A great painter's likeness perfectly caught

Sebastian Smee

GOYA by Robert Hughes Hamill, £20, pp. 429, ISBN 1843430541

`Self-portrait in the Studio' (detail), 1790-95, (Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Aries de San Fernando). From Goya by Werner Hofmann (Thames & Hudson, £45)

Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt was made to blackmail him; he was tried for reckless driving; a scathing attack on his character was conducted in the Australian media on account of his perceived arrogance; he became an unwelcome figure of contempt in his own country, and his estranged only son committed suicide.

From an outside perspective, all this has been dramatic and newsworthy, to be sure. But from the point of view of his admirers one of the most regrettable things to have happened to Robert Hughes is that the story of his struggle with these misfortunes (in most Australian tellings, the sickening secretion of something as close to pure Schadenfreude as you could find anywhere) has threatened to overwhelm the far more edifying story of Hughes's life as a writer.

To all this his latest book, a life of Goya, is a wonderful retort. A 400-page narrative both balanced and nuanced, it is also as vigorously animated by its subject as anything Hughes has written. As an accessible study of Goya's life and work, the book is all you could ask for and more. Sturdy in its organisation, its interpretations, its common sense, it nevertheless fizzes with insights and hops with enthusiasm. There is not a dull sentence — as you would perhaps expect; but neither is there anything damaging, as can sometimes be said of Hughes, in the way of self-admiring rhetoric or over-rehearsed polemic. The book sticks to its brief, largely because it has no need to do otherwise: Hughes has found his ideal subject.

Goya, he writes, was both 'a mighty celebrant of pleasure' and 'one of the few great describers of physical pain, outrage, insult to the body'. A very basic understanding of the capacity of human subjects to be several, often conflicting, things at once — so crucial to the biographer's task yet so frequently lacking — informs and enhances the entire book. 'Detail for detail,' Hughes writes in a discussion of dress, `no great tragic artist has ever been more absorbed, in his untragic moments, by the minutiae of fashion.'

Precisely because of his anachronistic 'modernity', his status as a hinge figure connecting the old and the new, a dense cloud of mythology has accumulated around Goya's name. Everyone has wanted to claim a piece of him, from Manet to the Magnum war photographers, from Dali to the Chapman brothers. And that's just in art; never mind the claims of Spanish politicians on both the liberal Left and the patriotic Right. Hughes, a lethal enemy of cant, is at his best teasing out the main strands of truth from the years of encrusted kitsch.

The idea of Goya as an artist 'naturally agin' the system,' he writes. 'is pretty much a modernist myth.' But this does not diffuse the abiding mystery of how 'so fiery a spirit, so impetuous and sardonic, so unbridled in his imagination, could ever have adapted, not just occasionally but con

sistently over 40 years, to the conditions of working for the successive Bourbon courts'.

Hughes is at ease describing historical events, as readers of The Fatal Shore can attest. He can also make the slow, tectonic movement of implacable historical forces concrete, relevant and intellectually involving. His grasp of the (mostly thwarted) incursion of Enlightenment, or 'ilustracion', ideas into Spain is convincing — and of course crucial to any account of Goya. Where there is insufficient evidence he says so. Thus, 'despite the acreage of scented embroidery that has been superimposed on their friendship,' it is most unlikely that Goya ever managed to get beneath the attractive skirts of the Duchess of Alba (that he would dearly have loved to, on the other hand, was never in question). Nor was she the 'challenging cutie' who is the subject of his famous paintings of a clothed and naked `Maja'; rather, the evidence suggests that the model was the mistress of the Prime Minister, Godoy. Nor was Carlos IV's wife, Maria Luisa, the nymphomaniac she is commonly depicted as; she had affairs, yes, and perhaps with Godoy, but so do royals everywhere.

Spain itself in Goya's lifetime comes dcross as a pitiable, benighted place, paralysed by a grasping nobility (there were three times as many nobles in Spain as there were in France), corrupt clergy and incompetent monarchs. But Goya loved it, and in his art — at times so deeply corrosive and sceptical as to suggest undying contempt — he also displayed 'a range of sympathy, almost literally "co-suffering", rivalling that of Dickens or Tolstoy'. Nor, despite his scathing attacks on the clergy in his first great series of etchings, the `Caprichos', is there anything to suggest that Goya was irreligious. Rather, it was hypocrisy he loathed.

Other cliches are similarly brought back to life through complication: Goya's reputation as an arch-realist, for instance (he was possibly the first great artist to have used a small sketchbook as a kind of visual notepad or diary, taking it with him when he travelled), needs correcting, for we also learn that he had 'a repertoire of standard poses that he would produce as signifiers of particular feelings' and that a great deal of his 'Disasters of War' etchings and 'Caprichos' were inventions based, often only loosely, on what he had seen or heard about. In his later work he was drawn to events with 'plenty of journalistic "grip"... : murders, kidnappings, rapes, intrigues, adulteries, deceptions'. But he had an uncanny ability to give melodrama the aura of 'full human truth'.

Hughes, unlike many artists' biographers, likes looking at pictures, and he is more than comfortable talking about them. He is especially good on Goya's sophisticated rhyming of colours, his sensuous, scudding brushwork in the rendering of fabrics and his 'singular ability to stabilise scenes of violent action by making them into a framework of almost Neoclassical rigidity'.

Goya's complex influences are deftly explained. They ranged from the expected Velazquez, Bosch and Rembrandt to the less expected John Flaxman, and the crucial example of English portraitists and caricaturists such as Hogarth, Blake, Reynolds, Gil tray and Rowlandson.

The disease which Goya contracted late in 1792 and which eventually made him go deaf remains a mystery. It could have been Meniere's syndrome, botulism, polio, hep atitis, neurolabyrinthitis or something else. But Hughes's ability to imagine its effects on Goya is impressive, believable and deeply sympathetic. There are robust judgments and marvellous descriptions all through the book. Anton Raphael Mengs, the court painter who supported Goya early in his career, to take just one of many examples, is described thus:

Stolid, correct, devoid of charm, insipid where strength was needed, dogmatic where fancy might have helped, thumped into shape as a -prodigy' by a failed-artist father and relentlessly. promoted by the theorist of Neoclassicism, Winckelmann, whose leaden flights of pederastic dogma make even the longueurs of 'queer theory' look almost sprightly — Mengs was one of the supreme bores of European civilisation.

Hughes spent the best part of a decade trying to tackle this book. He has succeeded triumphantly.

middlebrow cultural truisms; razor-sharp in its dissection of popular culture; cheerfully relentless in its assault on worthwhile targets like TV detective series clichés, the earthy wisdom of Michael Parkinson, and the matey demotic of TV pop historians; and, in that characteristically bone-dry Donaldson manner, very, very funny.

Here are some examples:

Strawberries, the. Always disappointing this year.

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968). In spite of Leone's operatic direction and Henry Fonda's 'against type' icy-eyed gunslinger, the real star of the picture, of course, is Ennio Morricone's unforgettable score.

Welsh politicians. Forever fellating Rastafarians on Clapham Common.

Mortgaged. Always 'to the hilt'. That said, you can't go wrong with bricks and mortar.

Ali, Muhammad (19424 Pound for pound the greatest boxer ever to put gloves on. 'I don't hope to see a better in my lifetime'. See also ARMSTRONG, HENRY 'HANK': DURAN, ROBERTO; HAGLER, MARVIN; HEARNS, THOMAS 'THE HITMAN'; LEONARD, SUGAR RAY; LOUIS, JOE; MARCIANO, ROCKY; MOORE, ARCHIE: PEP, WILLIE; ROBINSON, SUGAR RAY.

He. Disquietingly ubiquitous. 'He could be out there now, Sergeant. Watching us.' See also A TOUCH OF FROST.

See what I mean?