Goya's Women

By ROBERT HUGHES

Francisco Goya is one of those artists who seem both to transcend their time and to epitomize it. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto (I hold nothing alien from me that has to do with human nature), wrote the Roman poet Terence. This motto was lived out to the fullest degree by certain 19th century geniuses. Charles Dickens, with his insatiable interest in character and narrative, was one. In a more abstract way--music being an abstract art anyway--so was Beethoven, in his creation of equivalents for the human passions. And so, in the domain of the visual, was Goya--and there was no other painter in his time who even came near him in that respect.

Going through "Goya: Images of Women," the exhibition presented at the National Gallery of Art in Washington by the leading American Goya scholar Janis Tomlinson--it is a somewhat truncated version of a large show that was seen at the Prado in Madrid last winter--one realizes what depth and intensity Goya brought to seeing his world. The late 18th and early 19th century in Europe had portraitists who could extract gripping narratives of sympathy and experience from the individual human face and body. Delacroix, Ingres, David--it is a long and glorious list. But the most fascinating of them is surely Goya, which is all the more remarkable because he was so much alone, a man without colleagues or rivals in his culture. (He left Spain only twice--first when he was too young to matter, and then, fleeing from the squalid oppressiveness of Ferdinand VII's Bourbon regime, when he was almost too old to paint.)

Most of the Goyas that we rightly regard as his masterpieces were not seen by the public in the artist's lifetime. The Goya we know today is a rounded, far-reaching, almost encyclopedic painter, truly Shakespearean in his range; but the Goya Spaniards knew was largely a portraitist, and that is one of the most pressing reasons for the present show.

Goya and images of women? We may suppose we know something about that, having seen The Naked Maja, 1797-1800, one of the most famous woman images in art next to the Mona Lisa: the second most famous nude in Spain after Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, and the first with pubic hair. She was not, by the way, the Duchess of Alba, with whom--contrary to legend--Goya almost certainly had no sexual affair. She, like her companion piece The Clothed Maja, 1800-05, was most probably a Malagan cutie named Pepita Tudo, the mistress of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy. There are portraits of Alba in the show, though neither, alas, of the great standing figures, white and black, from the Alba collection in Madrid and the Hispanic Society in New York City. We must be content with The Duchess of Alba and "La Beata," 1795, the enchanting picture of Alba at play, her black fleece of curls cascading down her back--"There is not a hair on her head," wrote a French visitor to Madrid, "that does not excite desire"--tormenting her pious old servant, la Beata, with a red coral charm for repelling the evil eye.

But our familiarity, if we think we have some, is false. There is infinitely more to tell. Women pervade Goya's work. He was fascinated, obsessed with them and recorded all their aspects, actual and mythic, typified and individual. His subjects come from all classes. They appear as demonic witches and country sweethearts, as closely human or icily remote aristocrats, star actresses of theater-crazy Madrid, ordinary bulb-nosed wives, allegorical personifications of history, gap-jawed crones, alluring and cheeky majas, cute and not-so-cute whores, blond angels with diaphanous wings on the walls of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida--a conspectus, you might say, of every she-creature the eye could light on. And then, of course, there was the Queen, Maria Luisa, worn shapeless by 20 pregnancies, with her teeth as bad as George Washington's and her glowing arms, of which she was so irrationally proud that she forbade other women to wear long gloves at court so their arms would be seen to be less beautiful than hers, which perhaps they were.

We don't know who some of the women were, and it is a remarkable fact that although Goya and his wife, Josefa Bayeu, lived together in apparent harmony for decades, there is no known painting of her. But whatever their names, everything about them is observed with delighted accuracy--the way they stand and move, how they gesture, their makeup and coiffure and jewelry, and above all what they wear. Goya was an enraptured connoisseur of clothes and knew exactly what political and social meanings costume in Spain could have.

He could treat his female subjects with measureless respect. One of the finest examples of this in his work, and in this show, is his portrait of the Duchess of Osuna with her husband and family, 1787-88. Related to half the noblest clans in Spain, she was the most cultivated, educated and liberal woman of her age: patron of writers and artists (including, notably, Goya), with her own theater where new plays by the leading dramatists of the day were given, her own chamber orchestra to play Haydn and Boccherini to her guests, and a deep involvement with issues of women's rights and education. She gazes at us with an expression of limitless composure, looking neither down on her viewers nor up at them, serene and in every sense noble: an ilustrada de primera clase, a living epitome of what the woman of the Enlightenment should be.

Goya was connected to the Enlightenment too. Yet a whole side of his imagination was stirred only by the old black Spain, the country of witches, the Inquisition, absolutism and night terrors, and this too shows with sublime force in some of his depictions of women. One of the things that lends such power to Goya's women is simply that he viewed some of them with a degree of fear, as anyone might. He could not, even if he had tried, make them out to be little pink rococo sex dolls, as was so often the custom in France. Witches were female and had dreadful capabilities, and Goya painted and drew a lot of witches.

He also saw what nice, respectable girls can do. This is the message carried by many of the etchings known as the Caprichos, and even by his early decorative tapestry designs of the 1770s and 1780s, before illness and deafness turned him into the stricken, black Goya, haunted by death and disaster, who speaks with such appalled and appalling clarity to our century. The Straw Mannikin, his tapestry design of 1791-92, can be read as a country amusement--four girls tossing a straw-stuffed mannequin of a petimetre, a male dandy dressed in the French fashion, up and down in a blanket. But clearly it is more than that. This doll man flopping bonelessly in the air reflects Goya's sense of the power of women--the civilian version, so to speak, of the dreadful potency of the witches and the toothless hags in the "Black Paintings" and of the evil old celestinas or procuresses who accompany his beautiful hookers on balconies or the pavements of the Paseo del Prado.

That, of course, is part of the magic and the grip of his work: its unrelenting vitality. His figures, men or women, may be mad or bad. They may be full of life, or they may just have been spitted on a French saber. But they are never limp, wooden or uninteresting. Goya's immense appetite for life always keeps rasping through their imagined breathing. That is why one can never get bored in front of them, and why every Spanish painter since has seen him, with a mixture of delight and despair, as the man against whom no comparison can be won.