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Exhibition "I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker"

It’s all about representation, the question is: what’s being represented? I was sitting in the sculpture garden at the Norton Simon Museum on a bench behind a bush on a 90 degree afternoon. It was full sun and I managed to find a spot in the shade just past Air, a sculpture of a nude woman by Aristide Maillol from 1938. A Sitting Cheetah was perched just behind me to the right, looking over my head across the lillies on the pond. I could tell it was deep in thought, “...just like Monet’s Giverny”, it whispered to itself. As I quickly realized that the cheetah was the object of my projection, a deepening sense of self consciousness flickered through the brain and body of my backlit silhouette. It usually comes from the most unlikely of places, cartoons mostly, birds and good artwork, (the actual invention of form type of art, not the production of content type of art from the creator class). That Sam Francis painting I sat with earlier in the day. I know it looks like clouds, but what it really depicts is the atmosphere of consciousness. You just have to sit with it for a while, like around an hour then you’ll be saturated by the rain of scribbles in liquid.

Sitting Cheetah, Gwynn Murrill, Norton Simon Museum

My eyes scanned the layers of garden in my field of view: a Naked Coral Tree, the Erythrina crista-galli, another Maillol sculpture, River. The legs of the reclining sculpture, her buttcheeks and thighs and the leaves of the Coral Tree broke the continuity of the image, green repeating brush strokes on the surface of a sunblasted photograph. The plunging sightline across the pond was thus interrupted, the image flattened. With the right framing, It had the structure of a Matisse painting, really, like the oil sketch of Le bonheur de vivre from 1905. My eyes swivel and meander through the image, ignoring all the npc’s. The reclining sculpture murmured in my direction, “All they do is talk about themselves anyway”. The photographs are the most compelling when there’s an animal in them or an unusual strike of sunlight that creates a granular ambience of atmosphere.

Francisco de Goya, Fool’s Folly (Disparate de tontos), c. 1815-1823, printed posthumously before 1877, Etching and aquatint; Norton Simon Museum

I needed the openness of the garden as I just spent time with the Goya show. I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker. However exhausting it was to look at several hundred small prints, Goya is undeniably a pure legend.  His wit and criticism of power and those who abuse it are pointed and decisive. And he’s very, very weird.  His depictions of bullfighting in La Tauromaquia (1815–16) are harrowing and I found myself scanning them hoping to find a gored matador. What a total asshole. I assume the curator wrote, “... he (Goya) pays homage to the display of mortal danger posed to the bull, the matador and even the spectators themselves. In 33 crisply defined, highly orchestrated scenes, Goya communicates the grace, ferocity and death inherent in this power struggle between animal and man.” I imagine the words as a voiceover in a documentary, Goya hunched over his press looking deeply at his etching. His work obviously deserves the attention and scholarship it gets, but the sanitized, institutional analysis, it’s neutral and acts as a passive didactic, simultaneously saying everything and nothing. I can’t help but think that Goya was really compelled by the parallel between the treatment of the bull and the manipulation of the lower class. You know, the throngs of people who’ve had their bulls-balls in a vice for generations and centuries. Goya, just like most people, wanted to see that son of a bitch matador get dead-dropped with a horn right up his asshole. The ones that didn't, drank wine with the matador later in the evening after he sent a shiver of metal into the bulls heart. In Tantalus (Tantalo), one of the matador’s close friends is grief stricken at the sight of his beautiful wife. She lays over his lap, shapely breasts exposed. At first glance you might think she’s dead as hell, but in reality, she’s in a state of disambiguated boredom, near comatose. The old man can’t keep up with her incinerating passion and desire. She’s locked in that typical upper-class girl, thirst-trap coma, waiting for her bull to arrive. The story is as old as the hills. “Calgon, take me away”, she says.

Francisco de Goya, Tantalus (Tantalo), 1799, Etching and aquatint; Norton Simon Museum

In the sculpture garden, I caught myself thinking that it was so different outside in open space. The scale contrast between Goya’s tiny theatrical arrangements surely differed from the true to life scale of the garden, though the thought stopped short as I realized the garden itself is a representation, too. It’s an artificial reconfiguration of parts, a theater in itself and in this case, a type of Utopia. “Just like Monet’s Giverny” the sitting Cheetah whispered again. I was startled. The excitement washed over me and my heart palpitated, but not from that insight alone. It was perfectly timed with the near constant ticking reminder that I give my landlords 90% of my savings every passing month. The sun bleaches the photograph into everything and nothing as a shiver of metal pierces the heart.

Francisco de Goya, Blow (Sopla), 1799, Etching and aquatint; Norton Simon Museum

Francisco de Goya, A Way of Flying (Modo de volar), 1815-16, Etching and aquatint; Norton Simon Museum

APRIL 19, 2024 – AUGUST 5, 2024

I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker presents the Spanish artist’s four major print series in their entirety: Caprichos (1799), Desastres de la Guerra (c. 1810–15), La Tauromaquia (1815–16) and Los Disparates (c. 1815–23). Select impressions from trial and working proofs, as well as hand-colored and later editions, offer insights into the artist’s creative process and the full range of his expressive capacity in a variety of print techniques. This is the first comprehensive installation of Goya’s iconic suites on the West Coast, and it is drawn exclusively from the renowned collection of this material in the Norton Simon Museum.

For more information please visit: https://www.nortonsimon.org/
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