Spanish drawings at the Frick Museum (2nd review)

The Frick Collection, drawing heavily on the Hispanic Society of New York's holdings, is presenting a show that might be called "Goya and Others." The first room and the connecting hallway are devoted to mostly 17th-Century Spanish masters, most notably Ribera and Murillo, and the second room to 23 Goyas.

As a draughtsman, Goya is known mostly for his engravings, but there is no sterner test of the art than pen, ink and wash, and there will be few exhibits of any artist up to the quality on display here. Goya took Rembrandt as a model, and in some respects his achievement is even more striking. Unlike Rembrandt, his human subjects were mostly taken from life or from his ever-teeming fantasy rather than from posed figures or biblical themes. He typically depicts isolated figures or small groups against a very lightly sketched or bare background, and the absence of context and ornament gives them an existential density, as if, at least in this little space, they exclude everything on earth but themselves.

This is particularly true of Beggar Holding a Stick in His Left Hand, in which the figure, his eyes and face pathetically engaging the viewer, is totally isolated on a white ground, with only a puddle of shadow for company, or of the crouching old woman in Don't Fill the Basket So Full of Eggs, who bends beneath the weight of the white emptiness that occupies two-thirds of the drawing's upper space.

Who is the speaker?

Goya's titles are, as in his engravings, often an integral part of the drawings themselves. Who is the "speaker" in this latter work, with his disembodied warning? Perhaps, you'll think, a concerned passerby somewhere out of the picture frame. But the surrounding void clues you in: This is the voice of an observant but not especially benevolent deity who knows exactly what will happen next, and whose warning, if uttered at all, will go unheard and unheeded.

That voice shouldn't be confused with Goya's own. As in Two Prisoners in Irons, Torture, and especially in He Appeared Like This, Mutilated in Zaragoza, Early in the 1700s, Goya's sympathies are partisan and fierce.

Goya was about 80 when he drew He Appeared Like This, intensely envisioning an atrocity a century old. This is an extraordinary act of moral witness by a man who seems to have taken every kind of suffering on himself.

Goya certainly saw enough of it in person, as The Disasters of War attests, but even the horrors of the Napoleonic wars in Spain didn't exhaust his sense of obligation. For centuries past, many great artists had expended their sense of compassion on the Man of Sorrows, who was likewise said to have taken all suffering on himself. For Goya, clearly, that was not good enough. He wanted each tortured body and each tormented soul to speak for itself.

A surrogate Christ

This wasn't merely the peculiarity of a highly sensitive man. The Age of Reason, of which he was a product, substituted human moral responsibility on earth as an ultimate gauge for that of a transcendent figure. Each of us, in the example Goya posited, was not merely his brother's keeper, but a Christ for all his fellow men. That entailed an unremitting moral vigilance, for, as the most famous of all his titles had put it, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

Not all the work here, or generally in Goya, is focused on pain and suffering; he'd be a bit insufferable himself if it were. Each one, though, poses a kind of a riddle. Is the man straddling two rocks with a woman in his arms (Peasant Carrying a Woman) taking her to safety or abducting her for rape? Goya concentrates on the tensed muscles of the man, and the woman's face fails to resolve the issue.

Similarly, The Three Men Digging is a study of muscular tension and energy (and a study as well for The Forge, a painting in the Frick's own galleries), but what could rouse such effort remains mysterious.

Beyond sexual transport

The most remarkable Goya work of all— Mirth, a depiction of an elderly peasant couple soaring aloft— is the most difficult to decipher. Is their coupling a kind of sexual transport? Yes, perhaps, but also no, or at any rate not simply that.

Once again, the title is a critical component of the image. The idea of mirth, at least as presented here, contains desire but isn't confined to it. The couple themselves are comical, and not a little grotesque. Some elemental force, some human affinity beyond even desire is suggested. Goya leaves us to ponder it.

Kinky and esoteric

The rest of the exhibit would be quite creditable on its own. Ribera and Murillo are both represented by substantial works. Ribera's Head of a Satyr projects a boldly sensual and inquisitive face in red chalk, and Bat with Two Ears is an exquisitely rendered study with an odd Latin tag, Virtue Shines Forever. The kinky and the esoteric also combine in two sheets from about 1630, one of a full-length male figure in a toga with little figures perched on his head, and another of a similarly adorned head.

Murillo contributes a rather stark Christ on the Cross and a fine Study of a Head and an Ear— perhaps a beggar's, perhaps a monk's? Sebastian de Herrera Barnuevo's highly worked An Auto-da-fe is the only extant 17th-Century drawing of the Spanish Inquisition's public judicial pronouncements, and Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra's St. Jerome Reading in the Desert is a splendidly modeled example of a traditional subject that finds fresh things to say about it.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.