Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Best copy of these books I have seen. Year 1985. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The work of the great artists of the past must be periodically re-examined in composite studies designed to sum up the research carried out give a general idea suitable for the age and prepare the way for future work. Goya is a universal figure of Spanish art one of its greatest figures at least in the immense breadth of his range whether in iconography or in technique in expression or in image. Goya was endowed with a very rare gift for the interpretation and communication of plastic values but also for the discovery and re-creation of beauty and human meaning in the most arid elements of nature. His inexhaustible vitality enabled him to make interesting any type of pictorial or graphic representation presenting with equal intensity the terrible and the dramatic or infusing depth into the banal and superficial themes which at times above all at the beginning of his career as a Court painter- were demanded of him. Goya moreover since he lived between two periods and two worlds the affected charms of Rococo and the early days of Romanticism with the first stirrings of Expressionism is a key figure in the genesis of contemporary European art. He is important not only as an artist but also as a man. Moved by a superhuman energy he succeeded in more than making up for any defect in his physical nature. He was born and developed in a poor backward world surrounded by an exhausted decadent society in which very few individuals throughout his existence could provide him with relative friendship and comprehension. He only survived thanks to his tremendous vitality which never left him in sickness old age or exile. He weathered the perils of a poor and stormy youth and his violent and passionate temperament evaded the temptations of the easy life he could have led by exploiting his success at a Court where he was only asked to provide a showy superficial art which his natural gifts as a colourist enabled him to produce without effort. He overcame his congenital fear of poverty but he did not succumb to the temptations of material ambition or avarice for his fidelity to the interior drive that gave rise to each of the varied facets of his work was always the main force. (OS)