Dreaming of dystopia

VISUAL ART:FRANCISCO DE GOYA is, by general consent, one of the most brilliant graphic artists who has ever lived. Apart altogether from his achievements as a painter, his output as a printmaker would be more than enough to secure his place in history. As well as individual graphic works, Goya made two extraordinary series of prints, Los Caprichosand The Disastersof War. The Chester Beatty has in the past exhibited its complete collection of the latter and now the Instituto Cervantes is showing Los Caprichosin its Dublin gallery (the set was printed from Goya's plates in 1929). While the Disasters, made in response to the artist's experience of the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, are a searing account of human cruelty and the barbarity of warfare, the Los Caprichos, published in 1799, comment on "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society".

One of the Caprichoshas attained iconic status, and has come to symbolise Goya's art and temperament. Although originally intended as the initial image, it is number 43 in the series; in it a man – Goya, perhaps – has fallen asleep over his work table. His sleeping form is surrounded by a menagerie of nighttime creatures, cats and owls and bats. "The sleep of reason produces monsters" is a loose translation of the caption. A commentary, probably Goya's own, elaborates: "The imagination detached from reason produces terrible monstrosities; the imagination combined with reason is mother of the arts and a source of marvels."

It would make sense to have this image as the first in the series, particularly if we take the figure as being the artist, and the succeeding works as the caprices of his dreaming mind. They plunge us into a very strange world indeed, a theatre of cruelty in which venality, superstition, hypocrisy, vanity, spite and idiocy dictate the behaviour of a cast of peasants and aristocrats, monks and judges, killers and victims, whole menageries of beasts and, most startling of all, creatures who are at once both animal and human. Goya lambasts the clergy and takes several serious swipes at the Inquisition – not something to be done lightly at the time. The fact that the album of prints was withdrawn from sale a few years after its initial publication has been variously interpreted as evidence of suppression, or of his nervousness about potential retribution. But it seems more likely that Los Caprichosjust never really found its public and Goya gave up trying.

The first etching in the published album is a straightforward self-portrait. A commentary in the National Library in Madrid elaborates: “A true self-portrait, in a bad mood, with a satirical look.” Goya, well dressed and wearing a top hat, gazes to one side, his expression fixed in a quizzical frown. He looks sceptical rather than bad-humoured, and his bearing is stately and proud.

HE WAS SOMETHING of a dandy. The son of a gilder, he was born in Zaragoza in 1746. After being repeatedly rebuffed in his attempts to win an academic scholarship in Madrid – some accounts plausibly suggest he was a difficult student – he went to Italy and gained his first stamp of official approval in Parma. Back in Spain, in the early 1770s, he studied with academician Francisco Bayeu, married Bayeu’s sister Josefa and found work in the Escorial, at first designing tapestries, then establishing his reputation as a portraitist, eventually becoming court painter.

It seems a little incongruous that Goya, a man of fiery temperament and a sharp social critic with Enlightenment sympathies, was painter to the Spanish court, that bastion of privilege and tradition, throughout a period of unprecedented political upheaval in Europe. Many of his paintings of Spanish royalty and nobility have been interpreted as being slyly satirical. While, to our eyes, there is often something buffoonish about the cut of the aristocrats, Charles IV and his family, to take one particularly prominent example, were apparently happy enough with their group portrait.

As he aged, Goya's vision became increasingly dark, and the decisive event in this progression was his collapse into serious illness in 1792. He might have had cholera. There is a great deal of speculation about what exactly ailed him but he may have been afflicted with more than one serious problem. It took him years to recuperate and even then he was left deaf, suffered dreadfully from tinnitus and was prone to fantastic, perhaps paranoid imaginings. There has been much speculation about a putative relationship with the Duchess of Alba, which may have come to grief in 1796 (in his book on the artist, Robert Hughes is sceptical about the possibility that they were ever lovers). He read about the French Revolution and its idealistic underpinnings. Los Caprichosemerged out of this period of physical, emotional and intellectual turmoil.

It is too simplistic to see Goya either as a Modernist time-traveller in 18th-century Spain, or as a champion of the Enlightenment battling the forces of darkness. In their enormously detailed book, Goya: The Last Carnival, Victor Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch focus on Los Caprichosand situate Goya firmly in his own time. The historical context they provide includes revolutionary ferment, the end-of-century anxiety that tends to afflict societies generally and was certainly prevalent then, and the cyclical phenomenon of carnival, during which the world is turned upside-down and the normal order of things is reversed. Hence the humans carrying animals, the ridicule of institutions, the laws of nature overturned, and scenes of wild and lewd behaviour, all evident in the etchings. Carnival might seem largely peripheral, but Stoichita and Coderch emphasise its pivotal role in European society, a role first identified by Mikhail Bakhtin.

In detailing an extensive literature of Goya's time, however, they lead us to one frustrating conclusion. At first glance the import of many of the Caprichosseems bewilderingly obscure, particularly in some of the more grotesquely complex inventions, and that first glance is not misleading. The images are often obscure and oblique. Goya was not only addressing an audience appreciative of indirection and ambiguity, but also an audience capable of seeing what he was getting at because they shared his cultural landscape. They could get the references. Unfortunately, when it came to the point, they weren't that interested in them.

The difficulty of interpreting Goya’s images makes the dual, concise commentaries accompanying the Instituto Cervantes exhibition all the more helpful and enlightening. One commentary is the one he may have written himself, the other clearly by someone close to the work and deeply sympathetic to his ideas. The ambition of the project is extraordinary – to encapsulate the breadth of human folly in 80 tightly composed graphics – and its realisation is stunning. Working from initial preparatory drawings that are themselves terrific, he used the relatively novel process of aquatint to produce sumptuously textured images that sacrifice nothing in terms of incisiveness and spontaneity. Goya was a hugely generous artist and his powers of invention were staggering. They are fully evident in their most concise form in Los Caprichos.

Goya: La Conciencia Retratada (The Portrayed Conscience), Instituto Cervantes Dublin, Lincoln House, Lincoln Place Until July 25