Enfilade

From The Taft’s website:

Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos
The Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, 4 December 2010 — 30 January 2011

Francisco José de Goya, "And So Was His Grandfather." ("Caprichos, no. 39: Asta su abuelo."), 1796–1797, aquatint, 1799.

For those who feel a secret empathy with Scrooge and the Grinch, the Taft offers an antidote to Yuletide’s good cheer this winter. The full set of Francisco Goya’s 80 haunting images from Los Caprichos (“The Whims” or “The Fantasies,” published in 1799) confront human hypocrisy, pretense, fear, and irrationality, picturing them in every conceivable form. Goya’s singularly original visions of monsters, specters, corpses, and other bitter or callous beings enact challenges to authority of all kinds, including that of the church and state. Los Caprichos are likely the great Spanish artist’s most influential works and continue to inspire artists to this day. As both prints and images, they are decades ahead of their time. In them, Goya pioneered astonishingly innovative etching techniques, visual forms, and artistic themes, anticipating the later movements known as Realism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. The etchings on view are from an early first edition, one of four sets acquired directly from Goya, and belong now to an American private collector. The exhibition is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions. Goya (1746–1826) is one of the world’s greatest artists, as famous for portraits that seemingly penetrate his sitters’ souls as he is for portrayals of the brutality of
the Napoleonic Wars in Spain (1808–14). The Taft Museum of Art owns an
important oil portrait by Goya, Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, of about 1800.

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Edited by Janis Tomlinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), ISBN: 9780300094930, $75

Janis Tomlinson, “The Changing Face of Women in Goya’s Art”
The Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, 27 January 2011

Throughout his career, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) explored the wide-ranging roles of women in Spanish society–from good mothers to prostitutes, seductive sirens to victims of war. Dr. Janis Tomlinson will explore the changing face of women in Goya’s paintings and prints, with special emphasis on their portrayal in the etchings of Los Caprichos. Tomlinson is director of University Museums at the University of Delaware and has written and spoken extensively on Goya.