I, Goya - Softcover

Feghelm, Dagmar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3791330713 ISBN 13: 9783791330716

Publisher: Prestel Pub, 2004

Synopsis

Illustrations, Goya's own words and an informative text create a portrait of this visionary artist who chronicled the Spain of his day with a keen insight and a critical eye.
From his early years as an aspiring painter producing religious frescoes and designing light-hearted tapestry cartoons for the royal court, Goya became an increasingly cynical and mordant critic of the prevailing social mores the older he became. He maintained a precarious balance between his official status as court painter and the subversive content of his works, while at the same time paving the way towards modernism.
"The world is a masquerade. Face, dress and voice, all are false. All wish to appear what they are not. All deceive," reads the caption to one of the etchings in Goya's famous Caprichos cycle that reveals not only the vanity of humankind, but also the arbitrary wielding of power by the monarchy and aristocracy. Yet beauty, too, has its place in Goya's oeuvre, from his Naked Maya, arguably the most famous Spanish woman of all time, to his seductive portraits of the capricious Duchess of Alba, whose fickleness he was to experience at first hand when he became her lover.
This book conveys more than the fascination of Goya the artist. Above all, it portrays an individual whose chequered life in turbulent times still has the power to grasp our imagination.

About this title

About the Author:

Dagmar Feghelm works as a freelance art historian and lectures at Munich University.

From Publishers Weekly:

Born to an impoverished gilder and his noblewoman wife, 18th-century painter Goya (1746-1828) was driven by a fear of poverty throughout his lifetime and spent the majority of his artistic career struggling to balance his courtly ambitions with his desire for artistic independence-a hanging specter Feghelm, a freelance art historian, carefully delineates in this glossy catalogue of the Spaniard's life and works. A multifaceted artist who once claimed Rembrandt, Velazquez and nature were his only masters, Goya began his career as a tapestry cartoonist before honing his skills as a masterful producer of vibrant rococo-style folk scenes and subtly subversive court portraits of the fiercely conservative Spanish monarchs King Carlos III and Carlos IV. Offering solid, if not especially inspired, close readings of Goya's works, Feghelm is at his best when analyzing Goya's output following his nearly fatal illness in 1794. Left deaf by the experience, the liberal artist refused to design any more pocket book-pleasing cartoons and transitioned into the caustic Capricho aquatints and the phantasmagoric "black" paintings of his autumnal years, a shift that Feghelm skillfully describes with acute attention to historical detail. Working through the French Revolution and the Spanish War of Independence, Goya's outlook on life soured in the aftermath of such bloodshed and confusion. And Feghelm is quick to point out the expressionistic Spaniard's influence on later 19th-century painters like Manet (the latter's Execution of Maximilian (1867/8) is a direct citation of the former's The Third of May 1808 (1814)). Also illuminating are the deep captions that accompany the book's many glorious reproductions and the side-by-side biography and political timeline that conclude the book. 170 color illustrations.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Prestel Pub
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 3791330713
• ISBN 13: 9783791330716
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 159
• Editor: Wynne Christopher