This paperback edition of the award-winning study of the life and work of Goya is filled with the same fine reproductions as the original 1994 hardcover. Goya was one of Spain's greatest and most controversial painters, famous for incisive portraits and the "black" paintings of his later years. Scholars have often attributed Goya's progression from producing light-hearted court paintings to creating somber images of the Napoleonic wars to the artist's serious illness of 1792, which left him deaf. Writer Janis Tomlinson's aim here is to show a continuity in his work before and after the illness. She sees in Goya's vast output--at least 1,800 works--a vital drive to explore and exploit his personal creativity, which was strengthened by the deafness that cut him off from all but visual communication with the world. With detail supported by formidable research, Tomlinson presents Goya's life chronologically, analyzing his work from icons like the Naked Maya to his Los Caprichos series of etchings with their biting social satire and supernatural imaginings of a world turned upside down. The demonic intensity of Saturn Devouring His Son and Witches Sabbath, painted on the walls of his "Country House of a Deaf Man" at the end of his life, suggest to some the work of an embittered madman. Rather, these disturbing paintings reflect Goya's profound empathy for the victims of a predatory and unjust society--empathy that a modern audience readily shares. --John Stevenson


From Publishers Weekly
Modern interpretations of Goya as a political artist, proto-Romantic rebel, fantasist or realist capture partial truths about the protean Spanish painter, suggests Columbia University art history professor Tomlinson in this meticulous, sumptuously illustrated study featuring 210 color and 70 black-and-white plates. By viewing Goya's career as a lifelong experiment with image-making, she shows how his art became a self-perpetuating process as his works fed off one another. Tomlinson argues unpersuasively that Goya's royal portraits, usually seen as savage satires, actually evince sympathy for his often homely or awkward subjects. She is more successful in elucidating his kaleidoscopic view of evil in the Los Caprichos etchings, his innovative small-scale oils and his investigations of irrationality and destructiveness in scenes of madhouses, war, the Inquisition and popular spectacles. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
These three books are part of a series of brief monographs on big-name artists that also includes titles on Rembrandt, Monet, Bosch, da Vinci, Caravaggio, Gauguin, van Gogh, Titian, and C?zanne. The popularity of the artists, the glitzy format, and the low price will probably guarantee sales. Reading these three installments, however, was more bewildering than enlightening. The publisher states that they are a perfect gift or study companion for art history students and art lovers alike. Yet art history students expect and deserve bibliographies and citations (neither of which are present), and art lovers will probably not appreciate the number of illustrations printed right into the book gutters. The text portions are well written, but editorial negligence in other areas is distracting: inconsistencies, typographical errors, and incorrect headings appear throughout, and illustrations are included in sections where they do not seem to belong. Even the covers have misleading juxtapositions. The Matisse volume features his portrait prominently under his name, but under Goya's name there appears a servant from one of his paintings. And whoever is pictured under D?rer's name is a mystery, since he does not look like D?rer, but no identification appears anywhere. Some mistakes are glaring; for example, a section headed "Matisse and etching" discusses his lithographs instead. Conversely, D?rer's famous woodcut of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is noted as one of a series of lithographsAa process not even invented yet. The layout of the books is overly complex, with snippets of information under small illustrations scattered about in irregularly alternating color-coded sections. Although the colored sidebars suggest a distinction between "Life and Works," "Background," and "Masterpieces," there is often overlap, and some of the illustrations do not fall into whatever date span distractingly heads each page. Every facing two-page spread is concerned with a particular theme. Although these themes are relevant and interesting, when over 50 of them are presented this way in each book, the end result feels superficial rather than thorough. On top of all this, the film layer over the paperback covers peels away from the edges as one reads the books. Not recommended.AAnn Marie Lane, Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER