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Blood and Ink:
DePaul University Museum
Goya's print series The Disasters of War is a study of descent into societal chaos, of the changes in war which first pitted trained soldiers against civilians, and of one of the first instances of an artist as eyewitness in recording violent brutalities, rather than the heroic acts and noble portraits which had until then been the currency of war in art. Blood and Ink: Disasters of War from Goya to the Chapman Brothers presents over fifty of the portfolio of eighty-six secret etchings in which Goya recorded the warfare, famine, and corruption of church and state surrounding the Peninsular War of 1808-14. Eleven prints by contemporary British artists the Chapman Brothers are also included. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), First Court Painter to the Spanish nobility, was sixty-two when the war broke out in 1808. He had long been conversant with the dark and fantastical, hints of which appear in earlier work and which only became more prevalent after an illness in 1792 that left him deaf and withdrawn. These were the years in which he produced his print series Caprichos, published in 1799, a commingling of social satire and bizarre imaginary fantasy. And yet, even for someone as familiar with demons and terrors as Goya, the violent acts he both witnessed and heard of in the Peninsular War represented a new level of bestiality brought to life in human form. The incidents he recorded in The Disasters of War were the result of a new kind of warfare, one in which responsibilities were thrown to the wind. Warfare had for centuries been the preserve of the powerful. The moneyed elite were the sole possessors of the resources required to muster armies, to sponsor men, arms, horses. Nobles clashed to see who would take the day; but with the power to make war came also degree of responsibility in preserving the civic and social fabric around them. By the nineteenth century, however, the French nobility had divorced responsibility from privilege. In the Peninsular War (1808-14) provoked by Napoleon Bonaparte's attempts to conquer Spain, the French soldiers were both brutal and fearful. Seeking to subdue the populace through preemptive acts of violence, they inflamed the situation into a horror on both sides. French soldiers made savage example of peasants and city folk through maiming and execution. The fierce retaliation of the commoners was the first guerrilla warfare, guerrilla or 'little war' a reference to the many small raids, attacks and assaults which replaced large-scale military action. In one stroke, eighteen centuries of social accords and societal building were wiped away. What was opened was a Pandora's box of brutality and cruelty on a civilian population as the conflict degenerated into vicious individual acts, often wrought upon the innocent and unsuspecting. The prints of The Disasters of War focus on these incidents of individual, anonymous atrocity. Goya's eyewitness record was a first in itself. Never before had an artist focused so extensively on the small, the 'everyday' atrocities that riddled both city and countryside. Uncouth soldiers wrestle to rape unwilling women. Gun-barrels train with point-blank accuracy on their victims. Trained soldiers shoot frantic, pleading middle-class families, killing women and children along with the men. Execution-style killings leave the victims stripped, maimed, dismembered, impaled on and hung from trees. Repeatedly, Goya pictured the helpless before the killers, often faceless, often no more than a stack of gun-barrels thrusting in from one side of the image. Bodies are left piled to rot, or stripped for their clothes and goods; 'charity' is a corpse thrown into a mass grave. Each side commits atrocious cruelties upon the other. Goya worked on the prints of The Disasters of War between 1810-1820. The full series follows three courses: the brutish acts of the soldiers; the hollow-cheeked survivors and starvation-deaths of wartime famine in Madrid; and a final section of political commentary criticizing both church and state in the postwar years, as in the fantastical satire Las Resultas [The Consequences] (etching, burnished aquatint, and drypoint: ca. 1820). Bitterly pessimistic as he was, the truth Goya ensnared in these drawings was not published in his lifetime. It could not be: Goya was also a successful royal portraitist, pet painter of the Spanish nobility, and intimately embedded in the life of the court. His prints and their silent cries of blame and protest were kept private, and went into the drawer unseen by any save himself and a trusted confidant or two. It was not until thirty-five years after Goya's death that the Royal Academy of Madrid received into its collections the entire series of plates, published the series in 1863 under the title The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra). Goya, perceptive social critic that he was, surely sensed the dark sea-change that could never be rolled back and never has been. Consider this description: "Human beings, young and old, mutilated. Rebels chopping off arms and legs, gouging out eyes, chopping at ears. Girls and women enslaved and sexually violated... The very worst that human beings are capable of doing to one another." The words could easily be commentary on the subject matter of Goya's most horrific prints. But the speaker is not Goya, nor even one of his contemporaries: the reference is not from the nineteenth century, nor even the twentieth. The words were spoken in The Hague by Prosecutor Stephen Rapp on June 4, 2007. They are the opening comments of the trial of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. Goya's prints are timeless. That they are so is to our own regret. Man has not changed, nor have his capacities for atrocity diminished. The eleven prints by the Chapman Brothers (Jake and Dinos Chapman, b. 1966 and 1962 respectively) illustrate the paltriness of vision in our own age, in which artists seek to leech upon the mastery of prior centuries and irony robs images of depth. Also entitled The Disasters of War, the Chapmans' prints, done in 1999, were "inspired" by Goya's work, which apparently includes lifting images directly from the Goya prints and giving them a postmodern twist. In one, a nightmarish Goya scene is seen from behind as being a wooden cutout propped up with sticks. In another, a toddler with a penis for a nose sports a Goya t-shirt. That the prints were executed over a matter of weeks rather than years, offered as a clever contrast to Goya's decade of labor, seems little to boast of. Where Goya recoiled with sincere horror in the face of brutality, the Chapmans simply play with it. Against a darkening sky in one of Goya's prints, a victim stands bound. The gun-barrels face him point-blank, ready to fire. He is a hostage of any age, any era; he is humanity held hostage by its own caprice for cruelty in the chaos of warfare and struggles for power. Perhaps Goya sensed that for such an illness, as he titled the print, There Is No Remedy. Blood and Ink: Disasters of War from Goya to the Chapman Brothers is at the DePaul University Museum through June 15, 2007. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Prosecutor Stephen Rapp is quoted from the Time Magazine online article, "Liberia's Tyrant a No-Show at His Trial", June 4, 2007 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1628089,00.html). |
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