| GOYA IN BORDEAUX 
Seated majo and maja,
ink and watercolor on ivory
(Stockholm National Museum)
Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) spent his final years in exile in Bordeaux, western France, after a glorious and adventurous life.
Celebrated as a court painter, Goya was forced to leave Madrid more than once under the threat of a trial by the terrifying Inquisition after having seduced many women of the Spanish nobility or for some other misconduct. Goya, who fathered 22 children, was once stabbed in the back and left as dead. On another occasion, he seduced a nun in Rome and, facing the death penalty, owed to be spared thanks to the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador there. He then met trouble again for his support of the French revolution and was eventually forced to flee his country which had fallen under the rule of a reactionary regime.
At 78, being totally deaf and much ill, Goya chose Bordeaux as his home-town. There he spent four years working on new engraving techniques. Bordeaux was however not bothered by the celebrity of its illustrious guest who was buried there like a prince whereas no local newspaper found it interesting to announce his death.
His tomb was left unattended for many years and when Spain claimed the return of his body they received a beheaded corpse in 1899. Nobody knew what had happened of Goya's head which might have been taken by some Bordeaux doctor eager to examine the skull of such a genius.
All the more, Bordeaux never acquired a single work by Goya though it never missed to celebrate his birth and death during this century.
Today, on the 170th anniversary of his death the town has been organising an exhibition of works produced during the four years Goya spent there.
Such exhibition held at the Bordeaux Musée des Beaux-Arts
(until May 6th 1998 and before the retrospective due to take place in Lille at the end of this year) has been an opportunity to show how Goya was an avant-garde artist.
Before settling in Bordeaux, Goya spent the summer of 1824 in Paris and produced some portraits of former patrons. It was there that he visited artistic Salons and paid close attention to the art of engraving, notably that of lithograph, a technique discovered at the end of the 18th century. Goya had already tried this technique while in Madrid but his first trials proved unsuccessful. Back in Bordeaux, he chose to make new attempts and produced in 1825 his first lithographs based on bulls as well as bull-fighting themes which eventually did not appeal to the French public. | 
El Vito, lithography,
National Library, Madrid
Goya executed his lithographs in a way similar to that of his paintings placing the lithographic stone on an easel, handling his crayons like brushes. He also produced many drawings and some miniatures (one of these fetched over US $ 600,000 at auction recently) trying to develop new techniques, working altogether as a draughtsman, a painter, a watercolorist and a lithographer on small ivory plaques.
Hailed as the greatest Spanish artist since Murillo and Velasquez, Goya had started his career as a classical painter enjoying the protection of the Court. His illness which led him to complete deafness, like Beethoven, progressively drove him to depict the plight of his people and war horrors reaching a new dimension that gave him the opportunity to play a major role in the development of modern art during the 19th century. He certainly had a great influence over such painters as Delacroix and Manet and later Picasso, Munch, Ludwig Meidner or Otto Dix. |
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