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PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.25 x 11 in. / 400 pgs / 260 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 9   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780878468089 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00 GBP £40.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
WORLD

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Boston, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 10/12/14-01/19/15

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MFA PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

Goya: Order & Disorder

Text by Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Frederick Ilchman, Janis A. Tomlinson, Clifford S. Ackley, Jane E. Braun, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Gudrun Maurer, Elisabetta Polidori, Sue W. Reed, Benjamin Weiss, Juliet Wilson-Bareau.

Goya: Order & DisorderFrancisco Goya has been widely celebrated as the most important Spanish artist of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns, and an astute observer of the human condition in all its complexity. The many-layered and shifting meanings of his work have made him one of the most studied artists in the world. Few, however, have made the ambitious attempt to explore his work as a painter, printmaker and draftsman across media and the timeline of his life. This book does just that, presenting a comprehensive and integrated view of Goya's most important paintings, prints, and drawings through the themes and imagery that continually challenged or preoccupied the artist. They reveal how he strove relentlessly to understand and describe human behavior and emotional states, even at their most orderly or disorderly extremes, in elegant and incisive portraits, dramatic and monumental history paintings, and series of prints and drawings of a satirical, disturbing and surreal nature. Derived from the research for the largest Goya art exhibition in North America in a quarter-century, this book takes a fresh look at one of the greatest artists in history by examining the fertile territory between the two poles that defined the range of his boundlessly creative personality.

Francisco José Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was born in Fuendetodos, Aragón, in the northeast of Spain. Goya was court painter to the Spanish Crown, and famously documented the Peninsular War (1807–1814) between France and Spain in his harrowing Disasters of War series. An important bridge to the modernist era, Goya's oeuvre provided a crucial precedent for artists such as Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon.

Goya's portrait, "Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga" (1788) is reproduced from Goya: Order & Disorder.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Bookforum

Christopher Lyon

Goya: Order & Disorder automatically invites comparisons with Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, a volume produced a quarter century ago, when MFA Boston last presented a major Goya exhibition. The new book’s title suggests a historical approach to its subject–like the earlier volume’s–reflecting the massive changes in Spain and Europe during Goya’s lifetime. Instead, it delivers a thematic, historically untethered account of Goya’s achievement, making it hard to grasp how a young, savvy striver–many of whose commissioned works of the 1770s and early 1780s are underwhelming–evolved into the artist who created the bitingly satirical Caprichos in the late 1790s, who responded to Spain’s brutal guerrilla war against French invaders with some of the most indelible images in Western art, and whose late work foreshadows, in the words of Fred Licht, the “modern temper in art.” Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment presents Goya’s oeuvre in three chronological segments that segregate prints and drawings, which are uniquely important in Goya’s oeuvre. The effect is to show the artist’s transformation from a creature of the Age of Reason into a harbinger of our darker time. But the present book, organized thematically, scrambles the chronology of Goya’s career, so that works with quite different audiences and aims (noble portrait versus piercing social critique) appear cheek by jowl. Gathered under the theme “Hunting” are anodyne early tapestry cartoons; an unintentionally comic print copying a royal portrait by Velázquez, whose subject poses as a hunter; and, from Los Caprichos, the print All Will Fall, in which bird men, lured by a beautiful harpy, are ensnared and tortured by women with evident relish, an image that crosses the line between moralizing allegory and penetrating psychology.

Goya: Order & Disorder

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/10/2014

Goya: Order & Disorder

Goya: "Maria del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Alvarez de Toledo y Silva, Thirteenth Duchess of Alba," (1797)

Goya's iconic 1797 portrait of Maria del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Alvarez de Toledo y Silva, Thirteenth Duchess of Alba, is reproduced from Goya: Order & Disorder, the MFA Boston's gorgeous and immediately indispensible 400-page catalog for the first major Goya exhibition in North America in almost three decades. Until recently, the Prado's Manuela B. Mena Marqués writes in the book, discussions of this portrait—in which the figure famously points to the inscription "Solo Goya/Only Goya" before her feet—"revolved around the sitter's supposed affair with the artist. Several factors, however, argue against such an affair ever having taken place. These include the status of the duchess in 1797 as both a widow and a member of one of Spain's most important noble families, as well as her grief at the unexpected death of her young husband. To these we might add Goya's awareness of social parameters, which—as an artist striving to advance his standing as portraitist of Spain's most esteemed families—he would hardly violate. The inscriptions on the rings worn by the duchess, juxtaposing the names Goya and Alba (and thus equating the name of one of the most distinguished families of Spain with that of a Court Painter), have long been cited as evidence of that affair; however, they were added in the mid-nineteenth century." continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/10/2014

Goya: Order & Disorder

Goya: "Seated Giant" (ca.1818)

The last of the old masters, the first of the moderns; Goya's works in all media are gathered in this opulent volume, published on the occasion of the largest North American Goya show in more than 25 years—on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Sunday through January 19. Featured image, "Seated Giant" (by 1818) is discussed in the chapter on power struggles: "The curvature of the earth on which he sits alludes to the cosmic scale of his power, but he turns his back as if resisting his dominion. The moment is the cusp of day, with the crescent moon setting and light breaking at the horizon. He turns, as well, from the light. The giant's form and hunched, melancholic posture have been compared to to representations of titans such as Saturn (Cronus in Greek myth) and Hercules. But, in spite of the figure's strength and bulk and apparent derivation from antique sculpture (the Apollo Belvedere in Goya's Italian Notebook), this is not the idealized form o a go: the treatment of the musculature, hair, and face is naturalistic," Manuella B. Mena Marqués writes, "…its subject and mood suggest Goya's preoccupations after the war; the ambivalent treatment of the giant as powerful yet withdrawn could refer to the defeated Napoleonic empire, the Spanish nation, or the artist himself. Although power is fleeting, this enigmatic giant remains permanently suspended in space and time." continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/30/2014

Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

In "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1797-99), from Goya's Caprichos series, the sleeping figure is a self-portrait of sorts, depicting the artist as an "alternate version of himself," according to Manuela B. Mena Marqués' essay in our Halloween favorite, Goya: Order & Disorder. An owl at the artist's shoulder offers up a stylus or crayon, while the image of the artist dreaming describes a "place where reason and the laws of nature have been suspended." Goya's titular inscription "takes on a different meaning when understood as 'The dream of reason produces monsters,' a translation equally possible, as sueño can mean either sleep or dream. Understood that way, the monsters are the dream produced by the inventive mind. It is not surprising that in a print devoted to the concept of creativity, Goya uses a term that requires the viewer to hold simultaneously equally valid and contradictory ideas." continue to blog


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