An incisive historian of ideas, Siegfried Kracauer, maintained that the past cannot be deceptively understood as a clear mirror, since it not only reflects the features of whoever looks at it, but also points out clues or elusive signs that surpass the effigy and leave act the cadence of time. The individual belongs to his time, but his image distills a kind of vestiges that punctuate a living present. Anthony J. Cascardi’s research, Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique (New York: Zone Books, 2023) ostensibly outlines Goya’s artistic personality, now stripped of the academic rhetoric that describes and qualifies his work. The objective is crystal clear: to insist on the relationships between the vast body of Goya’s artistic work and the chaos of changes caused by the Enlightenment impulse, in the midst of the European Napoleonic dislocation. He reveals to us the life of an honest citizen of his time – the moment of the Enlightenment – ??seen through the light of a restless daytime dreamer.
Goya is the brilliant architect of a powerful intuition of things that he reproduces with original insight, but at the same time a clairvoyant perceiver of what we would call non-visible, who barely hints at the ideal construction of art. Cascardi’s sharp stiletto traces Goya’s versatile sensitive universe, convinced of its radical vitality. Goya’s images advance the features of a projected world, which also exercises an implacable criticism of his time. The caprices, the black paintings and the multifaceted display of graphic work place us before a truthful testimony of the tricks of a sharp gaze that individualizes what has been experienced: the Disasters of War is the most ruthless example. Goya’s convincing art creates a time of fiction that is torn between history – what is known – and what is glimpsed.
I must confess that I had the fortune of listening to qualified interpreters of Goya’s active historiography – Lafuente Ferrari and Julián Gállego, two teachers; Pérez Sánchez, always tight; the Mimbreña narrative of Valeriano Bozal, Glendinning in London and Werner Hoffman in Vienna -, who saw in the Aragonese painter the accurate model of an acute way of making art, an alert sensitivity that is moved by the cruel ambiguities of modernity, which is suspicious of the common and numbing half-truths of the objective story. Goya’s pointer approaches his time without gender prejudices – portrait, landscape, history, fantasy and chimera -, yes, but with a critical discernment that supposes formalist analysis, of narrative will: what happens, but above all how the stories happen What the images tell. This project of criticism proposes four complementary spheres, according to Cascardi. Religion and its antitheses, from secularization to superstition. Society or the sharp analysis of a process of consolidation of a bourgeois, citizen and secular social framework, and the “disappointments” that the process predicts. The history that stumbles upon the short circuits of the enlightened process, such as revolutions and social discontent. The human psyche that provides the vital drama and its derivations, such as the violence and the death drive that justifies the Hispanic bullfight.
Based on this framework, Goya advances an imaginative adventure that unfolds in his understanding the aspirations of the Enlightenment, a world that he lucidly considers invented to a greater extent than natural. Proposal curiously stimulated by the ethical ideals of Kant and Hegel, a postmodern contribution introduced by the North American critic in tune with the equidistant severity that colors the enlightened attitude of the Spanish genius. On May 3, with those blind executions that denounce popular barbarism and describe the socializing project as risky. The closed redoubt of the individual, the life lived, is situated on the margins of the plastic space and becomes the personal laboratory of an alternative sensibility, the cautious intimate gaze of the painter. Cascardi insistently points to the Frankfurt school and turns it into a watchtower for Spanish intellectual reconstruction. The urgent culture of criticism, in short, that must accompany the emancipatory process. Nothing without criticism, Robert Hughes had demanded, inspired by Kant’s aesthetics, but boldly rectified by Adorno in his Dialectic of Enlightenment. Going to Frankfurt to talk about Goya is still a venial postmodern idea.
Goya’s work breaks down the tricks of the Enlightenment that cloud the vision of the artist, always enthusiastic about the liberating idea of ??human progress. The reading of an optimist attentive to the emancipatory system that guides his work: it is the century of revolution. In depth, and in form, the bitter, but not disillusioned, painting of the elderly Goya bets on the invisible, of which we barely glimpse insecure traces that nourish the nocturnal world that watches over his sleep. Goya is the visionary who never despairs because perhaps he expects nothing, in his ultimate detached experience. Terrible challenge. A book to read with a red pencil at the sacred hour of lubrication, when the barking of the dog disturbs us and forces us to keep the light on.
