Hofmann describe the essence of the vast oeuvre left behind by Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), pointing to the source of its vital energy, alarming immediacy, and striking modernity. Discussions of Goya in recent decades have centered on his influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters. Hofmann redresses the balance, focusing instead on the Spanish artist's profoundly disturbing imagery, and demonstrating that Goya's modernity derives from his lifelong investigation of what lies behind the world of appearances and convention. Hofmann places Goya's paintings, drawings, and prints in a biographical context, revealing the specific character of each phase of the artist's life and work. He discusses "the glory and the pain of faith" evinced by Goya's early work, the artist's parabolic representation of the threat posed by the French Revolution, his dramatic documentation of the French occupation of Spain, his variations on cruelty in the Disasters of War etchings, and the religious faith apparent in his late work. Hofmann also relates the artist and his work to contemporary intellectual developments, drawing comparisons with writers, critics, and philosophers from Goethe to William Blake to the Marquis de Sade. 220 illustrations, 185 in color.

About this title

About the Author

From 1970 to 1990, Werner Hofmann was Director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. His many publications on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries include monographs on Gustav Klimt, Max Ernst, and Caspar David Friedrich.

From Booklist

A Goya revival much like the recent resurgence of attention paid to Vermeer and Caravaggio is under way, claiming the canny attention of Susan Sontag, Julia Blackburn, Robert Hughes, and now one more commentator with a distinct point of view. Hofmann's handsomely and generously illustrated volume, the best visual resource among the recent spate of Goya books, provides a useful corollary. The former director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, he offers a clarifying discussion of Goya's obsession with masquerade and his deliberate "transgression of borders" in his bold mixing of the sacred and the secular. Goya's power resides in his profound ambiguity, Hofmann argues, which is expressed most unnervingly in the print series titled "Caprichos" and the so-called Black Paintings. "Strange caprices and sober facts," witchcraft, exorcism, nightmares, violence, and conflicts between men and women, the beautiful and the homely, rich and poor, the sane and the mad--in short, the powerful and the powerless--all fascinated Goya, who invented "intricate codes" to violate tradition, express his skepticism regarding Christian salvation, satirize society, and unflinchingly depict the "sheer pandemonium" of the human condition. Hofmann goes far in articulating what it is in Goya's enduring works that so disturbs and moves us. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0500093172
• ISBN 13: 9780500093177
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 344