Goya - Tapa dura

Francisco Goya is a universal figure of Spanish art, one of its greatest figures, at least in the inmense breadth of his range, whether in iconography or in technique, in expression or in image.Goya was endowed with a very rare gift for the interpretation and communication of plastic values, but also for the discovery and re-creation of beauty and human meaning in the most arid elements of nature. His inexhaustible vitality enable him to make interesting any type of pictorial or graphic representation, presenting with equal intensity the terrible and the dramatic, or infusing depth into the banal and superficial themes which at times.

When asked who he considered an importance influence, Picasso only mentioned Goya (1746-1828). But, his extremely influence has arrived to a lot of modern and contemporary painters, such as Manet, the Expressionist movement on early twentieth-century and, most recently, Francis Bacon and Sigmar Polke. As painter of the Spanish Court, he created series of tapestry cartoons, wallpaintings, and individuals and group portraits, but, after his serious illness in late 1792, he starts an important body of uncommissioned works that introduces new elements which greatly enhance their expressive potential. This book, wrote by José Gudiol, one of the most renowed specialist in Spanish painting, is focuses on Goya s profoundly disturbing imagery, and demonstrates that his modernity derives from his lifelong investigation of what lies behind the world of appearances and convention.