Article

2022-11-06 -Great Cultural Revolution

Two climate activists have each glued a hand to the frames of two paintings by Spanish master Francisco Goya at the Prado museum in Madrid

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by Fred 2022-11-06 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11129 views ] Top

#1 My experience with the Spanish suggests this will not end well for the protesters.

Posted by Secret Master 2022-11-06 02:18|| 2022-11-06 02:18|| Front Page Top

#2 Kinda of things he painted, Goya wouldn't mind if they remained stuck to them. Naked, shrivelled, driven insane, captives forever of the shrieking madness of the art itself.

Don't mind me, I was just watching a redo of Pickman's Model. 🥳

Posted by Dron66046 2022-11-06 03:25|| 2022-11-06 03:25|| Front Page Top

#3 Kinda of things he painted, Goya wouldn't mind if they remained stuck to them. Naked, shrivelled, driven insane, captives forever of the shrieking madness of the art itself.

Yeah, but all that screaming and ranting might disturb museum goers who are there looking at the Velázquez or El Greco works.

Just cutting the hands off at the wrists and leaving them attached to the frames would give the same 'Goya-Like' artistic value to the works.

It might also work as a deterrent for others who believe they can improve upon the Masters.

Posted by Mullah Richard 2022-11-06 08:05|| 2022-11-06 08:05|| Front Page Top

#4 Naked, shrivelled, driven insane, captives forever of the shrieking madness of the art itself.

Or this Goya, of an insane ogre devouring his children

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 08:53|| 2022-11-06 08:53|| Front Page Top

#5 Goya was an analog to today's troll, for his sardonic paintings of Spanish monarchs.

A more recent one is Sergey Zakharov, who paid for his irreverence to local authorities in the trimmings he took from Russian separatists.

Posted by badanov 2022-11-06 09:00|| 2022-11-06 09:00|| Front Page Top

#6 The foregoing link didn't include his drawings:

Posted by badanov 2022-11-06 09:03|| 2022-11-06 09:03|| Front Page Top

#7 Goya was an analog to todays troll

Huh?
Someone’s got “trolls” on the brain.

Goya was a member of the elite, a friend to the good and the great. His gorgeous, psychologically penetrating oil portraits were desired by everyone, including English aristocrats like the Duke of Wellington. Some of his best paintings are delightful Watteau-like fête galante scenes.

Goya’s darker paintings and his etchings stemmed from the man’s disgust with war, corruption and human stupidity. He was one of our greatest artists, a master of multiple media and an unflinchingly honest critic of human frailty and foibles

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 09:07|| 2022-11-06 09:07|| Front Page Top

#8 Watteau’s influence on Goya can be seen in this beautiful, charming Goya painting from the Prado, Blind Man’s Bluff

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 09:15|| 2022-11-06 09:15|| Front Page Top

#9 Thank you, Billy B. I'm going to read up on him. I only have a cursory knowledge of art history but I find it very interesting in the way how talented mavericks have expressed our devolution into what we have now. Artists, writers, directors...

Posted by Dron66046 2022-11-06 09:18|| 2022-11-06 09:18|| Front Page Top

#10 ^ Just don’t watch that terrible Goya biopic flick with Natalie Portman. It’s interminable (and Natalie plays a feral little female b!tch—most unpleasant). Worst most convoluted plot ever. Like ‘Titanic’ without water or icebergs.

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 09:25|| 2022-11-06 09:25|| Front Page Top

#11 Goya was a member of the elite, a friend to the good and the great. His gorgeous, psychologically penetrating oil portraits were desired by everyone, including English aristocrats like the Duke of Wellington. Some of his best paintings are delightful Watteau-like fête galante scenes.

And as such was a much more influential and braver individual than the average Spanish peasant

Goya’s darker paintings and his etchings stemmed from the man’s disgust with war, corruption and human stupidity. He was one of our greatest artists, a master of multiple media and an unflinchingly honest critic of human frailty and foibles.

I am certain the "ruling caste" expressed the same sentiment.

However, it does not take away that he painted things and people how he saw and not how they were sought to be portrayed.

Posted by badanov 2022-11-06 09:44|| 2022-11-06 09:44|| Front Page Top

#12 BTW: The film Goya's Ghosts, a box office flop, is on Tubi

Posted by badanov 2022-11-06 09:50|| 2022-11-06 09:50|| Front Page Top

#13 Y'all are coming across like right brainers.

Posted by Skidmark 2022-11-06 11:38|| 2022-11-06 11:38|| Front Page Top

#14 For starters, every possession they have made from oil should be confiscated. Might be something of an eye opener.

Posted by Angstrom 2022-11-06 12:20|| 2022-11-06 12:20|| Front Page Top

#15 Y'all are coming across like right brainers.

Not so. Appreciating a complex artist like Goya is highly analytical.

It’s the fusion of art criticism — the formal elements like line colour composition genre materials brush techniques etc — and political-historical-social analysis.

So call it a synthesis of left-brain and right-brain activity.

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 13:14|| 2022-11-06 13:14|| Front Page Top

#16 Goya’s portrait of The Duke (no, not that one, pilgrim) was stolen in 1961 in a famous art theft that’s now the subject of a fun movie from Sony Pictures with Helen Mirren (nee Mironov) as an art historian and Jim Broadbent as the postman-thief. The painting was also featured in Dr. No a year after the theft — implication was that Dr Julius No was the thief (or the fence).

Official description of The Duke film:

THE DUKE is set in 1961 when Kempton Bunton, a 60-year old taxi driver, stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. It was the first (and remains the only) theft in the Gallery’s history. Kempton sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting on condition that the government agreed to provide television for free to the elderly. What happened next became the stuff of legend.

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 13:36|| 2022-11-06 13:36|| Front Page Top

#17 * Jim Broadbent as the ~~postman~~ cabbie-thief

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 13:37|| 2022-11-06 13:37|| Front Page Top

#18 Gahan Wilson mentioned Goya's art in a horror short, that's when I looked him up. Fabulists like Clive Barker and Whatsisname... Koontz! They keep alluding to his sinister depictions.

I found, like Billy B said, that he's just being critical. He's a thorough cynic maybe.

Posted by Dron66046 2022-11-06 14:17|| 2022-11-06 14:17|| Front Page Top

#19 A frustrated idealist.

You can see his love of beauty, truth and goodness in those early exquisite, sunny Watteau-like paintings

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 16:51|| 2022-11-06 16:51|| Front Page Top

#20 Jeepers... of all the stuff I didn't expect to wake up to today! Love this place. Off the "bad movie reviews" pile from last spring...

Unwilling Suspension of Belief

A spurious lady of Spain
Meets a curious ham named Bardem
Who can't just approach her
Directly -- not kosher! --
And so he arrests her,
Uplifts and molests her.
The rest of this picture's a pain.

Couldn't agree more with Billy about this lavish period production of a mediocre opera, sans music, from the guy who did Hair. J.B.'s his usual ticcing slime bomb. N.P.'s "midnight movie crowd shouting the lines" bad. Fans should scrupulously avoid. Pretty much wrecked my faith in Hollywood.

Posted by Captain Splat9596 2022-11-06 19:15|| 2022-11-06 19:15|| Front Page Top

#21 Anyone got a good word to say about the Wolf thing? Never made it past the first few minutes, but lord knows I'll watch anything on a Rantburg rec.

Posted by Captain Splat9596 2022-11-06 19:33|| 2022-11-06 19:33|| Front Page Top

#22 Goya's illustrations and paintings about French counter-guerilla atrocities in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. ...Military history and tabletop wargaming enthusiast back in the day.

Posted by magpie 2022-11-06 20:22|| 2022-11-06 20:22|| Front Page Top

#23 A bit of context for the 1961 theft of the Goya painting, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, from Britain’s National Gallery. The thief claimed he’d return it if Her Majesty’s Government would “provide free television to the elderly” in Britain. I suspect that this odd demand, and the unusual bargaining chip, May have been an unintended consequence of the extraordinary popularity of Kenneth Clark’s radically new (at the time) television lectures on art such as his 1959 series on Five Revolutionaries: Goya, Brueghel, Caravaggio and two others I forget.

It was reported that ordinary Britons loved these TV programs so much and were so intrigued by the artists Clark discussed — brilliantly, fluently, clearly and always interestingly — that you could go to a pub and have a decent chance of hearing people arguing about Caravaggio.

Posted by Billy B 2022-11-06 22:28|| 2022-11-06 22:28|| Front Page Top

23:36 Skidmark
23:30 trailing wife
23:27 trailing wife
23:13 Spike the Hairy6811
22:51 Big Brother Is Sniffing You
22:28 Billy B
22:08 Shamp Snurt3261
22:06 Markus
22:06 Shamp Snurt3261
22:06 Captain Splat9596
22:04 Billy B
22:03 Shamp Snurt3261
21:54 Markus
21:24 Shamp Snurt3261
21:18 Markus
21:10 Billy B
20:59 Shamp Snurt3261
20:58 Billy B
20:58 Shamp Snurt3261
20:56 Shamp Snurt3261
20:52 SteveS
20:46 trailing wife
20:45 Billy B
20:42 Billy B