| Notes: [PRINTS]. Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828). "Ni por esas [Neither do these] (Los Desastres de la Guerra [The Disasters of War], Plate 11)." Madrid: Calcografia for the Real Academia, 1923. 5th edition, limited to 100. Aquatint copper-plate etching with lavis, drypoint, and burin, lettered and faintly numbered in plate. Printed black on thin laid paper with vertical chain-lines and Joseph Guarro castle watermark along bottom edge. Sheet: (13 1/4 x 10 5/8 inches). Plate: (8 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches). "War always weakens and often completely shatters the crust of customary decency which constitutes a civilization. Beneath it lies - What? Look through Goya's 'Disasters' and find out. The abyss of bestiality and diabolism and suffering is almost bottomless." - Aldous Huxley, "The Complete Etchings of Goya," p. 12. "The Disasters of War," produced between 1810 and 1820, was not published until March of 1863, thirty-five years after Goya's death. The 80-to-85 plate series is Goya's caustic though humanitarian witness to the Peninsular War between Spain and Napoleon's French Empire, which lasted from 1808 to 1814. Reaching beyond the particulars of Spain's immediate situation, Goya instead condemned war's general irrationality and brutality, the result of which, as seen today in Palestine, is always suffering, pain, and death. As such, Goya's series of etchings transcends time and space, touching on the eternal nature of man's inhumanity to man. It is considered the seminal work for social protest art. "The Disasters of War" was the title the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando gave to the first published edition of Goya's etchings; Goya also referred to the series as "Ravages," and wrote a title on an early album of proofs given to a friend that read "Fatales consecuencias de la sangrienta guerra en Espana con Buonaparte, y otros caprichos enfaticos [Fatal consequences of the bloody war in Spain with Bonaparte, and other emphatic whims]." This plate, captioned "Ni por esas [Neither do these]," forms a small sub-series with Plates 9 and 10, all of which deal with sexual violence as a war tactic, and its title is a direct continuation of the previous two. Robert Hughes, long the art critic for Time Magazine, described this print in his 2003 biography of Goya as: "Compositionally the most developed of the three rape scenes, an image that shows to a sublime degree what power Goya could develop when his talent for showing awful events in terms of utter compositional starkness was fully at work. The man, a French soldier, is dragging his victim backward over some obstacle. There is a brutal tension in their arms, which creates the unifying diagonal of the design: the man pulling, the woman's body helplessly extended. On the earth, at her feet, is a naked baby, torn from her and thrown away. Behind them, a second soldier is overwhelming another woman, who holds up her hands in a useless prayer of supplication." And to the left of the composition, a church haunts this scene of war between two ostensibly Christian countries like a specter. While in the lower right corner of the print, almost lost in the darkness, is a man hunched over in despair. One infers the man is related to one of the women and is on the verge of witnessing the rape that is likely to follow. Hofer translates the print's captioned title simply as "Or these," and Hughes as "Nor those." Goya's friend Juan Agustín Cean Bermudez (1749-1829) composed the series's piquant titles from Goya's own notes, though another hand actually etched them. Their laconic power has been lasting: the contemporary artist John Baldessari (1931-2020) borrowed this print's title for an exhibition and catalog of his own. The print's copperplate is today found in the Calcografia, while the original drawing from around 1810 to 1814 is in the collection of the Prado and is numbered 167. The preparatory drawing is in reverse in sepia pen and ink with red crayon retouches. [Harris] Harris describes the 5th edition of "Disasters" as having a "tendency to over-ink the plates" with "a curious spotty effect." But that same gritty, blown-out visuality of the edition movingly parallels Goya's disturbed war-crime imagery in a manner similar to Xerox-ed punk flyers that use the disintegration of the surface image to reflect social disintegration. This print's paper is toned in sections from past matting and has four small pieces of tape on its verso from framing. Otherwise in very good condition. References: Beruete y Moret 113. Delteil 130. Harris 131. Hofer 11. Hofmann 155. Hughes, "Goya," pp. 291-292. Huxley, "The Complete Etchings of Goya," p. 12. LeFort 155. Loga 695. Mayer III.11. |