22.10.2009. - 13.12.2009.




The exhibition offers the opportunity to get acquainted with one of the most prominent masterpieces at the scope of the art history – the graphic series Los Caprichos by the brilliant Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The set of 80 prints, created and published in 1799 by artist himself, entitled Los Caprichos (The Caprices) spread quickly after it was published first and were soon known of outside Spain. They became the symbol of the Goyaesque style, and demonstrated a new way of representing reality - a way that is more expressive, fresher; a way that was to find its echo amongst the artists of the 19th century. The end of the cold, artificial prints of neo-Classicism had come.

There have been lots of researches carried out to find reasons that served as sources of inspiration for the series. Scholars have pointed out numerous theoretical and artistic influences, but the artist himself would have been loath to admit that – beyond a few quotations from well-known poets such as Jovellanos, and despite parallels in the dramas of his friend, Moratín the Younger – any person or work had played a part in the evolution of these remarkable prints. Under the protection of the Osuna family, the Duchess of Alba, government ministers and talented writers, he continued to attract commissions which allowed him to display his brutal, often turbulent vision. Before Los Caprichos the artist created lots of sketches and drawings that helped him at appointing subjects attracting his artistic scope. Particular interest should be addressed to the Madrid Album or, more precisely, the Madrid series, which unfortunately has come to us only partially. The Madrid Album comprises a large series of sketches showing subjects from contemporary life, and especially the plight of women. For instance, these drawings first introduce Celestina, a personality borrowed from traditional Spanish literature, and who becomes a particular symbol in Goya’s art. He shows her lurking in corners, reminding youth and beauty that they too must fade and wither. Like Celestina, the prostitute personifies many of the ills of society, and this dovetailing of reality and fantasy forms the original creative source of Goya’s new vision. The subject of witchcraft also was become crucial to his new serious style, the most explicitly expressed in Los Caprichos.

Some scenes of Los Caprichos look as if they are part of a play, a parade of eccentric figures. Mostly they are deeply pessimistic and cynical. Spain becomes a place akin to the medieval vision of Dante’s Inferno, rife with evils of all kinds: hypocrisy, mendacity, cruelty and moral corruption. The influence of 30 years of life as a professional artist are all examined: Church, state, the court, the law, the medical profession, the arts and sciences, the streets of Madrid, rural life, contemporary poetry and philosophy, theories about the poor, the rich, the diseased, the young, the old; a whole vast synthesis is brought to bear on a welter of vice, immortality and vanity.

As a confirmation of how the artist stamped his own personality on the Caprichos, the first plate shows a profile self-portrait. This portrait is highly fashionable, with this one image Goya restates his self-identification with modernity, and his glance slants sideways in the finished prints.

The method Goya used here were complicated and up-to-date. Traditional etching formed the basic technique, but Goya combined this with the comparatively recent invention of aquatint. The clean lines bitten out by acid on the surface4 of a small plate are complemented by pale tones, like wash, composed of tiny dots obtained by dusting the plate with particles of resin. Equally important to these plates was the addition of very fine grooves scratched straight on the surface of the plate with a sharp tool. Such drypoint scratches in areas such as the profound blackness of the background or the muted shadows and deep lines around eyes and hands were graphic equivalents to the atmospheric brushstrokes on paintings.

The sequence of prints which follows is devoted to deception in various forms. People pretending to be something they are not, people deceiving each other; playing cruel tricks on the young and vulnerable, and men as well as women play their part in designs. Celestina and prostitutes appear in numerous prints and occasionally demonic or supernatural activities replace their dishonorable professional dealing. Young girls and aged women become fatalistic and sinister figures whose powers extend to interfering in the affairs of mortals.

The critics and reformers of religion in Goya’s days were eager to circulate new tales and often unverifiable statistics which exposed the Holy Office as major instrument of tyranny in Spain. Nevertheless, as Spain declined as major European power during the 17th and 18th centuries, so the mythology of Spanish Inquisitional terror acquired even greater credence in popular belief. Goya’s Inquisition designs mirror the opinion of his enlightened patrons, particularly the sympathy felt for victims of the Inquisition’s power. The etchings devoted to the Inquisition are resumed at one of the central images of the eighty prints is plate 43 “The dream of reason produces monsters”. Here Goya speaks of himself as an author, but he also a dreamer. The dream was a traditional device, used by artists and writers in Spain as well as in other European countries to introduce subjects of a fantastic, philosophical or obscure nature, and Goya initially considered calling these prints Sueños (Dreams) instead Caprichos.

The last section of the Caprichos is devoted to the bleak and threatening world of dark forces and supernatural phenomena. Witches, magicians and beings whose physical deformities reflect their inner corruption sustain a bitterly satirical narrative. Here Goya carves meaning into the substance of the figures themselves: limbs, eyes, heads, hands and feat are tailored, like clothes, the express the nature of their symbolic functions.
Undoubtedly, Los Caprichos can be also seen at the light of the Great French Revolution as a subtle political caricature, in which the new “Sublime” tastes for violence and scatological detail entered the vocabulary of the satirical broadsheet. These aspects atrreacted even the contemporaries of Goya. The Osuna family bought 4 copies of the complete work and were said to have held private charades in their country house where the king and queen and Manuel Godoy were played out as figures from Goya’s prints. Many contemporary admires of the Caprichos shared the Osuna’s belief that these prints caricatured many famous persons, but Goya himself goes to state that his work is entirely free from the demands of caricature.

In February 6, 1799 Goya advertised the prints in the the Madrid Daily newspaper and put them on sale in a shop beneath his own Madrid apartment, where luxury items such as scent and liqueurs were sold. Few sets were sold and Goya was left with some 240 on his hands, most of first edition. In 1803 he donated these, together with the copper plates, to the Royal Printworks, in exchange for pension for his son. The Museum of Foreign Art owns the second edition of Los Caprichos in its collection. The series is now first in Latvia exhibited fully. The exhibition exposes 78 sheets of Los Caprichos, as the collection of the Museum of Foreign Art lacks two sheets: no.25 (He still smashed the jug) and no.69 (Draught). The works are annotated by the comments made by Goya himself as well as by art historians, and by explanations with regard to the personalities and events in Spain at the end of the 18th century.

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The Museum of Foreign Art
Pils laukums 3,
Riga LV-1050, Latvia
e-mail: amm@amm.lv
www.amm.lv