Old Man Goya: Amazon.de: Julia Blackburn: Englische Bücher

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Julia Blackburn has already established herself as one of the finest writers of non-fiction, but with Old Man Goya she takes her ability to re-create the past to a new level in her haunting evocation of the final years of the great Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya. Partly inspired by the painful loss her own mother (who was also a painter), Blackburn's desire to write about Goya developed when she learnt that in 1792, at the age of 47, the painter went permanently deaf; "I wanted to know what sort of world this deaf man had inhabited and how he had managed to live with the isolation of deafness and how it had changed the way he used his remaining senses". The result is a remarkably perceptive voyage into Goya's mind, which hovers between history and fiction, as Blackburn moves between the death of her own mother, visits to Goya's old haunts in Spain and France, and the painter's own remarkable lust for life in the midst of domestic upheavals and the horrors of warfare in early 19th-century Spain.

Old Man Goya moves from Goya's early days as a rich court painter, creating "dozens of designs of light-hearted subjects", to the trauma of deafness, the devastation of the bloody Peninsula War that swept Iberia between 1807 and 1812, the death of his first wife and old age with a mistress half his age. Interspersed amongst the text are 23 beautiful Goya copperplates through which Blackburn "can see Goya, a silent witness who makes no comment, but gives a shape to everything he sees", whose relish for the absurd, the cruel and the carnivalesque remained with him throughout his long life. Blackburn's elegant prose and unerring eye for domestic and artistic detail creates a wonderfully compassionate portrait of Goya, and she happily concedes to being "caught up in the spinning energy of the man as he hurtled relentlessly through the years", a journey that her readers will find well worth pursuing. --Jerry Brotton -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

From Booklist

Blackburn, a writer known for her impressionistic, in-the-frame approach to biography (Napoleon is among her subjects), focuses on the second half of Goya's long and amazingly productive life, beginning with the devastating illness that left him deaf at age 47. Kinetic description is her forte, and Blackburn not only empathetically imagines the sea change caused by Goya's abrupt sensory loss, and convincingly assesses its impact on his work, she also conjures up the artist's mise-en-scene, from the frenetic streets of Madrid to the sanctuary of the studio, the bizarreness of the court of Charles IV, the horrors of famine and war, Goya's long marriage, and, after his wife's death, late-life relationship with a much younger woman. So immersed is Blackburn in Goya's psyche and oeuvre, she channels the drama of his extraordinary, psychologically complex work, especially in her tactile descriptions of his adept printmaking, a concentration that inspired her to reproduce photographs of his etching plates, suitably intimate images for her vital, inventively participatory portrait of a master portraitist and observer of life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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old man goya 20. September 2002

Von maryann kane - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

This is a superficial and self-indulgent approach to both the subject (Goya), his art, Spain and Spanish history. Full of factual errors, it also is full of non-sequiturs, vague statements and strangely unconnected self-reflections. A huge disappointment.

1 von 1 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Goya a go-go 26. April 2007

Von Amanda Ducker - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

If you want dry history and biography, go elsewhere. Blackburn's talent is in immersing herself in a very personal and empathetic way in the world of Goya. I started Blackburn's The Book of Colour years ago, but dropped it quickly - her style annoyed me then but now I see that she hadn't yet found her stride, was bravely experimenting and failing.

More and more, I hear people saying that they are finding their "portal" to history through this innovative post-modern kind of biographical historical melange. Anyone who calls this work self-indulgent misses the point. Anyone who doubts Blackburn's intelligence and skill as a writer in pulling this together is deluded. I am astonished by how vividly she conjured the world that she imagined Goya saw, without relying on turgid passages of description. Love the impressionistic style. Feel that the reviewer who said she's a poor John Berger imitation was being a bit harsh. Let her have her idiosyncratic and at times brilliant style. There's enough potted history about without Blackburn adding to the canon.

5 von 7 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

A sensitive insightful work on the Artist Goya. 25. November 2002

Von Joan Fabian - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Though this work is not written by an art historian it is written with a fond appreciation for art and the artist. I was skeptical and didn't expect to find it so interesting. After reading many dry and boring works on artists, where so called facts are really just history (lies put to written account)-this work is what understanding art is all about. Her visits to the places Goya lived in shed light to his possible personality as one who experiences his work may do also. She uses her experience as a human being with a dying mother who is also an artist to contrast with discovering Goya through her travels. Without the clutter of dates and art historian jargon, we get to experience a human being and the connection between art and life. Goya appears as a human being, with hopes, desires and short-comings and not as some machine who produced art exactly when and where. I enjoyed her attempt at understanding the deaf and what it is really life to live in silence like Goya did. I think this book will help people appreciate Goya's work and the people he loved as well.

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Old Man Goya [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

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