Goya's Graphic Imagination

Abstract

He stares directly at us, intensely, and worried, as is communicated through the positioning of his irises, each centered in the middle of the eye, touching the upper eyelid but not the lower, and through his peaked eyebrows.These are the eyes of Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) in a self-portrait drawing from the mid-1790s (fig.1).Diminutive in size, at 6 by 3 5/8 inches, yet enormous in scale and emotion, it could serve as an emblem for Goya's Graphic Imagination, a compact yet potent exhibition of the artist's prints and drawings on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Spring 2021.The exhibition contained around a hundred works, occupying three relatively intimate rooms of the museum typically reserved for exhibitions of works on paper, and spilling into the adjacent hallway.It is entirely fitting that Goya's self-portrait had pride of place in the exhibition, isolated on a pedestal and greeting us as we approach the space (fig.2).In addition to echoing the spirit and scale of the exhibition, organized thoughtfully and insightfully by Mark McDonald, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it embodies some of the key interrelated themes explored throughout the chronologically arranged display: the human likeness to other animals, suggested in the self-portrait by Goya's unruly hair, which circles his face like a mane; and human foible, implied by the medal he wears, with his name written upside-down, as if to be a gesture of self-criticism of his own vanity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.