Robert Hughes: Goya

Australian writer and art critic Robert Hughes nearly died in a car crash in Western Australia in 1999. When he emerged from a long coma and dozens of operations, Hughes embarked on a loony quest for compen-sation for a fish he alleged had been stolen from the boot of his wrecked car.

That indicates his state of mind at the time. More importantly, Hughes' brush with death gave him the impetus to tackle his lifelong dream of writing a biography of the Spanish master Goya.

The accident is entirely relevant to Hughes' quest. During those long, painful months of recovery from his accident, he was unconscious but, as he explains, he was in a drug-induced dream state; his reveries were nightmarish. Hughes, whose right leg had been fitted by a spiked brace screwed into his flesh to knit the shattered bones, met Goya in his dreams - the artist taunting him, laughing at his earlier futile 'ignorant enthusiasm' when he had tried to write the book but was blocked.

The brace was not dissimilar to the torture tools used by the Spanish Inquisition still operating during Goya's life, the subject of some of his most disturbing work.

The writer finally met the challenge. When Hughes, based in the United States since 1970, regained health, he was able to achieve this work, a sublime study of the man he describes as the first Modernist.

The release of this paperback version is a cracker in every sense: a meticulously researched volume that reads like a thriller, heaving with murder, political intrigue, corruption, depravity and cruelty.

Goya lived an extraordinarily long life, from 1746-1828, at a time when, as Hughes points out, life expectancy in Spain was 32 years. He was also struck by profound deafness when he was 46, possibly because of meningitis, an affliction of which Hughes writes most poignantly, describing the loneliness and isolation of the deaf, particularly in the context of a society that held no truck with the disabled.

Goya lived through the reign of three monarchs - the ineffectual Carlos III, his successor Carlos IV and the malign Ferdinand VII, and a brutal war with Napoleon. And although the Spanish Inquisition had become slightly more tempered than

during its terror-stricken heyday in the 16th century, the Spanish Catholic church still ruled through fear, snitching and superstition.

Hughes paints a vivid picture of a Spain soaked in blood and ignorance; ruled by a privileged strata of idle aristocrats and corrupt clergy; supported by a massive population of workers who knew nothing of the world outside their borders; dominated by the strictures of extreme nationalism and faith.

That Goya painted what he did, and got away with it is extra-ordinary. Artists could survive only on the back of patronage, and he spent much of his career as royal painter, drawing for tapestries, making portraits and documenting what he saw in his Spain, becoming increasingly pessimistic, satirical and savage.

His studies of the horrors of the prison and the madhouse are brilliantly analysed by Hughes, who writes of how the Spanish believed that madness was literally the work of the devil, asylums 'dumps into which the psychotic could be thrown without the smallest attempt to discover, classify or treat the nature of their illness.'

More was to follow with his Caprichos series, essays in etchings and aquatint, accompanied by captions that attacked marriage, caricatured the priests and depicted the bloody banditry rampant throughout the countryside.

But war and its horrors are the subjects of Goya's most harrowing series of etchings, Los Desastres, which are based on the cataclysm of Napoleon's invasion of Spain, boldly resisted by the daring guerrilla uprisings of the peasants.

Hughes' unsentimental prose is irresistible as he examines this ghastly conflict in which thousands died. He gets to the heart of Goya when he suggests that while there is 'always some art about war that poses as a kind of remedy', or hopes to inspire pacifism, Goya was the first painter in history to set forth the sober truth about human conflict: that it kills, and kills again.

As an old man, Goya fled Spain and the paranoid reign of Ferdinand. He died in Bordeaux at the age of 82 and his remains were returned to Spain in 1901.

His work still remains absolutely fresh and relevant and now, thanks to Hughes' riveting study, we can all access it.

* Linda Herrick is the Herald's arts editor.

* Random House, $45