Blanton Museum

During our visit to the Blanton Museum on Thursday we analyzed Francisco de Goya’s series of prints including La tauromaquia (1815-1816), Los desastres de la guerra (1810-1820), Los disparates (1815-1823) and other paintings selected to be featured in the exhibit. The first room was headed by a self portrait of Goya in Traje de luces introducing the La tauromaquia series. I was taken aback when I walked into the first exhibit room and saw the amount of detail in each of Goya’s pieces. We can only imagine the amount of time these took and how tediously each one had to be drawn to fulfill the copious amounts of detail these etching and aquatints required. In 1815 when Goya was 69, he created a series called La tauromaquia which consisted of 33 prints. Goya contained a burning passion for bulls and represented it by dedicating these etchings to the art of bullfighting and by
displaying it as an entertainment and art form. Plate 20, “The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in (the Ring) at Madrid,” was the first plate that caught my attention. It depicted a bullfighter spinning perpendicular atop a staff while the bull was charging the staff at ground level. Goya’s approach to this sketch was to a depict bullfighting as an art and to make the fight as lively as possible. When I saw this etching I could almost hear the classical Spanish music playing and feel the whoosh of the fighter spinning atop his staff like a ballerina’s pirouette. The calmness of the fighter’s expression honored the fearlessness of fighters in this ferocious sport. It is obvious how Goya wanted to display bullfighting and bullfighters as the national pride of Spain. The next room’s arrangement contained less honorable paintings and a greater extent of absolutely haunting pieces somewhat resembling the experience that you described during the economic collapse of Russia in the early 1990’s. Los Desastres de la guerra was a series that Goya started in 1810 when he was 64.
This series depicted the atrocities of The Spanish War of Independence created by the soldiers and citizens of war torn famished countries. From the moment you walk into the sangre red “Famine and War” room, you are stunned by the goriness you see in all 82 prints. Plate 33, “Qué hai que hacer mas,” contains three soldiers stretching a man’s legs open while holding him upside down on his head and another soldier slicing him in half down the groin. Just reading that sentence would make anyone nauseous but viewing all of these pieces had a profound affect on me and painted a very lifelike reality of this appalling time period on the Spanish peninsula. Goya wanted his viewers to experience the reality of social breakdown that he encountered everyday in Madrid. His goal with this series was to reveal the amount of human cost expensed with the trauma and indecipherability of war. Goya’s view of this war was an obvious animosity because of the unreasonable destruction, misery and loss of life that war brings with
it. Throughout the Goya exhibit at the Blanton museum, I focused on the fact that Goya’s images were “visual poems, strings of broken syllables and disjointed images that paradoxically reveal the deficiency of language itself.” Although it may be cliche to say that each painting contained a story, I believe that through Goya’s thoroughness, this statement is the easiest one to make. Each person in every piece exhibited detailed expressions, the lighting and shadows depicted the overall mood and the theme of every piece was easily interpreted by the viewer.