Even if the year is not over yet, the “Goya” exhibition in the Basel Fondation Beyeler can be proclaimed the most impressive show in 2021 without any major risk.

After all, who would deny that Goya set the course for art for modernity about ten years before 1800 and twenty-eight years after that until his death?

Have you ever met an artist who doesn't adore him or at least appreciate him?

Goya was and is an “artist's artist” - Manet quotes his naked “Maja” from the Prado, the dressed one can be seen in Basel - in his “Olympia”.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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Manet's important painting “The Balcony” is an undisguised quotation from Goya's “Maja auf einer Balkon”, which was created around 1810, as well as “Maja and Celestina on a balcony”, painted around 1808, both with their robes flickering in front of their bodies to see in Basel.

However, on Manet's balcony, there are daughters from a good family instead of Goya's prostitutes at Freierschau.

Picasso freely makes use of Goya, for example in his shooting picture from 1808 for his horror scenarios from the Korean War, which show the same, and in the "Desastres de la Guerra" for Guernica.

This is where falsehood and pretense prevail

Modernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have been different without Goya. This makes it a perfect fit for the Fondation Beyeler, which focuses on Impressionism around Manet and Classical Modernism around Picasso, and, as has often been the case in previous years, concludes the show of old masters with a video created especially for the exhibition by a contemporary, namely with Philippe Parrenos "Quinta del sordo". Goya's “Country House of the Pigeons” on the outskirts of Madrid, whose fourteen jet-black “Pinturas negras” the painter brought directly onto the walls after he was almost completely deaf in 1793, Parreno moves brushstroke for brushstroke with his camera eye.

But Goya's art continues to captivate every normal observer to this day, especially when in Basel, with seventy-one paintings, twenty more are being presented than in the previous Goya exhibition sixteen years ago in the Berlin National Gallery. Some of them are leaving Madrid aristocratic collections for the first time since Goya's time. From the earliest tapestry boxes to the very last works shortly before his death, everything important can be seen, plus a hundred of his most important drawings, graphics and sketchbooks. The world that Goya shows is not a pleasant one. From the beginning, he has been falsehood and pretended, he shows rape, robbery, cannibalism - and not just in small, easily overlooked paper formats, but in medium-sized paintings. Why, if at all,a style name should be placed on him, the closest to the black romanticism, as it is also poured into pictures by Füssli, Piranesi, Blake or the Marquis de Sade in order to fight the inner demons.

He revealed the essence of every person in the face

Goya thus becomes an increasingly black-galled sociologist of the brush. He analyzes social situations and networks mercilessly by looking very closely. On one of his first major commissions, the "Family of the Infante Don Luis" from 1783/84, he undermines all conventions of the group portrait by placing the Infante's wife in the center of the picture, but showing her doing the banal hair combing while Don Luis himself is shown playing a vain card game with a golden ace. Seldom stupid other family members look out of the picture questioningly; He positions himself as a court painter in the tradition of Velazquez '"Meninas" to the left of the easel, but lets the white powdered wig slide back on his head just enough that the natural brown of his hair can be seen underneath,which one would be only too happy to interpret as dissidence - naturalness versus artificiality and pretense.