GOYA: Los Proverbios: Marvels and Monsters

The great, late-eighteenth-century Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes is famous for his court portraits and his monumental print series The Disasters of War. Less well-known, and created towards the end of the artist’s turbulent life, Los Proverbios is Goya’s most ambiguous series of etchings and aquatints, presenting the human condition as a series of “disparates” or follies. No-one escapes the artist’s ironic gaze — not the church, the gentry, the military, the poor — victim and victimizer alike are scrutinized in eighteen compelling vignettes. The bold, highly contrasting pictorial structure of these prints (often dark, massive figures looming in the foreground against minimal background information) echoes and intensifies Goya’s stark view of his subject-matter. Yet, despite their clarity of form and vision, these images are the most diffcult of all Goya’s works to interpret in a socio-political sense, and have prompted much discussion as to their intended meanings. The works have been loaned from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (gift of the Robert Tanenbaum Family Trust 1999). The texts accompanying the exhibition are in Spanish, French and English. (Scrymgeour Gallery)