The Dark & Light of Francisco Goya

by Colm Tóibín

New York Review of Books
December 18, 2014

In the summer of 1969, as the violence intensified in Northern Ireland, the poet Seamus Heaney was in Madrid. Like any tourist, he went to the Prado, but not specifically, he later said, “to study examples of art in a time of violence.” He found, nonetheless, that some of Francisco Goya’s work on display “had the force of terrible events…. All that dread got mixed in with the slightly panicked, slightly exhilarated mood of the summer as things came to a head in Derry and Belfast.” He found Goya’s work “overwhelming,” and was fascinated at the idea of an artist confronting political violence “head-on.” In his poem “Summer 1969,” he wrote of his time in the heat of the Spanish city while Belfast burned:

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.
Goya’s “Shootings of the Third of May”
Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms
And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted
And knapsacked military, the efficient
Rake of the fusillade.

Heaney ended the poem with an image of Goya at work:

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828. In the first version, he was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination. In this version, “history charged,” took him by surprise, and deepened his talent. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start. While interested in many subjects, he was ready for violence and chaos, so that even if the war between French and Spanish forces between 1808 and 1814 and the insurrection in Madrid in 1808 had not happened, he would have found some other source and inspiration for the dark and violent images he needed to create. His imagination was ripe for horror.

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Taking a Wrench to Reality

by Julian Bell

New York Review of Books
December 4, 2014

The man who did the most to give Cubism a cohesive identity was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. In early 1907, this progressive-minded twenty-two-year-old used funds from his German banking family to open a little gallery in the rue Vignon, just off the grands boulevards of Paris. He had an eye for the innovatory, and soon canvases by André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck were hanging on his walls. Two years earlier at the Salon d’Automne, the big event in the contemporary art calendar, these painters had been linked to Henri Matisse under the label les Fauves. But any group allegiance was now disintegrating. Matisse, serving on the 1908 Salon jury, rejected the latest work of another associate of les Fauves, Georges Braque, complaining that it was composed of “little cubes.” Kahnweiler promptly offered Braque a solo show.

Braque’s recently acquired friend Pablo Picasso was meanwhile starting to depend on purchases by Kahnweiler. The German was reliable: he made sure his painters had sufficient funds to continue with their artistic researches. Moreover, he was fastidious. By 1911 self-described “Cubists” had popped up all over Paris and were crowding out the Matisse contingent at the Salon, but of these only one, Fernand Léger, was let into the rue Vignon. Juan Gris, a personal protégé of Picasso’s, made it through the door soon after. Kahnweiler discouraged his exhibitors from submitting to the annual Salon, which he regarded as an occasion for contrived controversy. The sheer discretion of his operation gave it unique cachet, and the fortunes of all involved rose.

When war was declared in 1914, the French government impounded the gallery stock of this enemy alien. Stuck in neutral Switzerland, Kahnweiler composed Der Weg zum Kubismus (The Rise of Cubism), a philosophically reasoned advocacy of the work of Picasso, Braque, and Léger, his three “pathfinders of Cubism.” (Gris he favored with a later monograph.) In 1921, a year after it was published, word came down from the Elysée that the stock sequestered during the war must all be sold off. The market became flooded with hundreds of pre-war Cubist canvases, with the result that prices for them suffered a twenty-year slump. A chief beneficiary of this was a young and moneyed British aesthete, Douglas Cooper, who was able to acquire 137 Cubist pieces by the time the next war started.

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