3 MARCH 2001, Page 51

Goya's flights of fantasy

Martin Gayford on two absorbing exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery

Why draw? There are all manner of reasons. Artists make drawings as preparation for paintings, to try out ideas, to make quick notes of useful items, as five-finger exercises to sharpen their skills, and as finished works of art for sale. But those in the exhibition Goya: Drawings From His Private Albums, part of an excellent double bill at the Hayward Gallery with photographs by Brassai (until 13 May), do not really fit into any of those categories.

Juliet Wilson-Barreau, the curator of the exhibition, quotes another important Goya scholar, Eleanor Sayre, as suggesting that the best description of Goya's albums of drawings is 'journals'. That is, they are records of his thoughts, his feelings, his attitudes and his fantasies. As such, they can be elusive, and hard to interpret — witness the problem that crops up with the very first album, known to scholarship as 'A' and almost certainly drawn at Santacar de Barrameda in 1796.

Goya was staying there on the estate of the Duchess of Alba, a great noblewoman whose husband had recently died and a beauty noted for her big hair. At least one, and probably more of the drawings in this and the next album, show the Duchess in a surprisingly intimate, apparently teasing context.

One shows her in a fit of pique, and is captioned 'She orders them to put the carriage away, ruffles up her hair, and stamps. All because Father Flopwilly told her to her face she looked pale.' These images suggest that he was on relaxed terms with the Duchess. Since the mid-19th century it has often been stated that they were lovers (even that she posed for the `Maja desnuda', who is plainly a different woman).

This kind of story, understandably, has little credence in the austere world of modern art history. Janis Tomlinson notes in a recent book on Goya that

given the social hierarchy of late eighteenthcentury Spain, it is unlikely that the admiration [Goya felt for the Duchess's beauty] would have led to a passionate affair. .. on an even more basic level, it might be asked what the 34-year-old beauty would have seen in a 50-year-old artist, deaf and somewhat infirm.

It might indeed, although one is prompted to muse that stranger alliances have occurred, even in aristocratic circles, and that the company of a painter of genius even if hard of hearing and 50 might have had some charm. Goya himself, infirm or not, seems to have had matters amorous on his mind since these drawings are interleaved with scenes probably observed in the brothels of nearby Cadiz (Sankicar is a wonderfully sleepy town at the mouth of

the Guadalquivir). If the Duchess ever saw this or the other Madrid album, 'B', containing drawings of her, one would guess that she and the painter were pretty close.

But there's the rub. For whether the Duchess or anyone else saw these drawings is exactly what one can't be sure of. Others of the 550 or so album drawings, not in the main the ones in this show, served as raw material for Goya's celebrated series of prints, that began in the late 1790s with 'Los Caprichos' — the caprices — which he originally wanted to entitle 'Los Sueflos', dreams. The 117 drawings included in this exhibition are extremely diverse. Some look like caprices or dreams, others more like memories, notes to himself, private political cartoons.

Some have all the indignation, and some of the horror, of his 'Disasters of War'. A series of bound victims of the Inquisition wearing dunces' caps makes the viewer angry about that cruel and defunct organisation. One is inscribed 'For having Jewish ancestry', another 'They put a gag on her because she talked. And struck her in the face. I saw her, Orosia Moreno, in Saragossa. For knowing how to make mice.' Here Goya shows the standard, and justified, outrage of the Enlightenment at antiquated barbarism, the emotion of Voltaire, His vignette of two naked savages about to cudgel one another suggests that he did not share Rousseau's admiration of the nobility of the uncivilised. Indeed, Goya was fascinated by violence, barbarism, fantasy and cruelty. He also had an underestimated quality, a dark and sardonic sense of humour, and an eye for the curious. One sheet shows a monk, for example, whose ass unfortunately caught the attention of a horse, the monk being squashed between the two (this, he notes, he saw as a boy). All of the above tendencies perhaps explain his obsession with witches, the subject of a complete album (as well as many prints and paintings).

The peculiarity of Goya is that his long career straddles the watershed between the old world and the modern one. He began as the servant of an absolute monarch, and the universal Church; he ended an octogenarian in exile in Bordeaux pursuing personal obsessions and whims in just the same way as, say, Picasso. Halfway through his life, the kind of personal fantasy that exists in the margins and backgrounds of his earlier work and that of predecessors such as the Tiepolos, father and son, takes centre stage. These drawings — to which this is the first exhibition that has been exclusively devoted — show him at work entirely for his own satisfaction.

Downstairs there is an almost equally absorbing array of images by Brassal. A Hungarian born in part of what is now Romania, Brassai was part of the School of Paris — the phenomenon whereby artists from Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan, even England were drawn to the French capital during the early decades of the century. The difference was that rather than being a sculptor or painter Brassai — he took his adopted name from his native town of Brasso — was a photographer.

But he was a photographer in the same vein as Henri Cartier-Bresson: a photographer with a painter's eye. In fact, one suspects a painter wannabe. Much of his work is close to that of painter contemporaries. He engraved photographic plates to produce, in effect, pastiches of the style of his friend Picasso (whose studio he documented in beautiful shots). He photographed natural forms such as shells and plants, also a source for Arp, Brancusi and Nicholson. Like Dail he was fascinated by Art Nouveau metro stations, His shots of graffiti parallel and precede the art brut of Dubuffet. But, somehow, Brassal's eye only worked when it was looking through a viewfinder. His actual drawings are weak, his sculptures, like the engraved photographic plates, pastiche.

Above all, he recorded the drama and atmosphere of Paris between the wars: the nightlife, brothels, apache gangs, deserted night-time streets. When I met the painter Balthus, who died last week, a few years ago he told me that Paris in 1939 was so beautiful nobody wanted to leave. Nowadays, he felt, it had changed so much he no longer wished to see it. Brassal, and Balthus himself, produced the most memorable images of that vanished town.