Among the gallant scenes of the first cards for tapestries and the Ass with Levite from the last Waterfuers, Francisco de Goya (Fuendetodos, Zaragoza, 1746-Bordeaux, France, 1828) established one of the perimeters of modernity in Spain.
From art he made a microscope and a telescope: a way to closely and far the greatness and misery of a convulsed country that also housed the deranged symptom of a continent in transition between two centuries, the XVIII and the XIX.
Goya exhausted the first and inaugurated the second.
And, at the same time, he premiered a way to paint.
The figure of the Aragonese artist is one of the most powerful of the modernity of painting.
And the attraction force of him grows.
Switzerland has joined the fever with an exhibition in the mythical Beyeler Foundation of Basel, a city that houses one of the nodriza naves of the pharmaceutical industry.
The exhibition, designed by Martin Schwander and driven by Samuel Keller (Director of the Foundation) and Isabela Mora (head of the Beyeler International Program) has a title without adornment: Francisco de Goya and Lucent.
He opened yesterday, the Letizia Queen and will be open until next January 23.
The event is great.
Not to add an international exhibition around one of the axes of art, but because of the deployment of works that collects: 75 paintings (including a dozen lent by the meadow museum) and a hundred drawings.
Many of these pieces belong to particular Spanish and international collections and very rarely have been able to see outside their spaces.
The sample travels all the stages of the artist.
From the first tannos to the aesthetic and moral radicalism of his last period in exile, he who incubates the scenes of an atrocious country – ours-concrete in black paintings -presentation at exposure through an audiovisual part of Philippe Parreno-
and in the waterforts of the series of the whims and the disasters of the war.
But the Beyeler Foundation (mythical design of the Italian architect Renzo Piano) gathers, in addition, some exceptional fabrics such as the dressed Maja and the Duquesa de Alba white.
Also exceptional pieces such as Cucanca (1787) and the fall, which discourage the principle of the artist’s maturity period.
This period is the most intense period (also in the sample) and the most explored in studies on their work and footprint.
In these pieces, that dream of ethics and freedom in which Francisco de Goya believed and whose Spanish failure decided to march accepting exile as a protest, as a rejection, as an aid.
He developed all genres, although the portrait was one of his main signs.
He linked to court (Carlos IV) and the people.
To the street to the nobles.
And at each end he managed to be himself.
The Commissioner of the Exhibition stressed that Goya “was not only a portrait of bourgeois, aristocrats and kings, but also of crazy, prisoners, unnamed and shipwrecked. He tried to get out of the morale of the time, from that neoclassical art that domesticated
Both the look and the topics. ”
The one who now recovers Basel is the total artist we know, but above all the rebellious subject, the citizen who chose as the only possible way he who marked the melody of his demons.
