Tag Archives: Francisco de Goya

Windows into the Soul

4 August 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Francisco de Goya, court painter to the late 18th century Spanish royalty, was no great admirer nor groveling sycophant of his patrons. He portrayed them, literally and figuratively as pretentious hypocrites and regal bores. Somehow, he was able to convince the king and queen that his paintings embodied their imagined over-hyped majesty. They did, just not in the way the royal couple envisioned.  Goya sold the fiction ‘the king has no clothes but isn’t he marvelous’ with the aptness of Hans Christian Andersen, and it likely paid handsomely.

Modern portraitists of the rich and famous seem to follow a similar creed. A veiled contempt that comes through in their brushwork.  Faces frozen in contempt for the world beyond the palace, bodies wrapped in pop-art symbolism, palates of unmistakable gauche screeching, all undermining an uplifting narrative of benevolent power and grace. And, like Goya, they persuade their patrons that all is light and beauty, even though the cracks and shadows are front and center.

A portrait is not just posture, paint, and brushwork; it is an appointment with truth. Maybe just one minor truth, but truth none-the-less. The true artist illuminates the soul where he finds it. An artist’s symbolic performance can flourish in irrelevance of style, but the truth must come out.

Kehinde Wiley’s 2018 portrait of Barack Obama is a curious specimen. It goes beyond tradition into overt symbolism that lands in a duality of truth. It’s a disruptive panel bordering on cartoonish messaging. Botanical motifs of chrysanthemums and lilies in the background, engulfing Obama seated on a wooden chair with six fingers. A portrait not of a President but a topiary clipped into a pose of nonchalance and a distant soul focused on…nothing. The overall effect is one of mockery. Is Wiley mocking the President or is the President mocking his audience, maybe both. Wiley sold it as an informal symbol of a great man but maybe he was painting what he saw. A man whose legacy, much like the foliage behind him, now blooming with grandeur but fading to irreverence over time.

Compare this to Jonathan Yeo’s two portraits of King Charles III and Camilla. The former awash in crimson ambiguity, with vague lines of demarcation. Its symbolism is gaudy and obtuse: the lone butterfly, the seeping reds, the gaze misplaced: together, a haunting emergence from a bloody mess. A reliance on cryptic visual metaphors over soulful revelation. A painting wishing to express depth, and it does, but as a downward drift into circles of Dante rather than a royal crimson of empire. Yeo does not explain much of his trajectory of the portrait. He seems satisfied to leave the interpretation to others. Camilla says it captures him perfectly. But what it captures is not a dignified, confident king, but one who bartered his soul for the crown which Yeo captured impeccably, consciously or not.

Yeo’s 2014 portrait of Camilla, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, compliments his painting of King Charles: another study of a lost soul. A picture of non-essence. A painting of emotional neglect. Blotches of earth tones for blood and straight lines of iron and fog for character and birthright. In the background vertical lines of changing width suggestive of a perspective view of Camilla sitting in the corner of a prison cell, trapped in a unwanted life, with sub-horizontal lines crossing her clothing like lines of filtered light originating from a broken, tilted structure of casements in disrepair. Windows into a soul without balance or integrity. A blotchy face, pressed lips and the piercing eyes of disgust are the caricature of woman who finds the world a bore and the artist gives wholehearted ascent to her wishes.

Yeo’s portraits of the royal dyad are of tragic symmetry. Charles as an entitled blood-soaked monarch, lost in a mythic realm of post over duty. Camilla is a shadow brought along for form without script, shadow without light.

Each of the three portraits in the triptych, at first blush, are merely lacking in technique or likeness and immensely soulless. With further exposure and examination, the artists have captured their subject’s essence. They are gauche and grotesque, but the painter’s truth is bleeding through. They portray their subjects as an antithesis to their public persona. Wiley’s Obama is lost in symbolic foliage, Yeo’s Charles stands embalmed in a crimson history of unrestrained desire, and Camilla appears accidentally sentenced to royalty by an artist barely able to contain his disdain.

Symbolism, when wielded well, lives in the background, like Botticelli’s Primavera, where flora guides the viewer through renewal without eclipsing the figures themselves. Art that elevates does so through integration, not ornamentation. Symbolism must serve beauty, and beauty must point toward goodness. But if the truth isn’t of beauty, what then?

True portraiture captures the soul and, if need be, is not afraid to offend. It does not flatter blindly, nor does it subtract without cause. It seeks something elemental. It lets the canvas speak, the brush guide, and the palate reverberate with reality. Great portraits are a reckoning of the soul, not decoration of form.

Graphics: President Obama by Kehinde Wiley, 2018. King Charles and Camilla by Jonathan Yeo, 2023 and 2014. All copyrighted. Used for purposes of critique.

Goya: Beauty Unmasked

16 July 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Francisco de Goya, a late 18th to early 19th century Spanish painter of the Romantic school, is a fascinating study in evolving style, a visual descent into deafness, isolation, and existential dread, though more philosophically, his lifelong disillusionment with civilization’s failure to embody the Enlightenment’s promised ideals of reason, justice, and human dignity. His art swung like a pendulum, from crisp detail to loose rendering to the raw emotion of a mind increasingly separated from reason.

As a court painter to the Spanish monarchy, Goya’s portraits became canvases for cynicism, derision, and paradox. He offered scathing critiques hidden beneath formal composition, and the court loved him for it. They mistook his precision for praise, even as he quietly dismantled their poise and splendor.

His colossal canvas Charles IV of Spain and His Family (110 × 132”) does not illustrate majesty or brilliance; it immerses the senses in familial estrangement and tedium. Awkward poses; lifeless gazes; a composition emotionally hollowed, drained of vitality and intent. These are not confident rulers but bored figures waiting for the dinner bell to summon a distraction: ceremonial chatter over fish soup and presentation of chocolates. In the background of the painting, Goya includes himself, brush in hand, an artist caught in the act of witnessing. It was a nod to Velázquez’s Las Meninas; Goya once said he “had only three masters: Nature, Velázquez, and Rembrandt”; but here, reverence turns to scorn. Goya didn’t flatter his subjects; he distorted the real, undermining not his own reverence for form, but theirs. His royal figures do not speak; they stare blankly, confirming that the emperor wears no clothes. He looked beneath the surface in search of beauty and instead found something far less attractive, an insignificant echo of a tired reality.

Goya’s notion of beauty, conventionally understood, remained intact. But in his subjects, he saw hypocrisy, a lie, elegantly draped, concealing the moral disfigurement beneath. This critique finds haunting expression in his etching Nadie se Conoce (“Nobody recognizes himself”), Plate No. 6 of Los Caprichos, where masked carnival patrons drift like phantoms of untruth. On the reverse of the plate, Goya inscribed his chilling reflection: “The world is a mask; the face, the costume, and the voice are all feigned. Everyone wants to appear what they are not, everyone deceives, and no one knows himself.”

Goya painted the existential. His late works: The Disasters of War, The Black Paintings, The Madhouse, Saturn Devouring His Son, reveal more of his suffering psyche than his technical ability. Anthony Cascardi argues in Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique that Goya’s entire oeuvre is a sustained confrontation with Enlightenment ideals. Reason and beauty dissolve under his brush. Societal decay no longer whispers, it screams.

In style, Goya stands at the edge of the Impressionist movement, decades before its arrival. His gestural freedom, emotional brushwork, and psychological texture prefigure the rawness of Manet and even hint at Bacon’s existential grotesque. Paint becomes not just medium but mood, an extension of perception unraveling. Form overrides detail. But Goya moved to a darker rhythm, his brushwork shades where theirs shimmered. Where Monet dances with light, Goya wrestles with darkness. The Impressionists chose beauty over Goya’s emotional appeal, which ultimately served to mock his subjects’ feigned grace.

Unlike Picasso’s theatrical mockery, Goya’s assessment is surgical. He dispenses with pretense and seeks truth, not a truth easily embraced, but one rooted in the soul’s unpleasant, hidden recesses. Picasso once echoed a similar sentiment in a 1923 interview with The Arts: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Art distorts to reveal what reality conceals, truth not always visible, but deeply felt. Superficial beauty without the soul is not art, it is a lie.

In contrast to today’s symbolic excess, where the subject is buried beneath concept and symbols, Goya’s portraits are revealing to the point of brutality. He doesn’t idealize; he removes the layers of deceit. The beast within becomes the subject. His cynicism is constant, his honesty sometimes absurd, but always truthful.

Goya takes a moral stance. His genius lies in the ability to paint the conscious with the unconscious, to render not just what he saw, but what he felt and feared, the form with the spiritual. His style matched his psyche. He painted the perceived rot beneath grandeur, the weariness behind powdered wigs, the absurdity beneath court spectacle.

Goya’s fame was built and balanced on a knife’s edge: he gave the rich what they wanted in form, while seeding beneath it a quiet, damning truth. That duality, beauty as lure, truth as blade, is Goya’s lasting contribution to art.

Graphic: Self-Portrait at 69 Years, by Goya, 1815. Museo del Prado-Madrid.