Critics aren’t supposed to admit they are – in shrink parlance – “conflicted”. But with many great artists, we can’t definitively say that their grandeur is not grossness, their profundity superficiality. The uncertainty principle was formulated brilliantly in 1759, when Sir Joshua Reynolds said of Michelangelo: “I have seen figures by him of which it was very difficult to determine whether they were in the highest degree sublime or extremely ridiculous”; too great an indulgence of imagination produced “incoherent monsters”, Reynolds said, while too much restraint resulted in “lifeless insipidity”.
What would Reynolds have made of his Spanish near-contemporary, Goya, who takes us on an ethical-aesthetic roller coaster ride, both attractive and repulsive? Goya is now routinely considered the first “modern” artist, the first – and last – who dared look evil in the eye, then punch it on the nose. Thus Robert Hughes: “His work asserted that men and women should be free from tyranny and superstition; that torture, rape, despoliation and massacre … were intolerable.” Really? Or did he not – artistically, at any rate – rather enjoy it? Was not barbarity, ugliness and superstition the making of Goya? Was he not like William Blake’s Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost (“of the Devil’s party without knowing it”), and so a great artist?
An exhibition opening soon at the Courtauld gallery, in London, Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album, should dispel the simplistic, saintly image. Here, in 22 rumbustious late drawings, Goya reinflates a standard theme in European art, dating back to the beginning of the witch-hunts – the demonic energy, and lawless creativity, of old crones. They Rise Merrily, an airborne old lady and monk with tambourines, is the only piece which could conceivably be used in a Saga advertisement. And in the autumn, we can marvel at Goya’s smouldering aristocratic and commoner portraits, and wonder what he’s really saying about his often doll-like sitters. I can’t – and can – wait.
• Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album opens at the Courtauld, London WC2, on 26 February. Goya: The Portraits will open at the National Gallery, London WC2, on 7 October.
