Culture and Civilisations Stories and Essays

Though Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was an 18th-century painter and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) a 20th-century one, Picasso was born only 53 years after Goya’s death. Apart from both being Spanish, they had many striking traits in common both in life and art. Both lived to a great age for their era —Goya to 82, Picasso to 92—and painted until the end of their long careers. When Goya became wealthy he bought an expensive new coach; when Picasso got rich he bought a luxurious Hispano-Suiza car. In 1820, when he was 74, Goya began a liaison with a married Spanish woman, Leocadia Weiss, 52 years his junior. In 1953, when he was 72, Picasso began a love affair with a married French woman, Jacqueline Roque, 46 years younger.

Goya, depicted above in a portrait by Vicente López Portaña, fled from the oppressive regime of King Ferdinand VII; Picasso refused to live under the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, and both became exiles in France. Goya was persecuted by the Inquisition, Picasso was plagued by the Nazis. Picasso resembled Goya, in his defiant and volatile temperament, more than any other artist. A kindred spirit who honestly confronted the evil in man, Picasso wanted, as André Malraux observed of Goya, “to tear the mask of deception from the world’s face.” Goya, the crucial link between Velázquez and Picasso, strengthened Picasso’s connection to Spain.

Goya influenced Picasso’s Science and Charity, La Celestina, portraits of his first wife Olga and of women in both full face and profile; his portrayal of harlequins, bullfighting and Minotaurs. Goya’s The Disasters of War, Highwaymen Robbing a Coach and The Third of May, 1808 had a direct impact on Guernica and The Massacre in Korea. Finally, their late Self-Portraits evoke the same pity and compassion.

In Goya’s Family of Don Luis de Borbón a pale sickly young woman in white, her long black hair undone as if she were in bed, is seated in the centre with a card table extended in front of her. Illuminated by a single bright candle, she’s surrounded by her attentive family. The man on the left extends his hand toward her, the woman on the right holds her baby. No one has seen the resemblance of this painting to Picasso’s impressive Science and Charity (1897), painted while he was still in his teens. In this picture a pale moribund young woman, wearing a white nightgown, lies at the centre under a white sheet. She’s attended on one side by a bearded doctor (posed by Picasso’s father) who holds her long-fingered hand, feels her faint pulse and checks it with his watch. On the right a nun in full habit holds the woman’s baby. It’s too late for science to save the dying woman; her only hope, as the nun suggests, is in the afterlife.

In Fernando de Rojas’ classic Spanish novel La Celestina (1499), the bachelor Calisto uses the old procuress and bawd Celestina to begin an affair with an unmarried girl who’s closely confined by her parents. Goya’s Maja and Celestina on a Balcony contrasts the youthful beauty of the rosy-cheeked young girl, elaborately dressed in white and gold, to Celestina’s decrepit old age. A hideous dark wrinkled woman with a beaked nose nearly touching her chin, Celestina hovers with bowed head and clenched fists behind the pretty girl. Picasso’s Blue Period masterpiece La Celestina focuses on the old woman. Standing at half-length before a greyish-blue background, she wears a black cape and hood, with a hint of a white collar. Her face is lined, her eyebrows arched, and she stares fiercely at the viewer. Her one blind discoloured eye seems to give her the prophetic power of a seer. Picasso transforms the traditional wrinkled hag into a forceful modern woman.

Goya’s ideal of blonde and dark-haired beauty, Isabel de Porcel and Thérèse-Louise de Sureda, are reprised in Picasso’s many idealised portraits of his lovers Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. Goya’s portraits of the stunning Duchess of Alba have the same characteristic features — black hair, dark eyes, thin nose and small mouth — that Picasso admired in his late lovers Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque.

The Duchess of Alba (who later became insane) stands pointing her pink slippers as if to take a ballet step. She inspired Picasso’s portraits of his elegant aristocratic Olga (whose name echoed Alba), a Russian ballerina who also later became deranged. In one portrait Olga wears a high Spanish mantilla; in another, she sits in front of a Spanish shawl, extends one arm while holding a Spanish fan and has (like the Duchess) the top of her costume descending to the right to expose an expanse of white flesh.

Goya precisely foreshadows one of Picasso’s most innovative techniques: the fusion of both full-face and profile in his portraits. In Goya’s Dream of Falsehood and Inconstancy a two-faced, two-headed woman seen in profile lies between her two rival lovers. She touches each man with her extended hand and, looking both ways, wants to possess both of them. In Picasso’s Reclining Woman, and many other pictures based on Marie-Thérèse, a naked woman lies on her belly. She’s seen with her two profiles looking in opposite directions, and with her breasts, impossibly placed yet alluring, facing upward on her back.

John Richardson writes that Picasso’s “combination of compassion and grotesquerie, and the notion of conventional beauty as a sham, derived from Goya. How often he would echo Goya’s dictum, ‘Ugliness is beautiful.’” Goya’s The Old Women portrays a hideously wrinkled hag with a long nose and jutting chin. She’s pathetically decorated with an expansive white gown, rings, earrings and silver tiara, with Time’s Arrow shooting menacingly through her badly bleached straw hair. Her revolting attendant, dressed in black, has dark eye sockets, snout-nose and jagged teeth. She holds a mirror up to her mistress with Que tal? (What next?) inscribed on the back. The figure of the shaggy, white-haired, aged Father Time hovering above them suggests that they will soon be in their graves.

The notably unattractive Queen Luisa, flanked by her two pretty children in Goya’s satiric portrait, The Family of Carlos IV, is echoed in Picasso’s grotesque Woman in Blue. She is made up by a cosmetic mortician in an absurd attempt to recapture her lost youth, wears a billowing 18th-century dress, a gigantic green bow trailing down to her waist and a tremendous hat that threatens to crush her head. Picasso took rather cruel artistic revenge, after his miserable rupture with Olga and his destructive quarrels with Dora Maar, in the tragically shattered series of Weeping Women. He portrayed Olga in harsh yellow and with a bulbous forehead, spiky uneven eyes, grimacing mouth, carnivorous teeth, smeared red lips and claw-like fingers.

The parti-coloured harlequin, a shrewd servant in the Italian commedia dell’arte who appears in Goya’s Strolling Players, frequently recurs in various poses and settings in Picasso’s work. The harlequin drinks in sad cafés, is pensive with hand on his white-painted cheek, joins his family next to the red pot-bellied figure based on the poet Apollinaire, is elongated and holds his baby while standing next to his nude wife, is flattened into a Cubist figure and even reappears, with the traditional costume and bicorne hat, in Picasso’s portrait of his three-year-old son Paulo.

Goya’s famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Caprichos, #43), depicts a man sleeping at his desk with his head resting on a book. He’s threatened and terrified by nightmares of swarming bats with widespread wings and owls with jagged beaks. Goya warns that when men surrender their rational faculties, the dark side of human nature takes over in the guise of religion or nationalism, and leads to monstrous bloodshed. But the modern French Surrealists deliberately suppressed reason to produce amazing effects; and Picasso sometimes abandoned rational control of his art and submitted to impulse, instinct, coincidence and chance.

The stylised cruelty and glorification of heroic death in the Spanish bullfight is the most tragic performance in Western culture. Instead of death enacted on the stage, the bull and sometimes the man die in the arena. The 33 etchings in Goya’s Tauromaquia (“The Art of Bullfighting”) portray the movement, spectacle and drama of the corrida. Goya shows simultaneous bullfights in a divided ring; the death of a picador, transfixed by the bull’s curved horn, while his disemboweled horse lies in a puddle of blood; the death of a matador, gored, thrown into the air or pinned to the ground; and another wildly courageous matador who fights one bull while riding on another one.

Goya painted a portrait of Pedro Romero (1754-1839), who invented the modern style of bullfighting in Ronda, a hill town in Andalusia. Every year modern Ronda has a Goyesca festival with the matadors and their cuadrillas dressed in 18th-century costumes. In the introduction to his book Toros y Toreros, illustrated by Picasso, the heroic bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín compares his friendship with the artist “to the great Pedro Romero’s with Goya.” (In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway names his bullfighter-hero Pedro Romero.) Like Goya, Picasso portrays bulls goring a horse and dying after being pierced through the heart by a sword.

Goya’s depiction of bullfighting was clearly connected to what Charles Baudelaire called the bestial faces, diabolical grimaces and grotesque distortions of reality in his satyrs and monsters who preyed on both sleeping and wide-awake beauties. In Goya’s Bandits Stripping a Woman the robbers undress and humiliate their victims before raping and murdering them. In a hidden mountain cave a naked woman, with a thin veil around her belly and thighs but showing her pubic hair, covers her face in shame and despair. A hooded shadowy bandit prepares to assault and violate her. Behind him a voyeuristic bandit crouches and watches the rape while forcing another helpless woman onto the ground. Picasso also did many paintings of Minotaurs — half-bulls, half-men — kidnapping and raping young women.

Goya’s etchings The Disasters of War, which portray cruelty, oppression and suffering with razor-sharp lines and his own brilliantly satiric titles, foreshadow the horrors of the modern world. He shows death by every conceivable means: starvation, disease, rape, torture, knife, axe, sword, bayonet, rifle, hanging, garroting, amputation, castration and decapitation. He reveals dead horses, women fighting and dying, pillaging the dead, mutilated bodies, rotting corpses, cartloads for the cemeteries, mass burials — and the death of truth.

The most ghastly etching, Great deeds—against the dead! (#39), portrays a headless man with severed arms hanging upside down with his legs over the branch of a dead tree. His bound, cut-off arms and still-staring head hang next to what is left of him. Compared to such torture, the firing squad is merciful. Fred Licht observes that in these works, “The human body loses its integrity and becomes a mere abbreviation, a form that is reminiscent of the body but no longer praises its beauty or shows any interest in the organic coherence of its various parts.” These images, repeated at this very moment during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are especially dreadful and show the collapse of modern civilisation and the extinction of humane values.

Three of Goya’s paintings specifically influenced the agonising images in Picasso’s Guernica. In El Caballo Raptor (“The Kidnapping Horse”) a woman, with her head dropped backward and hands lifted up, is abducted by a horse whose neck and head are twisted and thrown backward. The little-noticed Highwaymen Attacking a Coach portrays the lofty trees and cloudy sky that form a V shape while the violent scene in the lower third of the picture forms a corresponding triangle. One bandit armed with a rifle stands next to the captured green coach drawn by four horses, whose colour matches the green trees and darker green sward that forms the stage for the murderous drama. The huge coach wheel links the two bandits who attacked the coach, one holding a rope, the other pointing a rifle. Five victims — two dead, one being stabbed, two pleading for mercy — lie or kneel in the foreground, with the four bandits around them.

The sun glints on the knife of the murderer and sword of the victim, and on the spangled decoration on a black coat. The matching corpses — one holds a useless sword, the other is not armed — lie face up and face down on either side of the painting. Blood flows from the wound of the red-coated dead man and wets the sand where his fellow victim lies. The two hopeless survivors, a man and a woman, beg on bended knees for mercy that will not be granted. The bandits, not content to rob the victims, must also kill them. The triangular composition, sudden violence, victims lying at both ends of the picture and massacre of innocent people with outstretched arms, all reappear in Guernica.

During the brutal Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the occupation of Madrid, the French rounded up and massacred the Spanish partisans who rose against them. In Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (1814), the classic image of anonymous modern executions, the eight soldiers in the firing squad, armed with swords and rifles, wear shakos, greatcoats and boots. Their bayonets, used to finish off the dying, are pointed only a few inches from the main victim and across the face, covered with his hands, of the next man to be killed. (The long row of vertical lances in Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda reappears as the long row of horizontal rifles in Goya’s painting.) The victims have faces; the killers, hiding their identities, do not.

The executed man in the fatal centre of the painting is surrounded by a kneeling, robed and tonsured Franciscan monk and by friends who either stare wildly or cover their faces to obliterate the ghastly scene. The victim, wearing an open white shirt (soon to be bloodied) and yellow trousers, raises his arms and palms with stigmata in a cruciform gesture of surrender and despair. He shows the whites of his wide-open eyes while focusing intensely on the last moments of his life. The tall cubical lantern lights the targeted victim and the legs of the firing squad who cast their shadows. The dim moonlight that shines from behind the riflemen, bent over their weapons, seems to push them toward the victim. The nearby church and bell tower provide no refuge or protection.

Picasso’s analysis of Goya’s painting, quoted by André Malraux, allows us to see it with his eyes: “The black sky isn’t a sky, it’s blackness. As for the lighting, it illumines everything like moonlight: the sierra, the belfry and the men shooting, who should not be lighted from behind. But it sheds far more light than the moon. It hasn’t the same colour. Then there’s the huge lantern on the ground, right in the middle. And what does that illumine? The guy raising his arms, the martyr. If you look at it carefully, you’ll see that it sheds light only on him. The lantern is Death.” But Picasso’s interpretation, probably based on memory, is not entirely accurate. The light illumines a soft brown hillside that absorbs stray bullets, not a sierra (mountain); and the triangular light also falls on the bleeding corpse in the left foreground. Hugh Thomas writes that “the actual hill where the executions occurred was probably below the site of the Montaña barracks, a scene of fighting during the Civil War of 1936-39”.

On April 27,1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German planes killed some 1,600 people and destroyed 70 per cent of Guernica, a defenceless Basque town in northern Spain. In his violent masterpiece Picasso responded to this cruel massacre of the innocents. The Third of May powerfully influenced Guernica. Goya’s Spain was invaded by France, Picasso’s by Spanish fascists from Morocco who started the Spanish Civil War. Both paintings are humane protests against atrocities committed on civilians.

Picasso’s friends — Paul Eluard, André Malraux and the art critic Christian Zervos — watched him paint Guernica while talking obsessively about Goya. The major exhibition of Goya’s etchings, lithographs and drawings at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1935, two years before Guernica, was another direct inspiration.

Both Goya and Picasso show victims dead and mourning. The pictures take place in the dark, have an illuminated central figure and other victims awaiting their inevitable deaths. The legs of Goya’s riflemen and of Picasso’s horse are parallel. Goya’s victim and Picasso’s woman on the right have desperately raised arms. Corpses with outstretched arms lie prominently in the foreground. In Goya the corpse bleeds into the sand like a dead matador. In Picasso’s portrayal of civilians destroyed by an overwhelming force, the bull, horse and matador symbolise the bullfight. In both paintings the victims plead for help, but help will never come.

Picasso became a communist in 1944, and his propagandistic The Massacre in Korea, painted during the war in 1951, shows the more direct but less effective impact of The Third of May. Four naked and defenceless women — two with mournful distorted faces, pregnant bellies and pubic hair — hopelessly try to protect four children before their execution. Three children attempt to flee, hide or cling to their mothers; the fourth one, unaware of his fate, continues to play on the ground. The eight civilians are confronted by six robotic men in medieval helmets and armour who point their row of weapons, and by their commander who brandishes a drawn sword. But the executioners are strangely naked below the waist and show their vulnerable balls and buttocks. Since Picasso did not identify the executioners as the American wartime enemy and the women did not look Korean, the Communist Party criticised the picture as poor propaganda.

In Goya’s famous Self-Portrait (1795), light floods in from the window behind him as he holds a brush and palette, stands before his easel and glances sideways at the viewer. He has dangling shoulder-length hair, and wears tight trousers, ruffled shirt and red-decorated jacket with bright buttons. The circle of candle-holders around his curious, flat-top, buckled hat that allowed him to paint at night reminds us that Picasso used arc-lights so he would not be disturbed when he worked at night.

Goya’s late Self-Portrait (1815), painted when ill, was a model for Picasso’s self-portrait in old age. Balding and with an expansive forehead, Goya wears an open-necked white shirt, has a resigned expression and tilts his blurred right ear toward a sound he cannot hear. Picasso’s brave Self-Portrait Facing Death, painted the year before he died, is a close-up view of his apelike face. He has huge staring wide-apart eyes, thick wide-nostrilled nose, grim slit mouth, deeply grooved stubbly face, bald head, dangling red-coloured hair and hairy raised shoulders. Like Goya, he’s staring straight at death, stoical and severe but not afraid. Goya’s art influenced Picasso throughout his life. It increases our understanding of Picasso, for without Goya he would not have been the same creator of horrors yet deeply humane artist.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published a life of Wyndham Lewis, Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.

© 2022 TheArticle.  All rights reserved

Focus on China | Coronavirus Pandemic | Ukraine Crisis

Already have an account with TheArticle? Sign in here.