Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes es una figura fundamental que une las épocas de los Viejos Maestros y los artistas modernos. Su obra, que actúa como crónica de la historia, se caracteriza por sus elementos subversivos y subjetivos. A través de su audaz manejo de la pintura y sus técnicas innovadoras, Goya sentó las bases para las generaciones posteriores de artistas. Su arte ofrece una síntesis única de comentario histórico y expresión artística profundamente personal, que sigue inspirando y provocando.
En esta colección, la editorial Gustavo Gil ofrece una serie de libros monográficos sobre numerosos artístas de vital importancia en la historia del arte. Esta publicación presenta la reproducción completa de las cuatro series de la obra gráfica de Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, Los Desastres de la Guerra, La Tauromaquia y Los Disparates.
After a serious illness in 1792, Goya spent five years recuperating and preparing himself for the burst of creativity that was to follow. He read deeply in the French revolutionary philosophers. From Rousseau he evolved the idea that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters, but that coupled with reason "it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." In Spain he saw a country that had abandoned reason, and he peopled Los Caprichos with the grotesque monsters that result from such an action. Plate after plate shows witches, asses, devils, and other strange creatures, many of which are caricatures of members of the society against which Goya was fighting.The plates were first published in 1799. There are still in existence, however, six extremely rare sets of artist's proofs, considered by most who have managed to see them as infinitely superior to the work actually published. Now, for the first time, this edition reproduces one of these sets of 80 prints, together with the "Prado" manuscript, a commentary on the plates. In addition, this collection contains supplementary material to the Los Caprichos series, inlcuding a never-before-published study for Caprichos 10; three unique proofs of plates probably intended for publication with the others; a preliminary drawing for plate I, a self-portrait of Goya (which appears as the frontispiece to this volume); and a unique proof of "Woman in Prison" which may represent an earlier version of Caprichos 32.
30x22. 321 pgs. Ilustraciones en b/n y en color.
La exposición muestra las 224 estampas que componen las cuatro series de grabados de Goya que se conservan en el fondo de obra sobre papel de la colección del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao: Caprichos (80), Desastres de la Guerra (82), Tauromaquia (40) y Disparates (22). En ellas se plasma su talento y el punto de inflexión que supuso su obra dentro de la historia del grabado, que podrá valorarse aún más, al contraponerse con otras estampas de artistas anteriores, coetáneos y posteriores que también forman parte de la colección del museo.
The strikingly original characterizations and sharply drawn scenes that came to be known posthumously as Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) are among Francisco Goya's most powerful works and one of the masterpieces of Western civilization. Goya's model for his visual indictment of war and its horrors was the Spanish insurrection of 1808 and the resulting Peninsular War with Napoleonic France. The bloody conflict and the horrible famine of Madrid were witnessed by Goya himself, or were revealed to him from the accounts of friends and contemporaries. From 1810 to 1820, he worked to immortalize them in a series of etchings.The artist himself never saw the results. The etchings were not published until 1863, some 35 years after his death. By then, the passions of the Napoleonic era had subsided and the satirical implications in Goya's work were less likely to offend. The Dover edition reproduces in its original size the second state of this first edition, which contained 80 prints. Three additional prints not in the 1863 edition are also included here, making this the most complete collection possible of the etchings Goya intended for this series. The bitter, biting captions are reprinted, along with the new English translations, as are the original title page and preface.
