By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” —Letter of William T. Sherman to James M. Calhoun, E.E. Rawson, and S.C. Wells, September 12, 1864
On Veterans Day, I usually run an etching from Goya’s Disasters of War (gallery), because militarism and imperial triumphalism, of which we have a surfeit in this country, make my back teeth itch. This Veteran’s Day, what with our genocide in Gaza, our Ukrainian meatgrinder by proxy, our quest for escalatory dominance over Iran, and our pervasive “Real men go to Beijing” zeitgeist, I thought I would give Goya’s war art a little more attention; his subject, in essence, is the aspects of war the veterans you know may dream of, but very rarely talk about. First, I’ll take a brief, biographical look Goya’s art in the Peninsular War of 1807-1814 (Goya’s handwritten title on an album of Disasters proofs given to a friend reads: “Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte, and Other Emphatic Caprices” (Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). I’ll start with a short potted biography of Goya. Then I will look at one painting. Following a sidebar on Goya’s technique, I’ll look at three etchings from Disasters. The works speak for themselves and should be looked at slowly; to that end, I’ll try to be strong on technical detail and leave the interpretation up to you. I’ll conclude with some 30,000-foot musings.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
The great Australian critic Robert Hughes, whose biography Goya you might add to your tsundoku, wrote:
What lay before Goya as the 18th century turned its corner into the 19th? Steady work, at rising prices, for the court and nobles; security, wealth and honour in an encroaching old age. The idea that Goya was, or ever had been, a social rebel is simply untrue. His art, even at its most radical – a phase still to come – was a horrified protest against disorder and superstition, not a call to irrationality. As first painter to the king he was doing really well and as long as the court held, he would continue to reap its fruits. (In 1812, when he was 66, his house, furni ture, possessions and cash in hand were worth, in aggregate, about 350,000 reales.) As a portraitist he had no rivals.
[But then] Spain was plunged into what were, in effect, two wars. The first was a formal affair of arching armies and proper battles – Wellington and his generals versus Napoleon, the Peninsular war. The second was an internal war of Spanish irregulars against, in part, other Spanish factions and, especially, the hated French. The “guerillas” (as they called themselves) were poorly armed. Napoleon was not the last general to make that mistake about guerillas.
After 1814 Goya had to show he had been loyal to Spain during the Napoleonic occupation – otherwise he would have lost his precious job as first court painter, after the restoration of Ferdinand. What he had really been doing, much of the time, was working on the series of 80 etchings known as the Disasters of War.
For reasons we don’t now know, these weren’t published during Goya’s lifetime. In fact they didn’t appear until 1863, 35 years after his death.
They are reflections on the evil, sadism and cruelty inherent in war itself. Goya doesn’t take sides, strange to say. French soldiers do dreadful things to Spanish peasants, partisans and women; but then, Spaniards do equally horrible things to the French, and to other Spaniards… The idea of the “noble proletariat” is very far from Goya’s thinking. He has seen too much. He knows too much. Now and again he permits himself a sort of hideously sardonic culture-joke, but generally he takes the war head-on, without irony, in a passion too deep even for tears. In these etchings Goya junks all the issues of “glory”, “patriotism” and the rest. It is a tremendous, mesmerising achievement and it spills over into his paintings as well.
The Third of May 1808
Of this painting, Hughes writes:
On May 2, 1808, in the heart of Madrid, a crowd of citizens attacked a detachment of Mameluke (Moorish) cavalry led by a French general. The next day, May 3, the French struck back. Six years later, in 1814, Goya did two monumental paintings, so that these events should never be forgotten. The rising of May 2 1808 ( The Second of May 1808 ) and the execution of the partisans on May 3, 1808.
The Third of May 1808 is the picture against which all future paintings of tragic violence would have to measure themselves. It is truly modern, never surpassed in its newness, so raw that although it was a state commission it remained in storage, unseen by the public for the first 40 years of its life.
The surface is ragged: no smooth finish. The blood on the ground is a dark alizarin crimson smeared on thick and then scraped back with a palette knife, so that it looks crusty and scratchy, just like real blood smeared by the twitches of a dying body. You can’t “read” the wounds that disfigure the face of the man on the ground, but as signs of trauma in paint they are inexpressibly shocking – their imprecision conveys the thought that you can’t look at them.
I will stop there, since I would prefer you to focus on the painting.
Sidebar on Etching
From the Park West Gallery:
Instead of using color, Goya sought out bleak shadows and shade to express his stark views in “Disasters of War.” He did so through a combination of etching, drypoint, and aquatint.
Goya began his process by coating a copper plate with wax and etched lines into it with a sharp, needle-like tool. He then submerged the plate into an acid bath, causing the acid to bite at the exposed metal. The plate was then washed and the wax melted away.
Goya next employed the drypoint technique. He scratched onto the plate directly to create more textured, uneven lines in his compositions. Lines created this way are softer when final impressions are made.
To create additional tonal effects, Goya used the aquatint technique. This involves dusting a plate with a powdered resin and heating it until the resin melts and hardens. Acid is applied to the plate and eats away at the metal around the resin. As a result, small channels are created that will hold ink depending on how long they were exposed to the acid—the longer the exposure, the darker the ink appears on the print.
The final step in the printmaking process was to ink a plate and wipe away the excess, resulting in ink remaining in the etched lines. The plate was placed on top of dampened paper and run through a printing press, transferring a mirror image of the plate onto the paper.
Through this tedious process, Goya exposed generations of art lovers to the sobering realities of war. Goya is often considered one of the first modern artists and, through his “Disasters of War,” we can understand why—his unflinching commentary on war and morality speaks to us through time, impacting us in the present in ways few artists can.
One curator comments, in “Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum” on the uses of these techniques in Disasters of War:
If we look at these works as prints, they violate all of the conventions of the preceding tradition of European etching. Murky pools of aquatint appear like pools of blood, the focus is personalised, immediate and confronting. Not only the limbs, but compositional structures are truncated and violated. So many of the artistic strategies advanced by Goya are not only pictorially confronting, but also pre-empt the devices of Expressionism and Surrealism of a century later.
Aquatint as pools of blood. Good to know. To the etchings—
Plate 7: Que Valor!
(“What courage!”). From the National Galleries of Scotland:
This print is notable among Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ etchings as being one of the few to depict a well known event. It shows the heroism of a woman named Augustina Zaragoza (also known as Agustina de Aragon) during the 1808 Napoleonic siege of Saragossa. She is shown standing on the bodies of fallen Spanish artillerymen as she fires a canon at the French army. Her white dress stands out in stark contrast to the darkness of the canon and bodies. Augustina is said to have leapt to the defence of the city when she realised that the Spanish militia had been killed or too badly injured to fight, and according to legend she took the match to light the canon from the hand of a dead soldier. Her courage was renowned throughout Spain, and she was credited with having repelled the French army, on that occasion at least.
This is the one plate where Goya shows a heroic action. The issue of whether Goya was reporting or imagining will come up later, but here he seems to be reporting, although not from primary sources. (The white dress and the cannon barrel, I assume, are part of the plate where the acid didn’t bite in, hence no ink. Not exactly like working in LightRoom!)
Plate 13: Amarga Presencia
(“Bitter Presence”). A post from “Every Painter Paints Himself” starts off with the brilliant observation that the painting resembles a skull, and the archways to the left are the holes for Goya’s eyes. It then devolves into an interpretation that is so like a combination of gender studies + “The Anxiety of Influence” that I refuse to quote it (it’s here). My own fanciful interpretation is that the soldiers are the “bitter presence” for the woman about to be raped, and the memory of the rape is a “bitter presence” for the artist, so bitter it persists into the grave after Goya’s death. We might also see the uninked parts of the plate (the world outside Goya’s skull; the woman) as the sweet light of reason, “present” but powerless.
Plate 39: Grande Hazaña con Muertos
(“A heroic feat! With dead men!”) Here is one amusing reaction from The Art Blog, “Goya’s emotionally charged art about war and human folly rings true today“:
I confess I was hard-pressed, while viewing works such as “A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!” that depicts the naked and dismembered bodies of several men hanging on a tree, not to see them as mirror images of similar atrocities revealed in the press this past week regarding the rape, torture, and mutilation of Israeli women by Hamas soldiers on October 7 (not to confuse Hamas here with the majority of Palestinian citizens, also victims of the war).
But see AP, “How 2 debunked accounts of sexual violence on Oct. 7 fueled a global dispute over Israel-Hamas war.” From the National Galleries of Scotland:
In this sickening image, one of the most extreme in The Disasters of War series, the naked bodies of mutilated, tortured and castrated men are shown hung from a tree as a warning to others. Goya was one of the first artists to reveal the grim reality of warfare, stripped of all chivalry, romance and idealism. He captured something quintessential about modern war which has found resonance with succeeding generations of audiences. This print was controversially adapted in the 1990s by the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. It formed the basis for one of their gory, three-dimensional tableaux, in which scenes from the series were recreated using dismembered mannequins covered in fake blood.
And what a trivial time the 90s were, to be sure.
Conclusion
The Library of Congress subject headings for Disasters of War are about as neutral is it is possible to be:
– Spain–Madrid, Comunidad de–Madrid
– Spain–Zaragoza
– 1810 to 1820
– Allegory
– Atrocities
– Death
– Famines
– Goya, Francisco, 1746-1828
– Peninsular War, 1807-1814
– Romanticism
– War casualties
I recently encountered this thread on wars between supercolonies of ants, also involving (no doubt) atrocities, death, famines, and war casualties, although (one assumes) not allegory or romanticism:
Many are aware that a world war between Argentine ant supercolonies is currently underway, across multiple continents, and against multiple ant 'nations'. pic.twitter.com/EuJJ1PFq8D
— Stone Age Herbalist (@Paracelsus1092) November 8, 2024
If there are indeed aliens observing earth from far above the atmosphere, one might wonder whether they see war between ants and war between humans as all that different, considering what we humans make of ourselves.
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Thank you for the Goya. Once seen never forgotten.
You can see all (I think) of the etchings in the Goya museum in Zaragossa.
In Spanish spelled Zaragoza, but if you go with the local Aragonese pronunciation you could write it Zárágózá the only word in Spanish with an accent in all its syllables.
Thanks. At least I got the “Z” right, despite the attempts of the computer to replace it with an “S”. I’d like to point out that I got to see the etchings with nobody else around. The museum was deserted despite it being the Día de San Valero:
We also share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee, and the differences between their lethal raiding and hierarchical behaviours and our tendency towards constant violence throughout our own history is minuscule.
The problem is that it is not easy to short-circuit millions of years of innate evolutionary programming with our own behaviour.
> innate evolutionary programming
I would speculate that the change to agriculture made warfare at scale possible, and the effects of that have occurred within an evolutionary eyeblink; no time to display adaptability.
Conclusion – The latest video from the Casual Geographic guy is on animals being … animals, or human, depending on what you think of our fellow humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6QGPT1jsvg
Goya and Los Caprichos are something we humans got right (remembering and studying), the medium is impressive, and the message is important.
Too bad we still haven’t learned the lesson of Christmas 1914 and the Truce; Remembrance Day still seems to be Nationalism Day, instead of Shared Humanity Day.
I’m a fan of Grass; the author’s voice is not how I hear it, but here he tosses in an extra “Stalingrad” (!) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NaXvrUYfRg
For my great uncle Royce, who I never knew. He died in Flanders fields from Mustard gas.
In Flanders Fields
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields
I love the first stanza. The second, which begins “Take up our quarrel with the foe,” not so much. For one thing, World War I wasn’t a quarrel. For another, one might also look at Flanders Fields as sunk costs, which the poem argues against doing.
Indeed. Rhythm betrays politics.
I was irritated first when in the wake of Febr. 2022 suddenly people all over started to quote it – until I realized: They were in favour of fighting Russia. I then knew history had washed up dark developments that had been festering since 9/11 despite what happened since 9/11.
Sorry flora, for carrying this a bit too far perhaps…
My great-uncle Donald was gassed in WW1, I don’t know which battlefield. I met him once in the 1960s, I was a kid and he was in his 70s I think. Owned a small orange orchard in LA and loved to hike around the trees, picking oranges, and sold them on the honor system in his driveway. Take some, leave a buck.
I saw home movies of him in uniform back from the war in 1918, being goofy.
Thoughtful presentation, Lambert.
I’m friends with makers of Fine Art and the process of making etchings of Goya’s refine requires mastering a very complex mechanical process, let alone creating images of exquisite dimension.
Since the etched plate is a mirror image of what the the artist intends, the artist must think of the plate as if it was a film negative and a reversal of the finished art; the wax removed from the plate will become the darkened elements. The white portion of the cannon and woman’s dress is surely intended by Goya; it highlights those elements of the artwork. What is on the right side of the plate becomes the left side of the finished print. (Fortunately, there are no insignia/letters that need to be reversed.)
Goya is clearly a master of the technique and presents the horror and violence of war with excruciating skill.
> mastering a very complex mechanical process
As opposed to AI slop. The only digital artist I know who’s remotely capable of doing what looks like real brushwork digitally, is Stalenhåg, and even so, retro-futurism, thematically, isn’t on a par with depicting the Peninsular War (a problem with science fiction generically, I would say).
One kinda lame nitpick: in Spanish, it’s Francisco–Francesco is Italian spelling.
It’s not lame (“As long as they spell the name right”). Fixed, thank you.
Thank you, Lambert!
Spanish artists seem to have a native genius when it comes to expressing the horror and miseries of war. Just finished reading a fascinating history of Guernica, Picasso’s masterpiece depicting the horrific fire-bombing of that Spanish city during the 1937 Spanish Civil War—the first example of saturation bombing ever seen on European soil.
Photographs of that devastated city are indistinguishable from those of Gaza City today. If Goya powerfully displays the horrors of 19th century warfare, Picasso mercilessly conveys the mechanized carnage produced by 20th century technological “advances.” It is a huge canvass filled with decapitated bodies, mutilated limbs, silent screams of torture and anguish, by men, women, and children. Most poignant of all, at the extreme left edge, is a mother with face-upturned, howling in despair, holding the limp body of her dead child in her arms. Similar images of Palestinian fathers and mothers have appeared on my computer screen nearly every day for the last year. I scroll past, but they haunt me still.
The book opens by recalling the telling episode during the U.S. run-up to the Iraq War, when the Guernica tapestry hanging outside the UN Security Council chamber was draped in a blue shroud to hide it from public view. In response to the cover-up, the UN delegate from Australia caustically remarked, “We may well live in the age of the so-called ‘smart bomb’, but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Guernica … And it won’t be possible to pull a curtain over that.”
https://www.amazon.com/Guernica-Twentieth-Century-Gijs-van-Hensbergen/dp/1582346062
Thanks for the reminder that great artists like Goya, and Picasso, can enable us to see the world feelingly, and so help us to comprehend and resist the terrible evil of militarism. As Kurt Vonnegut, born on Armistice Day in 1922, summed up:
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Thank you M.J. extended to Lambert in this beautiful post. Yes, there is beauty in the art of showing the horrors of warfare. That kind of beauty which makes emotions surface. The second of may is the official holiday of the Comunidad de Madrid but we should focus on that painting on third of may events.
[lambert blushes modestly]
> Just finished reading a fascinating history of Guernica
Hughes, from the same article:
Others argue for the Second of May.
NOTE Incidentally, the search on Goya is absolutely enshittified; it’s all to places like the Khan Academy, even the images. You’d think the brain geniuses at Google would be able to prioritize images from, say, the Prado — where the original is located! — and not second or third generaion JPGs from all over.
I saw Guernica in the Prado in the early 80s, when it was first repatriated. It was behind bomb-proof glass. I assume it still is.
And of course many of the Goyas.
I just had a dropout computer programmer’s education at that point- didn’t really understand what I was seeing.
That was actually the bombing of Durango four weeks earlier. Pretty much the same tactics with pretty much the same results but no British journalist wrote a story about it at the time.
painting: “Gaza – Guernica”
Look for Mohammed Al-Hawajri´ s painting»Guernica – Gaza«
or here his old site
It´s a mash-up with some Goya elements too:
http://hawajriart.blogspot.com/2013/03/guernica-gaza-2010-2013.html
There was an exhibition in Berlin early 2024, totally ignored.
During the godawful Documenta in 2022 “Gaza-Guernica” however was among those pieces that were “under investigation” for inciting anti-semitism!
What can I do – bang my head against the walls of my apartment?
NOBODY speaks about this any more.
You search for this term “Mohammed Al-Hawajri´ s painting»Guernica – Gaza«” you get hits about “history of anti-semitism”.
And since this post deals with Goya depicting the horrors of war, one would be remiss not to mention the series of etchings “Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre” about the 30-years war by 17th century French artist Jacques Callot. I presume that Goya was well aware of his notable predecessor.
Oh, that’s interesting, you learn something new everyday (especially here at NC).
I’ve actually only heard of Callot because (for literature nerds), E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote at least one or two stories inspired by Callot’s drawings of commedia dell’arte characters (Hoffmann specifically refers to Callot in the text).
From Wikipedia, Goya owned a copy of Les Misères. Callot was also an important technical innovator in etching.
George Smiley owned a Callot.
Maybe a little off-topic from Lambert’s original focus on Goya, but there is something unique about Spanish painters, whatever their subject and time. Besides Picasso, Dali will always be Dali, but I’m not even much of an art person, and I can sort of sense when something is a Velazquez (my personal fave) or an El Greco.
AFAIK they never showed war in full naked brutality like Goya did, but that’s partly what made him a pivotal figure (Goya’s Nude Maya was also a first). Just to add context too, the Disasters were after his first Capricios and his midlife mystery illness, which seems to have first started his transformation from subtly puckish rebel (I think most now interpret his portrait of the royal family as mocking them to their face without them realizing it) to all-out, brooding, eerie Romantic.
They may not be specifically about war either, but some of the Black Paintings definitely feel relevant too (particularly the Fight with Clubs).
On the German Condor Legion that destroyed Guernica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condor_Legion
famous members of the Legion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Condor_Legion_personnel
For a long time Wolfram von Richthofen and his other officers in charge had argued that the bombing of Guernica had been a mistake. Which it was not.
on von Richthofen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_von_Richthofen
Also involved Joachim von Richthofen, who later worked for Porsche. According to Wiki German:
“He was a member of the Condor Legion. In a classified report dated May 28, 1937, he reported on several cities attacked by the Condor Legion with regard to the effect of German bombs. The officer analyzed the bombing effect of German, Spanish and Italian types and gave detailed instructions in his reports on how to destroy a Spanish town most effectively.”
Joachim von Richthofen´s exact genealogical relation to the Richthofen family seems to be unclear.
The Legion Condor had its own hymn (of course): the “Lied der Legion Condor”.
That hymn was then adapted to become a marching song of the Waffen-SS: “SS marschiert in Feindesland”.
And recently, that song was again altered and adopted as the “March of the Ukrainian Legion of foreign volunteers”.
And thus, from a chain of references linking the Veterans’ Day, Goya, Picasso, and Guernica we are back to a bloody present-day conflict.
interesting indeed! – and yes the hypocrisy is astounding, especially in the light of repeated comparisons between foreign mercenaries in UKR today and the leftist Foreign Brigades in Spain ( NOT “legions” but that doesn´t bother anyone).
There is a sentence of Goya himself, the title of an illustration of him, “el sueño de la razón crea los monstruos”, which is impossible to translate since I don’t know, and as far as I know, nobody knows. In Spanish, “sueño” means both “dream” and “sleep”, it doesn’t happen in other romance languages (the closer cognates, in Portuguese, are respectively “sono” and “sonho”, different pronunciation). So, the sentence could be “the reason’s dreams make monsters” and/or “the reason’s sleep make monsters”. The illustration doesn’t help at all, you can see the “Reason” sleeping (and/or dreaming) and the monsters flying all over the scene. I think it’s deliberate, Goya wanted to mean both things, he could choose another wording for the title to avoid ambiguity.
btw. movies:
Carlos Saura´s “Goya” (which I always skipped to be honest but may be that was a mistake)
1999
104 min., Spanish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ECWBcV8txA
And the great “Goya” by East German Konrad Wolf
1971
128 min. German / Spanish subs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8XQEsmzKHk
Goya himself played by Donatas Banionis, the great Lithuanian actor (became a star in USSR cinema, those were different times) today best known for Tarkovsky´s “Solaris”.
I already posted these:
“Solaris” RU / Engl. subs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZhQPaw4rE
“Stalker” RU / Engl. subs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3hBLv-HLEc
That second Goya film. I didn’t know it. Only by the first images and music in the presentation I feel it will merit the watch. Thank you AG. I think the full title is something like this: Goya, the Uneasy Road to Enlightenment
Plate 13: Amarga Presencia – another eery aspect is the partially obscured body (Only legs visible) on the left behind the tied up man without a visible head (on his shoulders at least). Combined with the impression of a soldiers hat and women hair in the background also supports your memory interpretation.
Whether those impressions are echoes in memory or more literal 3 soldiers 2 victim couples is open to interpretation, as with the missing head of the tied up figure far left combined with scenes setting “in mind”.
The high res version helps:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Prado_-_Los_Desastres_de_la_Guerra_-_No._13_-_Amarga_presencia.jpg