Fred Licht - Goya - 2001

Magnificent book by Fred Licht on Goya, on art, his artistic influences, and his integration into society.
Many illustrations in black and white and color of Goya's works and of the artists who inspired him.
Very good condition of the book and its case, accompanied by a booklet of 6 reproductions of engravings taken from the book.

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is a Spanish painter and printmaker. His work includes easel paintings, mural paintings, etchings, and drawings. He introduced several stylistic ruptures that initiated Romanticism and announced the beginning of contemporary painting. Goyesian art is considered a precursor to the pictorial avant-gardes of the 20th century.
After an apprenticeship in his homeland, immersed in late Baroque style and pious images, he travels to Italy in 1770, where he comes into contact with Neoclassicism, which he adopts when he settles in Madrid in parallel with a Rococo style linked to his work as a tapestry designer for the Royal Factory Santa Barbara.
Having become deaf in 1793, he creates a series of tin-painted works, which he called “caprice and invention,” marking his maturity phase and his transition toward Romantic aesthetics.

His work reflects the caprices of the history of his time, and above all the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars in Spain. The series of prints The Disasters of War is almost a modern reportage on the atrocities committed and foregrounds a heroism where the victims are individuals who do not belong to any particular class or condition.

In the early 19th century, he also begins to paint other portraits and paves the way to a new bourgeois art. At the end of the Franco-Spanish conflict, he paints two large canvases on the uprising of May 2 and May 3, 1808, which establish a precedent both aesthetically and thematically for historical paintings.

His masterpiece is the Black Paintings, painted in oil on the walls of his country house. With them, Goya anticipated contemporary painting and various avant-garde movements of the 20th century.

Fred Licht (1928-2019) was an art historian, museum curator, and German-American university professor, a specialist in Francisco de Goya.

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