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Goya exhibit portrays best, worst of human nature

Susan Saccoccia

A recipient of NEA Arts Journalism fellowships in dance, theater and music, Susan reviews visual and performing arts in the U.S. and overseas.

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Goya exhibit portrays best, worst of human nature
“One Can’t Look (No se puede mirar),” Disasters of War 26 (about 1811-12). Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828). Etching, direct etching and drypoint (working proof). 1951 Purchase Fund. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

“Witches’ Sabbath” (1797-98). Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828). Oil on canvas. Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, España. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

The magnificent exhibition of works by Francesco Goya (1746-1828) at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston through January 19 draws the viewer into the artist’s world — which is not so different from ours.

War, famine and religious fundamentalism wracked Spain. Spawned by the country’s powerful church-court alliance, the Inquisition beheaded outsiders marked as infidels, including Jews and Muslims.

A prolific artist during this turbulent time, Goya enjoyed a long and prosperous career. He then decamped to a community of liberal-leaning Spanish expatriates in Bordeaux, where, until his death at age 82, he continued to observe and render the follies and trials of daily life.

Although Goya was a consummate insider — he was Spain’s court portrait painter of choice during four regimes — he was an unflinching witness to the suffering of those who were victims of the upheavals and injustices of his day.

While winning prestigious court and church commissions, Goya began to render life beyond the realm of his era’s One Percent. In 1799, Goya published 80 prints he entitled “Caprichos” (whims) — satirical drawings and fierce caricatures of power figures that he accompanied with ironic captions.

Venting passionate moral indignation, Goya’s pioneering prints paved the way for the caricatures of another master, Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), as well as the penny broadsheets of Mexican satirists such as José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), whose wily, grinning skeletons skewered high-society dandies and corrupt politicians.

Organized by MFA curators Stephanie Loeb Stepanek and Frederick Ilchman, the exhibition, “Goya: Order and Disorder,” presents 23 “Caprichos” as well as excerpts from Goya’s other print cycles. From dark jokes to grim narratives, some were so controversial that they were published only after his death.

The largest American retrospective of Goya in 25 years, the MFA’s absorbing exhibition shows 170 oil paintings, prints and drawings — many from museums and private collections in the U.S. and Europe, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Also on view are 60 of the MFA’s more than 1,300 works on paper by Goya.

Exploring Goya’s powers of observation and invention across time and media, the show and its fine catalog present his works not in chronological order, but instead, by theme.

In the first of eight galleries, self-portraits show Goya as a savvy self-promoter and a penetrating observer with an astute sense of theater. His oil painting, “Family of the Infante Don Luis” (1784), is a lively spectacle of 14 people, from children and housemaids to parents, each a distinct character. Goya inserts himself prominently in the frame painting the family. A 1795 self-portrait in oil is a tour de force as a calling card for court patrons, showing a backlit, formally attired Goya at his easel.

In contrast, his Capricho entitled, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” shows a slumbering artist surrounded by bats and owls, suggesting irrational forces slipping out of the cracks of daily life.

The show’s superb wall text includes an introduction by Stepanek, who says that seeing Goya’s prints at the Worcester Art Museum as a teenager changed her life. A decade later, she joined the MFA, with revered Goya expert Eleanor A. Sayre as her mentor.

That’s how it is with Goya. Urgent and intimate, his works are not only encounters with art, but also with life.

“Seated Giant” (by 1818). Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828). Burnished aquatint (first state). Katherine E. Bullard Fund in memory of Francis Bullard. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Works in the Life Studies gallery show Goya’s keenly observed views of human nature from childhood to old age. A wizened elder adorns herself like an ingénue. Three tottering geezers join young women in a fandango. A boy displays his menagerie of six caged birds, three cats, and a magpie on a string. Next to a drawing of a pretty mother who seems unaware of the infant in her lap, another shows a bearded woman caressing her baby. In Goya’s tender drawing, she is no freak but instead, the more loving mother.

Paintings in the Play and Prey section show a variety of leisure pursuits, including a subject that Goya renders with unalloyed pleasure and beauty: hunting. These masterpieces include a scene of two men culling a wild bull and portrayals of slain woodcocks and hares.

The next gallery presents works related to the theme of balance — both in human interactions as well as tests of physical equilibrium. A matador in midair pole-vaults over a charging bull. Skaters totter as they adopt this new pastime. A soldier attempts to rape a struggling girl. Behind him, an old woman wielding a knife is about to restore the balance of power.

In the splendid portrait gallery, each subject is a palpable individual. From large oils to miniatures and drawings, Goya’s men and women flicker with personality and character. The handsome Duke of Alba, standing by his piano with a Haydn score in hand, seems to beckon the viewer. Goya’s portrait of actress Antonia Zárate makes her beauty seem touchable, from the delicate shadow of her lace mantilla to her tender lips and curly black hair.

In church frescos and paintings, Goya often depicted miracles and other imagined scenes of piety. But, anticipating the Surrealists a century later, his taste for making the unseen visible extended to other subjects, such as grotesque apparitions. Images in the gallery entitled Other Worlds, Other States show gatherings of witches, depraved clergymen with apish features, and a lone heroic figure — a saintly hermit.

A nook in this gallery explores how Goya embraced and advanced printmaking techniques. Examples include a rare volume of proofs from his album “Disasters of War” (1810–14). In a searing indictment of war, Goya shows scenes of mutual slaughter as Spanish insurgents battled Napoleon’s invading French troops during the Peninsular War from 1808 to 1814.

While often inventive in his subjects, Goya also documented real people and events. Images in the next gallery show victims of this war as well as the Inquisition. Among them is the physician Diego Máteo Zapata, shown slain but still noble with the caption, “Zapata, Your Glory Will Be Eternal.” Celebrating an offbeat hero are two paintings that resemble an action-adventure cartoon strip. In the first, a friar calmly wrests a rifle from a notorious thief. In the next painting, he shoots him.

The concluding gallery singles out redemptive images in Goya’s chronicles of chaos. His softly textured print “Seated Giant” (by 1818) shows a figure of brute power at a standstill — as if worn by the past and wary of the future. The sublime painting, “Last Communion of Saint Joseph of Calasanz” (1819), renders the humanity of the frail but luminous saint. And in “Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta” (1820), Goya, his own suffering plain to see, places himself next to the doctor who heals him in a scene of transcendent compassion. Like Shakespeare, Goya takes in the best and worst of human nature.