Goya paintings to be displayed in Israel for the first time

Over 100 paintings, drawings, and prints by Spanish artist Francisco Goya will be displayed in Israel for the first time starting Dec. 10, when the Israel Museum in Jerusalem opens its exhibit, "Francisco Goya: Madrid of the day and night."

The exhibit includes dozens oil paintings by Goya on loan from the Museo del Prado in Madrid, as well as works borrowed from collections in New York and private collections in Spain.

"In honor of 30 years of Spanish-Israeli culture, we've managed to bring oil paintings over from the Prado. I never believed they would come to Israel. People told me not to even ask, because they are priceless assets that they wouldn't take off the walls," curator Shlomit Steinberg tells Israel Hayom.

Steinberg explains that Goya "was scared of the Inquisition. Scared stiff. They say he was full of social criticism and went against the government, but that's not exactly true. In some of his work, he did mock the aristocracy, but he was originally a portrait artist who painted the aristocracy. He was the first royal painter. For years, he did criticize the government, but he never showed those works. His fear of the Inquisition paralyzed him."

Steinberg says that what makes Goya an important artist is the fact that he took quotidian scenes familiar from the Spanish artistic repertoire and added something extra by playing with light and shadow and weather.

"His paintings always have something that goes a little further, from day to night, from light to darkness, from dimness to full light. He's always in motion. On one hand, he memorialized the goodness and the wealth of members of the upper class, and on the other the dark night life of the members of the lower classes," the curator observes.

"In addition, since he traveled extensively throughout Europe, he was aware of French fashion and style. He did something that combined the Spanish style with the ease and charm of French painting. At a later stage, as the political situation in Spain changed, he himself started to change. He was ill. We know that he lost his hearing around 1795. He became completely deaf and communicated using sign language. In one of his series [of works], that's very prominent. It has a lot of cynicism, bitterness, criticism, and occasional meanness, along with fear and anxieties," Steinberg says.

While unlike other artists Goya was known and appreciated in his lifetime, Steinberg argued that "he wasn't known throughout the world, but in Spain he was very well-known and welcomed. They appreciated him as an artist and as a person. He was a small man, dwarf-like, with curly hair. He wasn't some handsome snob that condescended to people. He was a simple man whose society people enjoyed. There's no doubt that today, he's one of the 25 most influential artists of all time."

טעינו? נתקן! אם מצאתם טעות בכתבה, נשמח שתשתפו אותנו