by Jen Graves
They carried her off!
"Oh—" Barbara Robertson caught her breath, tightening with dread.
The normally cheerful, petite redhead was pulling a framed print out of a cardboard box full of framed prints, and was about to get her first glimpse of the one she'd randomly selected.
Every print she pulls out is a fresh fright, like a wild animal she’s uncaging without knowing its species until it bites. Lurking in these boxes is some of the most nightmarish art in history.
"Do we have to look at this one?" Robertson said, letting out a grim laugh, since laughing is all you can do unless you mean to weep or claw at your eyes.
This one is better than the one of the woman selling her daughter, she added. Or the one of the rapists hauling off their victim, her face contorted in a scream and their faces nothing but hooded black voids.
This one is a dead, buxom, young woman laid out flat on an old man's lap.
Like all of them, it’s beautifully drawn and shaded. Like all of them, its subject matter means that it’s dreadfully beautiful, a dazzling light hitting a terrible crime.
Robertson puts it back, choosing another of Francisco de Goya’s Los caprichos—there are 80 of them in all—and hoping it isn’t worse.
"Ah," she sighed in relief when she saw it. "This one is merely wicked."
It's Robertson's job to re-frame all 80 prints so they can go on display this summer.
She spends seven hours a day alone with them in Seattle Art Museum’s basement. She’s taking one for the team. In the galleries this summer, these prints will be behind transparent sheets of Plexiglas: domesticated. Here, exposed, they lunge. They menace. They control the environment. Yet they’re just scraps of paper.
"I thought, 'This is going to be great!'" she told me when I visited her last week in the place that’s become like a tomb if she doesn’t turn on her radio.
Barbara Robertson is the woman trusted to use an X-acto knife in close proximity to Goya prints, seen here in a photo-allowed room next to one of the conservation studios at Seattle Art Museum, where she spends her days with the nightmarish scenes of Los caprichos. JG
In 1799, when Goya made Los caprichos, Spain was living under the Inquisition and corrupt royals. Ignorance, superstition, and venality were widespread. Goya, who’d gone deaf a few years prior, was enraged. The title, “caprices,” is furious sarcasm. The term usually refers to a piece of art or music that’s at least a little lighthearted.
After a few days alone with Los caprichos, Robertson began to notice an unsettling difference in herself. In 20 years of handling every kind of art for SAM, she’d never felt anything like this.
Her sunny disposition gave way to foul moods. She couldn’t explain how she felt at night. The whole world just seemed…worse.
"Here, take this one," she said, pushing across the table the print she was working on when I arrived.
In the piece, I saw two lovely girls at the base of a tall tree, wearing peaceful smiles and gazing modestly downward. They appeared to be roasting something on a spit, maybe cooking dinner. But no. Where is the fire? There is no fire. Instead, the girls hold a rod, and the rod is shoved up the ass of a plucked bird. Bird? Wait—it is a bird with a man’s head. The man-bird is vomiting. Or dripping blood out of his/its open mouth.
That swell vignette is only part of this virulent little fantasia. When you see this print at SAM this summer, look for the lecherous man-birds up in the tree; the black spots of syphilis on the girls’ faces; the crone with a maiden’s eyes.
“That is a pretty typical example,” Robertson explained. “It’s called All Will Fail. All will fail. All will fail!”
The problem with Los caprichos is that they are so goddamn good. You fall into them as into love.
“The more you look at them, they get worse,” moaned Robertson.
A woman smitten.
“First, I see how beautifully drawn this is,” she leaned in, speaking to no one in particular, in a daze.
“He could draw anything, in any position. Anything….”
Goya does this to people. Casts spells. He’s brilliant in every way: aesthetically, politically, poetically. While writing a biography of the artist, the Australian critic Robert Hughes was visited by a nightmare in which Goya trapped Hughes in a prisonlike airport, running the critic over and over through the security scanners but with a metal contraption on his leg so that he could never leave.
“I had hoped to ‘capture’ Goya in writing,” Hughes admitted, “and he instead had imprisoned me.”
Love and Death. The saddest and least hateful of them all.
In the museum basement, Robertson is technically in charge.
She uses an X-acto knife to slice through the paper backing on each frame. She turns it over and lifts away the armature and layer of transparency protecting the print. She pulls open the cream mounting. Naked now, the Goya faces up at her. Sometimes she grabs a nearby magnifying glass.
If you look closely, the monsters and terrors disappear for a moment. The shapes and shades rise up like music.
Even the tiniest lines are clear and sharp. Because of that, Robertson believes this set was printed early, before the plates wore down. (The whole set is lent to SAM by one private collector.)
To make each image, Goya cut his drawing into a plate. That became the basic etching. Then he printed using aquatint to achieve areas of infinite shading, from the bleakest whites to deep-sea grays and silky blacks.
Goya was the king’s painter. But these pieces he made for himself, and for a middle-class audience that could afford to buy a small book of prints. He sold only a handful before he decided he was too frightened of the Church. He hid the prints with the king, of all people.
“Look at this one,” Robertson said, sliding over another example. It shows an attractive young woman shielding her eyes while she reaches upward. She’s trying to yank the gold teeth out of the mouth of a hanged man.
“You don’t want to look at it, but there’s this beautiful composition of grays and whites and blacks,” Robertson gestured, pointing it out to the woman’s right. “They’re all going to get to you. They’re scary. They’re threatening. They draw you back in.”
She is so right. It happens in every piece.
Plate 12 of Los caprichos is titled Out Hunting for Teeth. You know, as one does. Courtesy of Seattle Art Museum
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