No artist has ever been so eloquent about his society, or seemed so eager to speak beyond the grave to ours, as Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The idea of a universal painter, capable of addressing humanity in general rather than this or that time and culture in particular, may be a pious fiction, but Goya comes as close to fulfilling it as anyone has ever done. We see his face pressed to the glass of our terrible century, mouthing to make his warnings understood.
There has never been a complete retrospective of Goya's work, but the next best thing may be the exhibition "Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment," which was shown at the Prado in Madrid last fall, opened last week at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and will be seen from May 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Organized by Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, director of the Prado, and Eleanor A. Sayre, the eminent Goya scholar who is curator emeritus of drawings, prints and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, the show is a curatorial masterpiece. Its catalog, with essays by Perez Sanchez and Sayre as well as other art historians such as Boston University's Fred Licht, is both a summary of existing Goya scholarship and a breaking of much new ground. Its theme is explicit: to show Goya's role in the Spanish Enlightenment, to present him as a man immersed in the values of liberal thought, to amend his reputation as a solitary fantasist who did sardonic court portraits on the side.
The difficulty with Goya is that for the past hundred years and more, he has been somewhat obscured by the Goyaesque. Our idea of him has been so much shaped by the Romantic sensibility that pervaded Europe after his death that we still like to see him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his - temperament against his times -- the first skeptic of art, the titanic ancestor of surrealism. "It is when Goya abandons himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable," wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in making black clouds, filled with vampires and demons, rolling in the warm atmosphere of a stormy night." The effect of this has been to pluck Goya out of his own age and put him in our own.
There is a case for Goya as the first great modern artist, because of his fascination with the irrational and his critical rage against church and class. Indeed, the inscriptions on two of his prints -- Y no hai remedio (And there is no remedy), referring to the shooting of bound prisoners in the series titled Disasters of War, and El sueno de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason brings forth monsters), the title page of his Caprichos -- seem as fixed above the wars, pogroms and massacres of the 20th century as Dante's words "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" were on the adamantine gates of hell.