Only Goya. The Art of Seeing

Goya’s artistic career successively embraced Rococo, Neoclassicism and early Romanticism. Many have contrasted the luminous painter of the tapestry cartoons with the sombre creator of The Disasters of War and the Black Paintings, arguing that only the works of his final years deserve to be regarded as truly modern. Yet it may equally be argued that the whole of the Aragonese master's oeuvre—including his frescoes, portraits and tapestry cartoons—constitutes a critical response to the world in which he lived: to politics, religion and even to the very means of representation.

It is this modernity that has led Romantics, Impressionists, Expressionists and even Surrealists to claim Goya as a precursor. His work embodies the spirit of the Enlightenment while, at the same time—as in The Third of May 1808—it stands as a powerful indictment of the barbarism that the Age of Reason itself could also engender.

The painter witnessed a profound historical transformation: the collapse of the old order under which he had developed his career as court painter, and the turbulent emergence of a new one. This experience makes him unmistakably our contemporary, for by the time the Zaragoza exhibition opens, our own world will likewise be undergoing a momentous transformation. In a more stable context, the exhibition might have been conceived as "Goya. The Art of Freedom," structured around the ideas of the "divine nature" he inherited from Velázquez and the declaration "There are no rules in painting" from his memorial to the Academy. In today's changing world, however, the exhibition places the emphasis on Goya's critical vision in a time of transition, offering an overarching perspective that also commemorates the 150th anniversary of Ibercaja and the 250th anniversary of the Royal Aragonese Economic Society of Friends of the Country, since both 1776 and 1876 were, in their own ways, watershed moments between different eras.