'He's Dickensian. His work is all about character, the human clay,' Robert Hughes, Goya's biographer, tells Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
Robert Hughes's biography of Goya begins with a slice of autobiography, something that would seem presumptuous on the part of practically any other writer - think of Norman Mailer on Picasso - but in this case it is warranted and horribly convincing. When Hughes was involved in a dreadful car crash in his native Australia in 1999, he came close to death.
"I was seven months in hospital," he explains. "When you're lying there in intensive care, people assume you have no consciousness. In fact I was having these very vivid, violent narrative fantasies and in one of them Goya and his friends were taunting me. He described me as a disgusting Englishman - well, he got that one wrong."
Hughes imagined Goya taunting him over his inability to get on with the biography he was contracted to write: "I'd been badly blocked." This wasn't because of any antipathy towards his subject. In fact, Goya had long been one of Hughes's heroes.
"The first artwork I ever bought was a reproduction of his engraving, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters," he says. In this oblique, nightmarish self-portrait, owls loom threateningly over a man who has fallen asleep at a table. "In 18th- century Spain, owls did not symbolise wisdom. They were regarded as being nasty, stupid, malevolent birds."
For any prospective biographer, Goya's life presents real problems because, despite his extensive output as an artist, in many respects we know relatively little about him.
He was born in an Aragonese village in 1746, the son of a master gilder, went to school in Saragossa and on to Madrid to study under a court painter whose sister he married. He was in Italy for at least a year.
Back in Madrid and fiercely ambitious, he began, as Hughes puts it, "the scramble up the greasy pole". With some success.
His portrait subjects represent "a small anthology of the socially responsible aristocrats". But he succumbed to a mysterious illness in 1793 - and, Hughes reckons, a nervous breakdown - an illness that left him deaf for the rest of his life. Apart from that, he recovered, and was appointed principal painter to the king in 1799, but following his illness he announced his intention to paint subjects not open to him in his commissioned works, opening up his work to areas of dark, disturbing fantasy.
Hughes doesn't go along with the biographical trend that opts for fabrication and invention when faced with gaps in the record. He does have huge - though measured - empathy for his subject, a rare feeling for character, a brilliant grasp of the complicated cultural and political world within which Goya lived and worked, and the ability to bring all this to life on the page. He resists categorising Goya too glibly, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, and allows a genuinely rounded, complex figure to emerge. You cannot abstract artists from their historical contexts, but more than most Goya was immersed in the concerns of his age. It's clearly a quality that drew Hughes to him.
"He's Dickensian," he says. "His work is all about character, the human clay, as with Dickens. Someone said Dickens's morality is all sympathy. And, like Dickens, Goya is drawn to these exaggerated types."
Part of his greatness is that he was prepared to be a moralist.
"The meaning of his work can't have the same intensity in our ironised culture," says Hughes. "We just don't expect to encounter powerful moral utterances in a work of art these days. And I don't know, but I think it's possible that you may need to be willing to make powerful moral utterances to be a great artist."
He comes down hard on much of the received wisdom about Goya. He is scornful of the popular notion that the artist might have mocked his royal patrons by caricaturing them in his portraits: "That's the purist bullshit. How was he going to keep his job if he made them look ridiculous?"
He's also wary about the easy assumption that Goya was anti-religious. "He could certainly be fiercely critical, but that was because he hated hypocrisy. I actually don't think he was an atheist. I think he was probably moderately religious, but he was against the temporal power of the church. He was vehement in his criticism of priests, not because they were priests but because they were corrupt."
As regards the artist's personal life, despite assorted circumstantial evidence, Hughes thinks it unlikely that he would have had an affair with the Duchess of Alba. He makes a fairly convincing case as to why not; but maybe, he adds, "I just want her for myself. She was gorgeous".
The duchess was not the model, he also argues, for the remarkable double portrait, The Maja, nude and clothed, and he proposes a more likely candidate.
He is much more sympathetic to the clichéd view of Goya as the last of the Old Masters and the first Modernist: "There's truth in the cliché." It's not just a question of contrasting the pre-Enlightenment world of error and superstition with Enlightenment dreams of rationality and progress. For Goya, man is a fundamentally flawed creature, and he is a witness to the horrors of his age "in work that buries the favourite fictions of the Enlightenment".
Often Goya eerily looks forward from his own century to ours. Hughes cites one of his masterpieces, May 3rd, 1808, an account of an atrocity that is as fresh as yesterday, in which French soldiers execute Spanish civilians following a partisan attack on French cavalry. The sheer rawness of the painting is striking, its lack of finesse, as is the brute anonymity of the soldiers.
"It's the greatest war painting of all time," Hughes says. "Previously a certain level of nobility and heroism were allowed in war paintings, but there is no nobility in what's going on there. At the end of the 20th century we understand that the old notion that man is good is just wrong. No one of intelligence believes that any more. Goya was fascinated by arms and armies. I think he was interested in the way the ability to slaughter people en masse had grown out of human consciousness. A history of the 20th century is partly a history of vast advances in the technologies of slaughter."
Hughes is enormously sympathetic to Spanish and Catalan character and culture, as witnessed by his massive Barcelona. "I love the country," he says. "If I was to change citizenship - which I'm not saying I'm going to do - I think I would become a Spanish citizen. I've lived in America for 32 years, my wife, Doris [the painter Doris Downes] and my step- children are American, but I feel out of step with the current presidency. America is rapidly becoming the Great Satan it's accused of being."
Hughes says we have "entered a strange, parodical phase of American democracy. Spain came out of the Franco era very quickly. It's a popular democracy in a way that the US is not at the moment".
Having said which, he acknowledges a yen for extremity in the Spanish character. "The Spanish anarchists were the most frenzied. The English writer, Gerald Brenan, told a story about how, during the civil war, he was sitting on a hillside looking down on Malaga ablaze. An anarchist farmer approached him and asked him if he knew that the anarchists had put Malaga to the torch. Yes, he said, he did know that. Did he know why, asked the farmer. He thought for a minute and he said that actually no, he hadn't got the faintest notion as to why they were doing it. They were burning Malaga, the farmer explained patiently, so that evil would never again exist in any corner of the world."
- Goya by Robert Hughes is published by the Harvill Press, £20