There is no one to help them. Tragic subjects in the graphic art of Francisco Goya
20 October 2012 - 13 January 2013
General Staff Building, 2nd floor

On October 20th, 2012, the General Staff Building hosted the opening of an exhibit of pieces by the great 18th-19th century Spanish artist Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes. 40 plates of graphic art from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum are presented at the exhibit; engraving from four different series and several drawings made with a lithographic pencil.

A significant number of these pieces belong to Goya’s first graphic series, Los Caprichos (Caprices). This is a cycle of engravings on political, social and religious subjects, in which many of the troubling problems of Spain at that time were reflected: poverty, the power of the inquisition, the darkness of superstition of the people, human vices. All of the plates in this series have subscripts and commentaries, which generally come from Spanish folk sayings, proverbs and songs. In the engravings of this series, tragedy is interwoven with farce, beauty with deformity, the real world with an imaginary one, populated with fantastic images of devils, witches, sorcerers, goats, bats, giant cats, apes, and donkeys and camisoles. This exhibit includes ones of the most famous engravings from the Caprices series, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

The freakish monsters of the Caprices series give way to the images of the Los Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War) series. If, in Caprices Goya uses allegory and the grotesque, then in the Disasters of War, the real world, with all its suffering and bitterness, predominates. This series was dedicated not to the conflict between opposing armies, but to the struggle of the Spanish people against the French invasion. Goya shows cruel torture, punitive expeditions, shootings and executions, the bodies of the slain (as on plate 26, under the title One Cannot Look.

The most important events of Spanish history at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries are echoed in the work of Goya. Dark scenes of suffering, loss and horror were familiar to the author, who lived through the friend progressive reforms under Charles III, the heroic struggle of the Spanish people against Napoleon’s invasion, as well as two Spanish revolutions in the beginning of the 19th century.

Goya dedicated his last and most heavily encoded graphic series, Disparates (Los Proverbios,) to the events that followed to defeat of the revolution. Those compositions included in the exhibit are full of allegory and the grotesque, large figures practically fill the entire space of each page, their proportions disrupted and their deformity exaggerated.

The theme of struggle in Goya’s graphic art was not only connected with political and social upheavals. More than once, the artist often used the theme of Spain’s national spectacle, bullfighting, in his work. The series received the name La Tauromaquia (the bull fight). Goya aspired to show what he saw with his own eyes and the movements of his torero contemporaries, many of whom he was quite familiar with. For the master, bullfighting was one of the most striking images of Spain, combining glory and tragedy, art and insanity, beauty and blood.

In addition to the engravings, the exhibit includes several of Goya’s drawings. Despite the fact that they do not belong to a particular series, they are united by a common theme, human suffering.

The tragic events which predominate in the work of Francisco Goya in the last period of his life reflected the entire essence of what happened in his homeland. Often approaching exaggeration, allegory and the grotesque, the artist developed his own expressive and emotional language, which helped him to convey the events he witnessed.

There is no one to help them exhibit is being held in parallel to the exhibit of the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman, who appealed to pieces by Francisco Goya in their work. Visitors have the opportunity to compare the work of the famous Spanish artists with that of contemporary artists.

The curator of the exhibit is Mikhail Olegovich Dedinkin, Deputy Head of the Department of Western European Fine Art at the State Hermitage Museum.