Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Then, of course, there is Goya. Who better to lay bare the essence of our current times? Critic T.J. Clark tells us about a show of the Album D drawings by the great Spanish artist (1746-1828) now at London’s Courthauld until May 25: Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album.

Clark writes:

• “There seem to be difficult things in the world, like old age and human cruelty and petty malice and the ugliness of lust, to which I (Goya) am drawn, and which I can’t put down – can’t get used to.”

 Elsewhere:

• “I couldn’t put a name to the quality of Goya’s laughter, or decide how much I wanted to join in.”

 And:

• “The wordlessness of Goya’s pages – the way his images annihilate their scribbled captions, and never stop saying ‘De esto nada sabe’ (‘Nothing is known of this”) – seems intrinsic.”

 Finally:

• “This is old man’s art – Goya was in his seventies, as profoundly deaf as his contemporary Beethoven, when he did Album D – and in old age acceptance and abhorrence often keep company.”

A lifetime is too short to stand before these drawings and wonder of them as Clark does in the April 9 edition of the London Review of Books.

To quote Matthea Harvey’s title of her beautiful book of visual poetics, “If the Tabloids Are True, What Are You?” There is a reason this work by the incomparable Goya is something you can’t put down. You can’t get used to.

Next: Running for Your Life: Jazz Palace, NYC !