Goya and the Disasters of War

To what extent is art a mirror of its times? Hamlet seemed to think it a faithful mirror, and the purpose of the stage play was, he said, to “show …the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” But Hamlet had his own reasons for thinking so, and anyway he chose a work that would mirror just what he wanted it to, thinking, as he said that "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king".

War has certainly been part of the “form and pressure” of recent centuries but it’s surprising when we reflect on it, how marginal the presence of war has often been in the art of those centuries, at least in any obvious sense. Impressionism is probably the most famous – or anyway the most popular – art movement of the so-called modern period, yet it’s hard even to imagine a battle scene painted by Monet, Renoir or Pissarro. And Picasso’s Guernica aside, the art of the twentieth century seems to have been much more preoccupied with harlequins and everyday objects than with scenes of war.

The focus in our conference is not, however, the twentieth century, but the two centuries preceding it, and the artist I’d like to talk about is the Spanish painter and engraver, Francisco Goya, whose lifetime straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Goya’s art is fascinating in itself and he is, I think, rightly regarded as one of Europe’s greatest visual artists, but he is of particular interest to our conference because his works include some of the most powerful depictions of the disastrous human consequences of war in the history of visual art.

Interestingly enough, one would never suspect this if one looked only at his earlier work. Goya began as a typical artist of the eighteenth century, very much in the vein of near contemporaries such as Watteau, Tiepolo, and Fragonard, and the spirit of his paintings is, like theirs, a world away from the savage bloodletting of the battlefield.

War is almost invisible in the works of the major artists the eighteenth century. Admittedly, it seems a somewhat less bellicose century that its predecessor, that is, if we exclude the French revolutionary wars that began in the 1790s; but the eighteenth century still had its wars – in both Europe and America – and men were still dying on battlefields or fearing they might. But the painters of the period, like most of the novelists, incidentally, do not seem to have been interested. Watteau invented his enchanting world of fetes galantes; Tiepolo created a dazzling, theatrical realm full of fantasy and brilliance;  Boucher invited his viewer into a world of voluptuous nymphs and cupids; Canaletto and Guardi favoured elegant Venetian scenes or picturesque ruins, and English painters such as Gainsborough seldom strayed from tasteful portraits of the titled or the well-to-do. Scenes of violence were not unknown, of course: religious paintings still depicted the martyrdoms of saints, suitably dramatized, and the rather idiosyncratic Magnasco even descended into the dungeons of the Inquisition – though even here, in keeping with style of the times, the action seems enveloped in a veil of semi-fantasy and, as André Malraux aptly comments, “Magnasco paints with such verve that his scenes of violence become a kind of ballet.”  

Goya’s nineteenth century contemporaries were somewhat different, of course. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the world of refined courtly amusements and fetes galantes gave way to rather sterner subjects, and military exploits were often among them. Salon painters of the period, such as Vernet, often preferred what were then called ‘big subjects’ and battlefield scenes could meet this requirement admirably. The formula was fairly straightforward – a blend of military glamour and semi-photographic realism. The subject matter should preferably be dramatic and eye-catching – a cavalry charge, for example, could do very nicely – and while a certain quantity of blood might flow, the emphasis should be on military dash and valour, not on the disturbing cruelties of war.[1] There’s is a large painting of this kind in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, entitled Long Live the Emperor! which, although dating from later in the century, represents the genre quite well.

There were, of course, paintings of higher quality than this – such as Gericault’s well-known Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge and here the influence of Romanticism is not far to seek. Seen in this light, war becomes a magnificent drama, and even when Delacroix shows us the tragic events of his Massacre at Chios there is a mood of lingering heroism, even in the stricken victims themselves, that keeps the inhumanity of the event at a safe distance. All in all, nineteenth century painting tends to muffle the horrors of war, or perhaps one should say to infuse war with a kind of poetry – sometimes of the highest quality, of course – which instinctively searches out the dramatic and the heroic rather than the vicious, the atrocious and the inhuman. Perhaps a fitting symbol of all this might be Turner’s well-known rendering of the Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth. The Temeraire had been in the thick of fighting at Trafalgar but there are no echoes here of the screeches of wounded and dying sailors, just the almost Wagnerian grandeur of a gleaming, Romantic seascape.

This then is the world of Goya’s eighteenth and nineteenth century contemporaries. The early Goya, as I’ve said, belongs very much to the eighteenth century mood I described earlier – the world of fetes galantes and courtly amusements, and if he had died in his mid-forties – that is in the early 1790’s – art history would almost certainly record him as a painter in the baroque/rococo style and, taken all in all, a relatively minor one when seen in an international context and compared with figures such as Watteau, Fragonard or Tiepolo.

However, Goya did not die in his mid-forties; he died in 1828 when he was over eighty years old. And at the age of forty-four he fell victim to a grave illness that came close to killing him, and left him stone deaf for the rest of his life. For Goya, this experience seems to have been a descent into a solitary Hell – not in the religious sense because he seems to have been indifferent to God, but in the sense of a prolonged, solitary torment. He emerged from the experience a different person. Outwardly, very had little had changed. He resumed the post he had worked hard to acquire as Painter to the Spanish Court, and went on to produce numerous portraits of the Spanish royal family and various aristocratic patrons, many of which figure among his finest works. But inwardly he was a man who had begun to see with different eyes, and who had discovered a world whose existence other artists of the period had never suspected. It’s not too much to say that another Goya was born – a Goya far removed from the world of courtly amusements – so far removed in fact that most of the work of this ‘subterranean’ Goya, if I may so describe him, remained unknown during his lifetime except to a few close friends. And prominent among the themes that preoccupied this new, subterranean Goya was the cruelty and horror of war.

Though not immediately. The first major work of this new Goya was a series of etchings published in 1797 which he entitled the Caprichos. Here we suddenly enter a world that seems the direct antithesis of everything that centuries of post-Renaissance art had aspired to. In subject matter as in style, it is a kind of anti-world of what the eighteenth century was by then calling “fine art” – les beaux-arts. For this Goya, notions of beauty, refinement, taste, grace, heroism, and nobility vanish entirely, to be replaced a world that seems like an evil dream – a dark, leering world of hypocrisy, deceit, gluttony, prostitution, rape, witches, and half-human monsters. The world of Watteau, Fragonard, and Tiepolo seem to be in tune with the spirit of the times: they reaffirm the notions of sophistication and cultivated taste to which the Age of Reason was so strongly attached. Styles altered somewhat with the slightly later figure of Jacques-Louis David: the elegant and ornate baroque gave way to a more sober, neo-classical register, but even David continues to affirm a hierarchy of values, an ideal of man – which of course helps explain why the revolutionaries held him in such high esteem. But there is no ideal of ‘man’ in the subterranean Goya. Unlike his contemporaries, he seems to be in serious conflict with his times, as if pointing to a hidden fissure in the civilized surface of the Enlightenment exposing a dark underworld beneath – a world in which all the characters seem to be proxies for some relentless demon who rules over a world in which the slightest gleam of hope has been extinguished.

The Caprichos were initially put on sale, although Goya withdrew them soon afterwards. His second series of etchings, completed between 1810 and 1820, was never advertised for sale. This was the Disasters of War. Here, there is no longer any need for proxies for, as Andre Malraux comments, ‘Goya’s demons have now found their true form, the horrific’[2] and the Disasters ‘shout what the  earlier etchings had whispered’. Or as another writer puts the point: ‘The real world having caught up with [Goya’s] imagination, mining its depths becomes superfluous. Why bother summoning up devils when men’s conduct is already diabolical?’

The war in question was the struggle of the Spanish people to expel the French invader in the early years of the nineteenth century. The conflict was savage, protracted, and punctuated by atrocities by both sides – one of the first examples of the kind of guerrilla war we have come to know so well, that sweeps up civilian populations of men, women and children. Some critics see the Disasters as kind of cri de coeur of Goya the Spanish patriot against the cruelties of the French occupier but while there is no doubt an element of this, Goya’s depiction of war goes much deeper than a simple political melodrama of good versus bad. The black irony of many of his captions is one sign of this, but there are others as well. The locations, for example, always seem rather ill-defined: they might well be Spain but they seem strangely divorced from any specific geography. The uniforms of the soldiers are only sketchily done as if nationality were only secondary. And the perpetrators are not always the French soldiery; they are often Spanish peasants as well. In the end, the evil is war itself – or perhaps something deeper: the lurking inhuman in man that many Enlightenment thinkers had tried very hard not to see.

Goya’s aim is not, however, simply to depict something ugly and menacing. “A great artist,” André Malraux reminds us, “does not depict horror for the sake of horror any more than he depicts battles for the sake of battles, or a still life for the sake of still life”. Indeed, if it had simply been horror for the sake of it, the Disasters would be easily outdone by photographs of horrific war injuries or even some of the monsters of Hollywood science fiction. Goya’s art involves a genuine creative act – the development of a true artistic style in the sense the word style assumes when we think of any great painter, novelist or composer. What then is the nature of that style? Some commentators, describe Goya as a realist but that judgement strikes me as too hasty. The idea of realism in art is confused at the best of times: it suggests a kind of neutral style that somehow transcribes reality “just as it is” with no artistic interference. But the notion of reality “just as it is” is obviously question-begging and there, is any case, no such thing as a neutral style – a form of representation that does not “render” or “interpret” in some way. Even a photograph has its share of style – the style of photographs. Styles we call “realistic” can only be realistic inflections of existing styles – as Renaissance art was of the Byzantine style, for example. So, is Goya a realist in this sense? Does he simply modify the baroque and rococo painting of his times to achieve greater naturalism? Is he just a kind of Watteau or Fragonard or Tiepolo made more photographic? Or a Jean-Antoine David somehow brought closer to the world of everyday appearances

The diagnosis is obviously inadequate. Far from mere photographic realism, there is a kind of poetry in Goya just as there had been in all post-Renaissance art – whose prime objective had never been realism despite what art historians often say. But the poetry of painting from Botticelli onwards through painters such as Raphael, Titian, Watteau and David, had been in pursuit of what the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney had called a “golden world” in contrast with Nature’s merely “brazen world” - a golden world which, even in its tragic moods, as in Titian’s Entombment conveyed a sense of nobility. The Disasters of War, by contrast, are a kind of anti-poetry in search of an “underworld” – a dark, sinister, unforgiving realm in which human suffering has no purpose and in which notions of nobility and human dignity – including those espoused by the Enlightenment writers of the times – are simply a hypocritical sham. And war, with its cortege of atrocities, is the unadulterated essence of this underworld. It is the context, as Malraux says, in which Goya’s demons find their true form.

Not all writers agree with this view, I should say. Some see a message of hope in the Disasters, one critic arguing for example that Goya is championing the heroic struggle of ‘the people in action, the common people, workers and peasants” and thus “testifying to “a profound optimism, faith in reason, and heroic affirmation of human dignity and freedom”. This is not a view I share. The Goya I see is not unlike Ivan Karamazov who finds nothing to persuade him that the endless tale of human suffering can possibly have an underlying, redeeming purpose. Whatever Goya’s political views about the struggle against the French may have been – and initially at least he seems to have welcomed their presence in Spain – the Disasters, to my mind are a long way from a political or moral pamphlet about good versus evil. If Hamlet believed that that ‘the time is out of joint’, Goya’s preoccupation is a universe – a scheme of things – out of joint. Aldous Huxley captures the atmosphere of the Disasters admirably when he writes:

There are those shadowy archways … more sinister than those even of Piranesi’s Prisons, where women are violated, captives squat in hopeless stupor, corpses lie rotting, emaciated children starve to death.

and he goes on:

Of still more frequent occurrence in the series are the crests of those naked hillocks on which lie the dead, like so much garbage … Often the hillock sprouts a single tree, always low, sometimes maimed by gun-fire. Upon its branches are impaled, like the beetles and caterpillars in a butcher bird’s larder, whole naked torsos sometimes decapitated, sometimes without arms…[3]

War in the Disasters is, in short, something quite different from a struggle between good and evil. It is a universe in which there is only evil, a universe, as Malraux comments, from which “God has departed but in which Satan has remained”.[4]

Theodore Adorno made the oft-quoted comment that ‘to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Whether or not that is so, it’s hard not to feel that the sinister poetry of Goya’s etchings, well before Auschwitz, has disturbing affinities with the single-minded pursuit of humiliation, atrocity and murder we associate with the extermination camps. And although created at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Disasters of War are disconcertingly suggestive of war as it has been experienced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – war with its wretched litany of atrocities and mass murders.

Goya’s famous work The Third of May, 1808, which is like a scene from the Disasters in paint, is uncannily suggestive of this modern satanic world of anonymous mass death. Some critics suggest that the upwardly extended arms of the central figure remind us of a crucifixion but, if so, it is a crucifixion very different from those that post-Renaissance European artists were accustomed to depict. There are no mourners here, only a terrified crowd apparently waiting their turn to be shot; there is no dramatic Titianesque sky telling of the universal significance of the event, only an inky blackness that seems to close over the sinister scene like a lid; there are no witnesses, only a faceless row of soldiers who seem like an anonymous killing machine, with a lifeless ghostly building in the background; and the central figure’s gesture of defiance – if that’s what it is – seems merely to be mocked by the prone figure in the foreground whose arms are extended in a just the same way – but in death. In short if this is a crucifixion, it is one that seems to portend despair rather than hope. And this work, we tell ourselves with amazement, was painted in the immediate afterglow of the Enlightenment when so many thinkers and writers were investing so many hopes in mankind’s future.

André Malraux describes Goya as ‘our greatest poet of blood’ and ‘the greatest interpreter of anguish the West has ever known’[5] Perhaps the most telling, if most enigmatic, image of this anguish occurs towards the end of the Disasters in Plate 69 which shows a skeletal figure – a casualty of war perhaps? – scrawling “Nada” – "nothing” – on a scrap of paper, as shadowy faces loom nightmarishly out of the darkness. If the 3rd May 1808 is a crucifixion, perhaps this is the resurrection scene – or anti-resurrection scene – that goes with it?

Whatever we may think about that question, one thing at least is beyond doubt:  as a testimony to the horrors of warfare, Goya’s Disasters of War remains without peer in the history of Western art.

 References

Huxley, Aldous. "Foreword." In The Complete Etchings of Goya. New York: Crown Publishers, 1943.

Malraux, André. Le Triangle noir. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.

Malraux, André. Saturne: Le Destin, l'art et Goya. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Goya, A L’Ombre des Lumières. Paris: Flammarion, 2011.