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Lot Essay
The eighty prints of Los Desastres de la Guerra are perhaps the most uncompromising artistic record of war ever made, rivalled perhaps only by Otto Dix's series Krieg of 1924. Created over a period of ten years, Goya's work on this series was prompted by General José de Palafox's request to visit the town of Saragossa in order to witness and immortalise the defence of the city and struggle and heroism of its citizens. The etchings are the result of Goya's ensuing journey through the ravaged landscape of his native country at the start of Napoleon's Iberian campaign and the brutalities he saw along the way, of his experience of the famine in Madrid that followed war, and of the deeply repressive and reactionary Spanish regime after 1814.
Unlike official war artists, Goya was not interested in grand battle scenes. Instead he focussed on almost intimate, close-up scenes of people fighting, fleeing, killing, and dying. They show acts of bravery - usually on the part of women, of mechanical slaughter - on the part of the French army, and acts of grotesque cruelty - committed on both sides. While Goya depicts the perpetrators in hard, roughly etched lines, de-personalised by their uniforms, the naked bodies of the dead and mutilated, are described with great tenderness with the finest lines and stipples, their poses often reminiscent of famous works of classical sculpture. It is in the depiction of the bodies of the dead that Goya expresses his compassion and humanity, often in stark contrast to his laconic titles.
The tyranny of King Ferdinand VII's rule following the war meant that the series remained unpublished in Goya's lifetime.
Like all great art, however, Goya's prints transcend the specific place and time in which they were created, and his terrible, unflinching depiction of the savagery of war continues to resonate profoundly in the modern era.
Unlike official war artists, Goya was not interested in grand battle scenes. Instead he focussed on almost intimate, close-up scenes of people fighting, fleeing, killing, and dying. They show acts of bravery - usually on the part of women, of mechanical slaughter - on the part of the French army, and acts of grotesque cruelty - committed on both sides. While Goya depicts the perpetrators in hard, roughly etched lines, de-personalised by their uniforms, the naked bodies of the dead and mutilated, are described with great tenderness with the finest lines and stipples, their poses often reminiscent of famous works of classical sculpture. It is in the depiction of the bodies of the dead that Goya expresses his compassion and humanity, often in stark contrast to his laconic titles.
The tyranny of King Ferdinand VII's rule following the war meant that the series remained unpublished in Goya's lifetime.
Like all great art, however, Goya's prints transcend the specific place and time in which they were created, and his terrible, unflinching depiction of the savagery of war continues to resonate profoundly in the modern era.