The Disasters of War - Technique and Style

Technique and Style

Detailing and protesting the ugliness of life is a common theme throughout the history of Spanish art, from the dwarves of Diego Velázquez to Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937). Reflecting on The Disasters of War, biographer Margherita Abbruzzese notes that Goya asks that the truth "be seen and ... shown to others; including those who have no wish to see it .... And the blind in spirit stay their eyes on the outward aspect of things, then these outward aspects must be twisted and deformed until they cry out what they are trying to say." The series follows a wider European tradition of war art and the examination of the effect of military conflict on civilian life—probably mostly known to Goya via prints. This tradition is reflected especially in Dutch depictions of the Eighty Years' War with Spain, and in the work of 16th-century German artists like Hans Baldung. It is believed Goya owned a copy of a famous set of 18 etchings by Jacques Callot known as Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (1633), which record the devastating impact on Lorraine of Louis XIII's troops during the Thirty Years' War.

The dead man in plate 37, Esto es peor (This is worse), forms a mutilated body of a Spanish fighter spiked on a tree, surrounded by the corpses of French soldiers. It is based in part on the Hellenistic fragment of a male nude, the Belvedere Torso by the Athenian "Apollonios son of Nestor". Goya had earlier made a black wash drawing study of the statue during a visit to Rome. In Esto es peor he subverts the classical motifs used in war art through his addition of a degree of black theatre – the branch piercing the body through the anus, twisted neck and close framing. The man is naked; a daring factor for Spanish art in the 19th century, during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Art critic Robert Hughes remarked that the figures in this image "remind us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabres, neo-classicists like Menges would have been in aesthetic raptures over them."

Goya abandons colour in the series, believing that light, shade and shadow provide for a more direct expression of the truth. He wrote, "In art there is no need for colour. Give me a crayon and I will 'paint' your portrait." He uses line not so much to delineate shape but, according to art historian Anne Hollander, "to scratch forms into existence and then splinter them, as a squinting, half blind eye might apprehend them, to create the distorting visual detritus that shudders around the edge of things seen in agonized haste .... This 'graphic' kind of clarity can be most sharp when it is most jagged." The immediacy of the approach suited his desire to convey the primitive side of man's nature. He was not the first to work in this manner; Rembrandt had sought a similar directness, but did not have access to aquatint. William Blake and Henry Fuseli, contemporaries of Goya's, produced works with similarly fantastical content, but, as Hollander describes, they muted its disturbing impact with "exquisitely applied linearity ... lodging it firmly in the safe citadels of beauty and rhythm."

In his 1947 book on Goya's etchings, English author Aldous Huxley observed that the images depict a recurrent series of pictorial themes: darkened archways "more sinister than those even of Piranesi's Prisons"; street corners as settings for the cruelty of the disparities of class; and silhouetted hilltops carrying the dead, sometimes featuring a single tree serving as gallows or repository for dismembered corpses. "And so the record proceeds, horror after horror, unalleviated by any of the splendors which other painters have been able to discover in war; for, significantly, Goya never illustrates an engagement, never shows us impressive masses of troops marching in column or deployed in the order of battle .... All he shows us is war's disasters and squalors, without any of the glory or even picturesqueness."

The Disasters of War is the second of Goya's four major print series, which constitute almost all of his most important work in the medium. He also created 35 prints early in his career—many of which are reproductions of his portraits and other works—and about 16 lithographs while living in France. Goya created his first series, the 80-plate Caprichos, between 1797 and 1799 to document "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and ... the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual." Caprichos was put on sale in 1799, but was almost immediately withdrawn after threats from the Inquisition. In The Disasters of War's first two groups of prints, Goya largely departs from the imaginative, synthetic approach of Caprichos to realistically depict life-and-death scenes of war. In the last group, the Caprichos sense of the fantastic returns.

Between 1815 and 1816, Goya produced the Tauromachia, a series of 33 bullfighting scenes, during a break from The Disasters of War. Tauromachia was not politically sensitive, and was published at the end of 1816 in an edition of 320—for sale individually or in sets—without incident. It did not meet with critical or commercial success. In France, Goya completed a set of four larger lithographs, Los toros de Burdeos (The Bulls of Bordeaux). His final series, known as Los Disparates (The Follies), Proverbios (Proverbs), or Sueños (Dreams), contains 22 large plates and at least five drawings that are seemingly part of the series but which were never etched. All these were left in Madrid—apparently incomplete and with only a handful of proofs printed—when Goya went to France in 1823. One plate is known to have been etched in 1816, but little else is established about the chronology of the works, or Goya's plans for the set.

Goya worked on The Disasters of War during a period when he was producing images more for his own satisfaction than for any contemporary audience. His work came to rely less on historical incidents than his own imagination. Many of the later plates contain fantastical motifs which can be seen as a return to the imagery of the Caprichos. In this, he is relying on visual clues derived from his inner life, rather than anything that could be recognised from real events or settings.