Description
Robert Hughes on Goya — the pairing art history was waiting for. Hughes, the great Australian critic, called Goya the first modern artist, and this biography shows why: the court painter who became the prophet of horror, the man who painted duchesses and then, going deaf, painted demons. From the sunny tapestry cartoons to the Black Paintings, Hughes follows the arc of a genius darkening with his century.
Hughes writes about art the way Goya painted it — with ferocity and moral weight. His pages on the Disasters of War etchings and Saturn Devouring His Son are criticism at its most powerful: erudite, angry, and alive. This is not a dry academic life; it is an argument about what art is for, made by a critic at the height of his powers.
Essential for anyone who loves Goya — or wants to understand how the Enlightenment curdled into nightmare. Hughes at his best is unmissable, and this is Hughes at his very best.
Goya by Robert Hughes is the acclaimed 2003 biography of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) — the Spanish master who bridged the old masters and the modern age. Written by the legendary Australian critic behind The Shock of the New, it is as much a vivid portrait of a turbulent Spain as of the artist himself.
Hughes follows Goya from ambitious young painter to the most sought-after portraitist of the Spanish court, and then into darkness: deafness, the Napoleonic invasion, the horrors recorded in the Disasters of War etchings and the haunted Black Paintings of his final years in Bordeaux.
Fiercely intelligent and beautifully written, this is art biography at its finest — a book that explains not just how Goya painted, but why he still matters. Essential for art lovers, history readers and anyone who wants to understand the birth of modern art. A masterpiece of art writing from one of the great critics of our time.
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