Goya : Visions of Flesh and Blood

A most fascinating film http://www.sydneyartsguide.com.au/exhibition-on-screen-presents-goya-visions-of-flesh-and-blood-from-the-national-gallery-of-london/Heir to Velasquez, hero to Picasso…This is the third year of this marvellous season of Exhibition on Screen and this time it is based on the Goya: The Portraits exhibition that was recently on at the National Gallery in London. Top brass gallery directors, curators and scholars combine to give fascinating insights into Goya’s life and times, his personality and oeuvre. There are voiceovers of some of his letters and a look-alike actor stalks around as Goya in his later years. Dizzying panoramas of Madrid and sections of the exhibition are included as well as sections of bull fights , great horsemanship and hunting dogs. Extreme close-ups allow us to examine the varnish and brushstrokes of various paintings. We learn about Goya’s early life, his work at court, his major patrons (including the King and Queen of the period and the Duchess of Alba); how he became totally deaf after a major illness and his solitary life in self imposed exile in Bordeaux in France. His marriage is mentioned in passing and we learn much about his close friendship with Martin Zapater. There is much excitement when Goya’s rare, fragile 1771 Italian sketchbook is reverently displayed especially for this documentary. This allows us to follow how the artist jumped between ideas, and how he stored images for future use. Goya is somewhat elusive yet amazingly direct. He is regarded and presented here as one of the first modern artists because of his amazing sense of the individual yet he is also firmly anchored in his turbulent time which saw the French revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the terrors of the Inquisition and the rigidity of life at the Spanish Bourbon court. To Goya politics and painting became inextricably linked as he became court painter and conservator. Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, stated that Goya’s great curiosity was combined with a piercing intelligence; that he never stopped working, and never did the same kind of artwork twice. This, it is implied, was how the portraits showed such great psychological depth. The viewer is shown around the exhibition – the various aristocrats, the great Bourbon familial set-pieces, the portraits of his family, his friends, his Doctor and his self-portraits. Scholarly commentators include the exhibition’s curator Xavier Bray, Juliet Wilson-Bareau, and the curators of the Prado and the Spanish royal palaces. We also meet a conservator, Joanna Dunn, at the National Gallery in Washington to be informed about (and shown) Goya’s orange priming, his glazes, his brushstrokes, his painting wet paint on to wet paint. The biography, interwoven with the paintings, is in subtle chronology beginning with Aragon, Goya’s birthplace in northern Spain, his adolescence spent in Zaragoza, and we then move with him to Madrid. Then we follow the slow development of his career from designer for the Royal Tapestry Factory making the large-scale paintings of life and leisure which were translated into the great wall hangings, on through his travels to Italy. On his return, his first aristocratic and royal commissions began- frescoes and paintings for chapels and cathedrals– and portraits. Over a third of Goya’s oeuvre consists of portraits. We are told that Goya before his deafness, (perhaps caused by the lead in the paints he used), loved music and was something of an extrovert. He was a man of intense friendships and conflicting impulses, a man of the Enlightenment yet a royalist, who developed a wonderful rapport with the greatest aristocrats of the day as indicated, for example, by the portrait of one of his major patrons, the Duchess of Alba; who wears two rings, one of which reads Goya, the other Alba, and coyly points to the artist’s name scratched in the earth at her feet. It is through Goya that his greatest patrons are viewed and remembered – Charles III in hunting gear; Charles IV and his Queen; and the familial portraits of the family and staff of the Infante Don Luis de Borbon, with his wife, children and staff ( where Goya included himself at his canvas, an allusion to Velazquez’s self-portrait in his Las Meninas). This is not to forget his major portrait of of a very exhausted Duke of Wellington. There is an analysis of his extremely nightmarish, dark works for example Los Capricios and The Horrors of War are also included to provide us with an even deeper understanding of the man and his works. The Goya exhibition ran between October 2015 and January 2016 at the National Gallery London. The film runs for 105 minutes without interval. Exhibition on Screen presents Goya Visions of Flesh and Blood screens at selected arthouse cinemas from Saturday 26th March.