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 SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Kurzbeschreibung
New illustrated appraisal of the Spanish painter and graphic artist. 220 illus, 185 in colour.