Werner Hofmann

#2

1975

The art of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) holds a special fascination. A unique figure in the age of Romanticism, Friedrich was as significant within the art of Germany as Eugene Delacroix was in France, or J. M. W. Turner in England. Yet his work was little known in its time, and after the artist's death it was long forgotten. Only in the twentieth century did it become apparent that Eugene Delacroix anticipated much of our modern experience of the world. Friedrich painted strange, evocative scenes whose dark tones and ambiguous meanings seem to embody the very notion of the German Romantic visionary, yet at the same time they seem to look ahead to various modern styles. Scholars have pointed out the similarity between his paintings and the symbolic seascapes of Edvard Munch, and his atmospheric landscapes have an affinity with the work of the Impressionists, yet his use of isolated figures in a limitless expanse of space, dominated by an overwhelming sky, also evokes the sensibility of the Expressionists. Others have related his work to the intimacy of Paul Klee or the lyrical landscapes of Emil Nolde. And there is a fundamental connection between Friedrich's Romanticism and a current of abstract art in our century, allowing him to be compared with painters such as Mark Rothko.

#3

Goya ranks as one of the finest exponents of intaglio engraving in the history of art. His consummate mastery of the techniques of etching and aquatint, and of lithography - the latter a recent invention when he turned to it - was placed at the service of imagery that provides an intimate record of the artist's response to the times in which he lived, as full of conflict and upheaval as our own. Alongside single prints of sacred and profane subjects, it is above all on four major series of etchings that Goya's reputation as a print-maker rests. The biting social criticism of Los caprichos, the savage indictment of war and violence in Los desastres de la guerra, the intense drama of the bullfight in La tauromaquia and the elusive symbolism of Los disparates speak to us with undiminished power across two centuries. For the most part, Goya's prints, which provided unequivocal evidence of his Enlightenment sympathies, were denied the wide circulation he intended for them. The artist's privileged position as Court Painter did not place him outside the orbit of the repressive regime in Spain before, during and after the Peninsular war with Napoleonic France; indeed, the Desastres series was not published until almost forty years after his death. This volume, previously published in Spanish by the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid, reproduces all known etchings and lithographs by Goya, including some rare impressions rejected by the artist. Following a general appraisal, the authors provide introductory texts to each chapter and commentaries on all the prints. A note on print-making techniques used by Goya, an extensive bibliography and a detailed chronology of Goya's life and works and of contemporary political and cultural events complete a book that will delight both the general art lover and the connoisseur.